The End Of An Era

The legendary Sparrows Point Steel Mill outside Baltimore closes, apparently for good:

The sprawling Sparrows Point plant is on more than 3,000 acres in a prime location in eastern Baltimore County, nearly surrounded by water. The property's major downside: toxins.
"More than a century of steelmaking and finishing operations have resulted in perhaps the most complex environmental cleanup site in the Chesapeake Bay watershed," Baltimore County's attorneys wrote in court documents.
That's the sort of work in which Environmental Liability Transfer says it specializes. Jostes said in an earlier interview that a cleanup would take "many, many, many years" but the site could be used while the work is under way.
Environmental Liability Transfer acquired another large, bankrupt manufacturer in 2005 — a Missouri brick factory — and got it "up and running and producing brick once more," Jostes said. But most of the company's projects are straight redevelopment.
Sparrows Point steel built the Golden Gate Bridge and Maryland's Bay Bridge, along with hundreds of ships for World War II, but recent years have not been kind. Environmental Liability Transfer and Hilco are Sparrows Point's sixth owners in less than a decade, a tumultuous stretch for workers that included the bankruptcy case of longtime owner Bethlehem Steel.
Some analysts thought the Baltimore County facility would land a new operator, but others were pessimistic from the start, given its age and the tough steel market.
Steel analyst Chuck Bradford suggested last summer that Nucor might want to buy the cold mill "to pick up and move somewhere else." It's a "very good" mill, he said.
"Almost nothing else has any value," Bradford added.
Deborah Rudacille, writer of the book "Roots of Steel: Boom and Bust in an American Mill Town," a workers' history of Sparrows Point, said last summer that Sparrows Point becoming scrap would be sadly ironic. It was built in part from the remains of the Ashland Iron Works in Cockeysville.

It lasted longer than the Homestead, Bethlehem and Duquesne Works,  but it's future is the same as those legends.  What was once the largest steel mill in the world is no more.