Lockport, New York. Its not what you would have called a steel town, at least not like those scattered along the Monongahela north and south of Pittsburgh or in Lackawanna, N.Y., where the steel mill was the major or only employer; but Lockport has a metals history dating to the nineteenth century. In the 1940s and 1950s, manufacturing and business in Lockport thrived around a vibrant urban core. Simonds Saw and Steel was the towns second largest employer, its workers dwarfed in number by a factor of six to one to the leading employer, Harrison Radiator Division of General Motors. However, Simonds counted for something, because even though it didnt dominate the industrial or city landscape, steelmaking then was at the heart of American industry and the soul of labor.
