Donora, Pennsylvania, once housed a thriving steel mill that stretched for about four miles, though that factory closed more than 50 years ago. Today, the town of about 5,000 people has no gas station, no bank and no grocery store. And just a few years ago its only school closed.
The shuttering of that school was particularly tough for a community that has been in decline for decades.
“Everyone loved that school. It was so huge to the community,” says Jeanne Marie Laskas, a professor of English and the founding director of the Center for Creativity at the University of Pittsburgh.
The building that was once Donora High School has also become a symbol of hope, though, as leaders in the region debate opening a community college campus on the site, which proponents think could be a spark to revive this town, as it would bring jobs, customers for things like a coffee shop and library, and more.
Laskas is a longtime magazine journalist with an expertise in immersing herself in unfamiliar settings to document them. And she spent the last three years on an unusually ambitious attempt to tell the story of this fading town — which has much in common with many other small rural communities across the U.S. Along with another professor at the university, Erin Anderson, who has an expertise in audio production, Laskas spent days at a time living in Donora and recording interviews with anyone and everyone she could — collecting more than 800 hours of audio recordings in the process.
She even bought a house in a historic neighborhood of the town — a structure entirely of poured cement designed by Thomas Edison — to use as home base for the project, and which she commuted to from her home outside of Pittsburgh, about 45 minutes away by back road.
The professors had no specific storyline in mind, and didn’t know what they’d end up focusing on. But the plan was to make a podcast that gave a sense of what life is like in a shrinking community that was once a symbol of a growing American industry but now feels forgotten and neglected.
“We were like, ‘what if we actually set up here and we’re in the town in the odd moments — first thing in the morning when the school buses are going by and the trash truck is coming and all the small moments that you think are nothing, but what do they amount to?’” Laskas says.
The resulting 10-episode podcast, Cement City, was released last fall to major acclaim, including a spot on The New York Times list of the best podcasts of the year.
Education turns out to be a theme of the town’s story. And for this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we talked with Laskas about her Cement City project, and her takeaways for the role of education in the many forgotten small towns around the U.S.
Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or on the player below.
