Granite City Case Study

A plume of gray smoke floats across the early morning sky as Granite City comes to life. “You smell that? That’s the smell of money,” said Brenda Whitaker, a town resident, former mill worker, and now restaurant proprietor. That is what her father use to say of the stench that Granite City residents would awake to every morning as the mill puffed out its great cloud of smoke from the coke plant. This little factory town, just six miles from the Mississippi River and criss-crossed with miles of train tracks, began as a small agricultural area with rich bottom lands. But after William and Frederick Niedringhaus found this prime spot for their factory in 1892, a town was born. Creating row houses for their mill workers in which to live,

With each change, the residents watched and waited. In the 1980 census, the population of Granite City fell 9.5% to 36,815, down from the 1970s census of 40,685. By the 2010 census the population was down again to 29,849 people, but this time the demographics of the town had changed drastically. 1980 had two Black students at the high school and was, and still is, pretty much considered a Sundown Town. But now the demographics, although still elevated on the White side at 91.5%, 6.5% of the town is now Black and 2.1 % are mixed race. The great White town with its solid families and steady jobs had shifted to less than 50% of married couples and 15.4% where females were the head of the household and there were no male

As a teen I witnessed the drastic fall as the town that had thrived with two steel mills, Granite City Steel and American Steel Foundries, was faced with American Steel closing its doors after 90 years and the recession of the early 80s hit Granite City, eliminating jobs in not just the steel industry, but manufacturing. The domino effect took hold of Granite City and several thousand jobs were lost. The only thing that kept Granite City Steel afloat was a Japanese company obtaining fifty-one percent of the shares, thus making what was the All-American town’s main employer now controlled by foreign interests. The citizen base fled under the economic strife and the schools closed. My father, a steel worker at Granite City Steel, was laid-off due to much of the mill being shut down due to lack of demand for steel in the nation. My mother, a school teacher of twelve years was also laid-off, making our nuclear family on the verge of a