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Bethlehem Steel Employed 31,000 People at Its Peak. The Lehigh Valley Replaced It With Two Rival Hospital Systems and a Warehouse Boom -- Neither One Aware of the Other.

Bethlehem Steel defined the Lehigh Valley for a century before its 1995 collapse. What replaced it wasn't one successor but two unrelated private bets, healthcare rivalry and warehouse geography, that together outgrew steel without ever coordinating.

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Youngstown Sheet & Tube Shut Its Brier Hill Plant in 1979, Part of a Collapse That Cost the Valley 50,000 Jobs. In 2013, a French Company Built a $1.05 Billion Pipe Mill on the Exact Same Ground — to Make the Exact Same Product.

Youngstown lost 57% of its population after its steel industry collapsed in the late 1970s. Decades later, a seamless-steel-tube mill wen...

Erie, Pennsylvania's Locomotive Plant Employed 5,000 People in 2012. It's Down to 1,400 After a Decade of Cuts and a Two-Month Strike. The City's Real Anchor Has Been a Century-Old Insurance Company the Whole Time.

GE built Erie's locomotive plant into a 5,000-person employer; it's been cut to a fraction of that under GE, then Wabtec, including a 202...

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