Youngstown Sheet and Tube was a major steel producer in Youngstown, Ohio. Its closure is the event John Kiriakou uses to date the economic death of his own hometown, New Castle, Pennsylvania, an hour away.[1]
Kiriakou remembers the day itself from the inside of a classroom: “I remember the day the Youngstown Sheet and Tube closed. I was in seventh grade and kids were balling in the hallways because all of their fathers had lost their jobs.”[2] In an earlier telling he places himself in eighth grade and the closure in 1977, and describes families relocating en masse to Florida and California for work: “the town just died… that was the end of it.”[1]
The wider collapse
The closure was not isolated. Kiriakou recalls visiting the president of J&L Steel in the Youngstown–Pittsburgh area in the summer of 1982, while working for his congressman, and being told the plant had not had a steel order in two months because Japanese seamless tubing had undercut American riveted tubing on price.[3]
Interviewing Richard D. Wolff in 2026, Kiriakou discovered the two were regional neighbours — Wolff from Youngstown, Kiriakou from New Castle — and framed the question of Trump’s tariffs around whether they could do anything for a rust belt that has “seen some bad years going back to the 70s, even before the 70s.”[4][5] Wolff replied that his father had pushed a wheelbarrow at Youngstown Sheet and Tube, that the men thrown out of work were in their forties and fifties with their seniority gone and no comparable job ever again, and that with nobody working the town could not raise the taxes to maintain its own schools.[2][6]