Good Influence: Wayward Machine Co.

Bobby and Kacy Middleton and the 18,000 lb Press Brake

Less than 3 years ago, Bobby and Kacy Middleton were living in a house in the suburbs with a yard the size of a football field.

Bobby had made a name for himself building vintage motorcycles under the name King Kustom. Over 15 years he’d won awards and been invited to build for the Born-Free vintage motorbike show for 3 years in a row. He had a social media presence and a following — kids who followed his work on instagram and aspired to make a living building award winning bikes.

But life in the suburbs left something wanting.  They didn’t particularly like yard work. “We were really bored,” Kacy says.

When their friend Daniel moved into a cool storefront on Morgan Street, they told him “If you see something else like this, let us know.”  A few days later, Daniel called to say that his landlord had bought the building on the corner of Morgan and 32nd Place. They drove in to see it that night. It was a shell of a building with cratered floors, a retail storefront and a garage large enough to build motorcycles.

Leaving a house they owned to rent an apartment, moving a whole shop of machine tools, seemed like a risk.  “We were asking ourselves ‘ Are we really going to do this?’”

Five weeks later the landlord had built out an entire apartment, the Middleton’s had rented their house, they shipped 10,000 pounds of machine tools to Bridgeport and opened the doors as Wayward Machine.

They’d brainstormed the name with friends.  They wanted something with attitude, and broader than motorcycles, something open to the possibilities of the space.  Maybe they’d open a lifestyle clothing store.

Meanwhile, Meg McMorrow, a good friend, had asked Bobby to build a couple restaurant light fixtures for Siren Betty, the design firm she was working at.  The fabrication jobs just snowballed from there.

Wayward Machine has spent the past 2 and a half years growing furiously by every measure - employees, shop space, tonnage of machines.  And not least in social footprint which has taken on dimension with a videographer on staff, and their street presence in a real neighborhood.  Every contact they refer to in the Chicago restaurant industry industry is also ‘a good friend,’ or ‘a great guy.’

“He’s figuring it out,” Kacy says of a good friend who runs a complementary business, like Wayward is doing.

Milling Machine - the Tool That Could Reproduce Itself

Wayward Machine opened with the tools Bobby used to build motorcycles: a lathe, a bandsaw, a welder and an antique Bridgeport mill (from Connecticut) that’s so versatile Bobby says it could reproduce itself.

They worked out of the garage at the back of their apartment.  As positions opened up, they drew on Bobby’s social media media followers - other bike builders who knew how to weld - or on neighbors, the barista at the coffee shop who knew auto CAD, the young woman who lived upstairs.

Then Meg, their friend at Siren Betty, took a job at Heisler, a restaurant development machine responsible for the Queen Mary Tavern, Estereo and Bad Hunter.  Heisler advertises its work on forward trending projects, a design aesthetic of “rawness of refinement,” and a desire to “mentor and champion the people they work with.”

In its first year of existence, Wayward Machine Co. was busy building furnishings for Bad Hunter for the better part of a year.  They built chairs in the hundreds, they built giant back bars, kitchen partitions, dropped ceilings from steel frames inset with wood, or with frosted glass to look like skylights.  They built a lot of steel and glass doors.

Steel and glass, for doors, windows and walls, has turned out to be a big moment in the interior decorating world.  Wayward builds them for a growing list of private residences too.

To keep pace, Wayward Machine has added staff; they moved the shop to 1100 West Cermak Road in Pilsen, a space large enough for work stations, fabrications tables and an office, and they’ve filled it with machine tools from old industry machine shops going out of business.

They’ve bought a punch press, benders to shape tubing, and an 18,000 pound brake press.  It puts down 100 tons of pressure to bend uniform angles into thick steel plate. They bought a sheer that slices 10 gauge plate like it’s cold wax with the push of a button.  Cutting it by hand would take someone 15-20 minutes with an abrasive grinder.  It would also be a screechingly loud, filthy job, and even without error or injury, the cut wouldn’t be clean.

"Like a giant mechanical paper cutter"

The tools themselves are all analogue technology from the 60s and 70s, “We can’t afford half million dollar machines,” Bobby says.  “We had to mess with them to make them work, because they’re old.” But they work well for the scale of Wayward’s jobs, and analogue has other advantages for a skilled mechanic.  “I never hooked up a press brake before, but I can make stuff work,” Bobby says,  “I’m not afraid to jump in there and figure it out.”

They still draw on some tried and true contacts in the suburbs - a certain chrome shop, and a certain powder coater. “His paint is perfect, no bullshit,” Bobby says.  “But we have to pack up the truck and send it to Addison.”

That’s one big advantage of their urban location.  Their steel supplier is just down the street.  Since founding Wayward there have been more connections close by, a 3-D printer, a foundry, a stamping company on the far south side.

Especially around the restaurant industry, they tend to describe their associates as people they’ve become close with, like the mill worker who makes wood tops for Wayward’s metal table bases. The electrician they use is doing all the hip restaurants. He doesn’t advertise, Bobby says. “Everybody just knows him.”  Wayward Machine built metal for his house; when Wayward moved the shop to a much larger space in Pilsen this Spring, he wired the new shop.

Their upholsterer, is a young businessman in West Town.  “He’s one of our best friends, we love him to death.” He’s upholstered every barstool Wayward Machine has built - over 300 of them so far. His father ran a cottage scale upholstery business, Aaron saw opportunity to grow.  Father and son still work together at the new business, Urban Craft Custom Upholstery.  Urban Craft is 7 years old, with 20 employees.

“We thought that was shocking,” Kasey recalls.  Now they’re half way there themselves.  They’ve got a project schedule 50 jobs long, they can point out 6 different jobs in progress from where we stand on the shop floor.

As the jobs multiply, the problem solving gets more complex.  There are endless calculations of dimensions, quantities and costs, of schedule and logistics, of keeping 5 or 6 jobs moving timely from one phase to the next. Not to mention the problems involved moving really big, cumbersome objects through space.

A Shop Full of Windows and Walls

Bobby points out a large steel structure that’s been built to fit an industrial size window for a loft conversion in Wicker Park.  “We could make this in 3 pieces,” Bobby says, “but we’d put it in and it wouldn’t look as good as it does now.

“So me being a psychopath, I say ‘Let’s make it one piece and we’ll just figure out how to get it there.’  So we’re going to figure out how to get it to Wicker Park.  We’ll put it on a trailer somehow, move it late at night.  We’ll figure it out.”

There will be more problem solving when they do.  The building is an old warehouse, so none of the floors are straight, none of the windows are square, it’s built of old brick that will start to come apart as they’re working it. It’s going to take a lot of patience to fit it in just right.

Bobby says problem solving is the part of the job he likes most.  He says Stephen Adzemovic excels in that area too, if you’re wondering what he’s up to since leaving Bridgeport Coffee.  They hired him because he could draw in autoCAD, but a lot of people can use software. “We work really well together,” Bobby says. “We bounce ideas off each other all day long.”

Kacy problem solves on the marketing side. “I make sure that we’re visible to the people that I know need us,” she says. “I can steer what our jobs are.  I know if we post a picture of a brass hood, and we post it in enough places or in the right way, tomorrow we’re going to get an e-mail from somebody who wants a brass hood.”

Last year, she started shooting video of the crew working on the shop and posting that on social media.  Now they have Nicolette Nunez, a full time videographer who follows them around with a video camera.  She found Wayward Machine on instagram, she’d offered to work for free. They said ‘Let’s try it for 2 weeks and see what happens.’  “She made herself invaluable,” Kacy says, “so we hired her full time.”

Street Presence

There’s something about the thought of a lot of people who may never have worked in a factory, who may never have reason to weld 2 pieces of steel together, wanting to watch video of other people doing it, that seems almost wholesome. 

We often use the word ‘lifestyle’ with a wink, to refer to appearances not connected to real substance.  But if we don’t resent being social creatures, we can’t reduce the way we watch each other, the various social cues we read, and send, as if they only work as status markers.

The Middletons have been communicating an attractive lifestyle since before they opened Wayward Machine.  King Kustom's social media accounts built on a shared an appreciation of a common object.  Wayward Machine’s communicate a style of life tied in to a style of work, one where something additional to cash is in circulation. It spills out from the social media accounts into their work networks, and from their house in Bridgeport, it spills out into the street.

The building on Morgan and 32nd Place had a sweeping mural across the street-side wall before they moved in.  Bobby and Kacy didn’t like all of it, so they engaged friends to repaint parts with motorcycles, wrenches.  They installed goose necked lighting so the sidewalk is bright at night.  They engaged Pat Finley, an elder sign painter, to paint the Wayward Machine Co. sign at the center of the wall. 

“He just paints, he doesn’t do any vinyl stickers,” Bobby says appreciatively. “He draws a big stencil on paper, uses a pounce pad that leaves an outline, just as a reference, then goes and paints on there.”

And they sit on the stoop with friends, and talk to anyone who pauses to chat as they walk by.  They’re out there a little less this year.  It’s been cold, they may be working all the time.  But that’s why they can tell you about a half dozen creative businesses going on behind curtains and storefronts on Morgan Street.  Appointment only vintage clothing shops - one for ladies a block or so north, and one for gentlemen just south, a print shop, urban gardening, documentary film.  Other folks who are figuring it out.

Since they moved the shop to Pilsen this spring, the house on Morgan Street is bigger than they strictly need to live in.  They use the storefront as an extra living room; they’ve installed kilns in the garage.  Kacy uses them to make art and household objects that look like geologic curiosities.  They run on the electrical that Wayward Machine used for welding.

“We definitely struggle with whether it makes sense to stay in the space financially, because it’s so large,” Kasey says.  “But we love it there.  As long as we can afford to pull it off I think we want to stay.”

Ever curious how it works around here? Full video link in bio! PS @team_ussa wears a beret......go check it out! #wamcoworkday video by the talented and uber creative @nicolettenunez.photo

A post shared by WAMCO | Bobby Middleton (@waywardmachineco) on Jun 27, 2018 at 4:09pm PDT

A Job at the Coffee Shop

You might not have known this when he was serving your breakfast order at Bridgeport Coffee, but Stephen Adzemovic has lived across the US and around the world, he’s lived longer in Chicago than he’s lived anywhere else in his life, and it might not be an exaggeration to say the coffee shop job helped keep him here.  “My life in Chicago is 90% Bridgeport,” he says.  And that is directly tied to connections he’s made at Bridgeport Coffee.

So when his other part time job told him they needed someone full time, Stephen wasn’t sure leaving the coffee shop was the right decision, even though the other job involves doing Computer Assisted Design work for Wayward Machine Co., a funky metal shop that builds custom furnishings for restaurants and other commercial interiors.  “My Dad is really glad I chose the metal shop,” he says. When he told his customers at Bridgeport Coffee he says they’d congratulate him like he was moving up in the world --“I was really surprised.”  His hesitation might make you think twice about what makes for meaningful work.

Stephen’s father was an immigrant who’d come to New York with his parents as a child, and who worked his way into a career in international banking.  Through a series of mergers and opportunities he’d moved his family all over the world, with especially long stints in the Middle East that started when Stephen was 12.

There were some things Stephen didn’t like about the Middle East.  He had that American itch to question received answers, which wasn’t common practice there.  “In some countries you’re legally not allowed to question; in others, people are allowed, but they don’t tend to do it.  Or they don’t talk about it, if they do.”

On the other hand he came to appreciate that people are people, wherever you go.  And more unusual, he came to appreciate the feeling of being out of his element.  “I liked that feeling of being outside,” he says. “Where I don’t fit in, and people don’t treat me like I fit in.”

That’s not a feeling most 12 year olds enjoy, and he admits he might not have enjoyed it right away.  But he came to appreciate the perspective, “even when it’s confusing and harsh, it’s also exciting.”  He says he expects to live internationally again, though he does wonder if it will be different, having come to appreciate the stimulations of parochial life. “It was new, I hadn’t experienced that before.”

Stephen moved to Chicago in 2011 to study architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and to Bridgeport in 2013, following an ad for an apartment on Craig’s List.  UIC has a great reputation as a theory school, and that’s what attracted him.  He wasn’t so interested in style or aesthetics, as in the power the architect has to make decisions, but decisions that were not arbitrary, decisions that are calculated to try formal ideas.

“Form follows function” is the classic theory of the old Chicago school, articulated first by architects whose designs were streamlined for modern office and manufacturing functions, without pretending to be from some earlier era.  They came to wear their steel frame structures as an aesthetic, without a lot of prettified details pasted on top.  Stephen says architects are pushing new limits with the terms “form” and “function” in the post digital era, but that’s not the problem that interests him personally.

“Initially it was a social thing,” he says of the kind of theory he wanted to pursue: the architect’s power to create space that affects people without them realizing, or paying attention.  He describes the feeling he got in an airport he visited recently – it was a vast space with a high ceiling, but the ceiling swooped up at the edges, so it was concave, it felt like it was bearing down on you, making you small.  People tend to feel small in cathedrals too, but cathedrals soar upward toward the center, drawing your eye into the vastness.  “It’s not about you and how small you are,” Stephen says.

Stephen’s not sure he’s interested in building a lot of large structures, right now he’s more interested in smaller spaces, where he can design an environment, especially since that’s the scale that’s accessible to him now.

He recently joined up with friend David Ramis to build an experimental project at the Co-Prosperity Sphere, the gallery just down the street from the coffee shop, where they’d helped reorganize the basement in return for use of some of the space.

They built two walls, joined at a 5 degree rotation.  The walls were built out of regular sheetrock and studs, but it didn’t quite reach the ceiling, the 2 walls met at that odd little angle, the sheetrock was cut and distressed up top to make a pattern in relief.  “It’s made of all the things a wall is made of, but it’s to make fun of walls, it’s about finding ways to re-imagine something we take for granted.  It forces you to pay attention.”

Stephen was very happy with the results, they invited friends and local artists to see it, and some of Stephen’s architecture professors came to see it too.

After school, Stephen considered the kinds of things most people do just after architecture school.  They go straight to graduate school, or they get a low level job at an architecture firm.  Neither of those options seemed all that compelling.  He took the job at the coffee shop while he was considering his options. “If you’d asked me then, I’d have told you I’d be there for 6 months.” He ended up working there for 2 and ½ years.

“It’s more about the people than my passion for beans.  I really don’t care about coffee beans.” The coffee shop is where he came to appreciate life in a small neighborhood.  “I’m not anonymous,” he says. “I know people here, and I’m known.

“I don’t think it would be the same if I worked at a coffee shop in a different part of the city.”  Sure he would have had regulars, sure he would have made friends, but the people would probably be more transient. “Neighborhood, community, those are real things in Bridgeport.”

He lived on Lloyd Street for awhile, where all his neighbors had been born there, not just in Bridgeport but on that street.  “The neighbor next door had been there for 80 years.”

Meanwhile he was interacting with a constant stream of people at the coffee shop.  He couldn’t choose who came through, though he had some control over how much he engaged with people, which he sometimes exerted in a playful way.

“There was one guy who took years to warm up to me,” he recalls.  “He’s one of the grumpier people, a gentleman who always came in and got the same order.”  Stephen made a point of being extra friendly “partly as a way to take some power back.” Eventually the friendliness took, especially after they ran into each other outside the coffee shop.  Now Stephen will show him projects he’s working on to hear what he thinks – he trusts his opinion. “We’re interested in engaging in the same conversation.”

He’s made scores of other friends and acquaintances that way, a professor at the School of the Art Institute, staff from the restaurants and bars nearby, transplants and people who’ve lived or worked in Bridgeport all their lives.

Sometimes someone would make a comment or a joke he thought was “on the less cool side of the line.” Not necessarily about race, it might be homophobic. “Something that I don’t want to smile at,” as Stephen puts it “but not so serious that I’m going to take myself out of the role of smiling server to say ‘Hey, don’t say that.’”

He says he’d smile, and disagree.  “I’d say ‘I don’t think that way.’”

Which, if you think about it, might have more influence than an actual argument. Especially now, when social divides seem so wide that even people of good will talk right past each other, that kind of soft exposure might be exactly what we all need to make incremental shifts in our point of view – like the kind Stephen might exert on a patron, or the kind the neighborhood has exerted on him.

Soft influence is possible here, in an old neighborhood with new people moving in, and the coffee shop is one of the places, like a tidal pool, that we swirl through and brush shoulders for awhile.  But that mix is fragile too.

Stephen says he’s never had trouble with the young gang bangers or drug dealers or occasional shootings that also happen around Morgan Street, because the people engaged in that understand he’s “not part of the mix.”

Where he has felt tension, it’s been from people who see that cluster of businesses on 31^st and Morgan as an engine of gentrification that will force their families out.  And they might be right.

Stephen points out that lots of patrons come from outside the neighborhood to Kimski’s to see what Korean-Polish fusion is, or to meet friends at Bridgeport Coffee, and they see that it’s friendly, they know that the rents are cheap, and they find the neighborhood seems pretty safe. 

“I’m probably helping gentrify the neighborhood,” Stephen says “but I’m gentrifying myself.”

That’s the great neo-bohemian dilemma: the service jobs of the people who staff the establishments that make neighborhood life dynamic don’t pay well, leaving them among the most vulnerable to being priced out.

That might be more an accident of labor history than natural law.  There’s no inherent reason service jobs couldn’t be organized and well compensated.  The services might cost more.  In the meantime, patrons can contribute directly to the stability of their servers at the coffee shop, or the bike shop, or the take-out counter at Johnny O’s by making good use of the tip jar.

And there’s another factor at play.  Small landlords who live on their properties are a diminishing breed across the city, even in Bridgeport where the owner occupied 3 flat has been well represented.  But they still persist here more than elsewhere.

Stephen has lived in 3 apartments in Bridgeport, each one of them owned by landlords who had a family member in the building, or they lived there themselves, or, at his current place, the owner lives next door. The fact that none of his apartments were owned by investment groups or distant landlords in the suburbs may be a factor in the cheap rents that drew him here.  It might also help keep some rents stable in the longer term.

At one of his apartments, the rent was so cheap, Stephen wasn’t sure he shouldn’t tell the owner she could be charging more.  But she lived in the building, she wanted good tenants who didn’t demand a lot but might stay awhile.  He was pretty sure she was charging one of his immigrant neighbors something like small change to live there, because she’d once been an immigrant too.

When the guys from Wayward Machine Co. first started coming to the coffee shop, Stephen recalls with some amusement that he thought there was some weird power dynamic going on, because the boss always ordered first.  At one point, he made a joke about it, and they all thought it was pretty funny.  “Now, knowing them better, it wasn’t what I thought.”

One day, they were all standing around outside the coffee shop, talking about a big project they had coming down the pike that they knew they would need a lot of drawings for, and they asked “Do you know anyone who knows CAD?” Stephen knew CAD. “A few hours later, I was working there.”

“They care about the neighborhood.  They’ve done a lot of projects here,” Stephen says.  They also seem to be thriving.  They opened the shop in a large garage space at 32^nd Place & Morgan in 2016. They’ve just moved to Cermak and May Street because they needed more space.  Stephen started full time when the new shop was ready.

He won’t be doing metal fabrication himself, though having a better understanding of how fabrication is done is definitely one of the perks of the job.  And the scale of their projects is a lot like the kind of design he wants to do: building restaurant and other commercial environments.

“Working there is really cool,” Stephen enthuses.  “But I don’t know if it’s the last time I’ll work in the service industry.”

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Two Careers in Rolling Steel

Tapping a Blast Furnace, image from ArcelorMittal

Before he came to Blue City Cycles to work as a bike mechanic, Mike Okelman got 2 engineering degrees and worked at a steel mill in East Chicago –  home of the largest blast furnace in the Western Hemisphere in fact – where he made 4 times as much money as he ‘s making now.

Engineering is the kind of profession his parents wanted for him, and steel mills offer the kind of secure, well-paid jobs that have become hard to find.  But after 4 years in the mills, Mike says the work he does at the bike shop is more satisfying, and it also supports a more sustainable lifestyle.

Mike always knew he wanted to do something technical.  He had an idealistic admiration for American manufacturing and an abiding respect for the labor unions that made industry a source of good jobs. His parents wanted him to pursue a professional career, so he enrolled at University of Illinois Urbana Champaign to study mechanical engineering in 2002, and worked straight through his bachelors and his masters by 2008.

Back in 2005, he toyed with the idea of trying out an internship in the auto industry. “I was imagining working on energy efficiency and fuel cells,” he says, but GM’s presentation that year was all about the Hummer.  Instead, he found himself at a job fair talking to 2 guys from International Steel Group.  They had a table top model of a steel mill they’d probably last used to recruit new talent 25 years ago. “No one was talking to them,” Mike recalls.

Ladle of Steel
photo from NW Indiana Steel Heritage Museum photo gallery

2005 was an excellent year for steel makers worldwide, as economies boomed the mills couldn’t pour metal fast enough.  But American steel makers had been in decline for decades.  In 1967, the industry represented almost 5% of US manufacturing output; by 2001, it represented less than 1%, and the labor needs of the steelmaking process had dropped by a factor of 1,000.  Recruitment hadn’t been a priority for most mills in recent years, as evinced by that dusty table top model.  Plants that hadn’t shut down were still rearranging themselves to find a comfortable position.

International Steel Group had just purchased Acme Steel, a venerable Chicago company whose fortunes more or less tracked the local industry – starting in 1880, when Acme first opened as a maker of steel clasps and barbed staples. In the 19^th Century, dozens of small makers of steel goods were embedded in Chicago neighborhoods.

Over decades they tended to combine into big vertically integrated operations that could smelt iron from ore, make coke from coal, turn iron into steel, cast it into blocks and roll it into finished materials. They also tended to precipitate on Chicago’s southern edge, by Calumet, where raw materials could be brought by the barge-full to their doorstep, and from where the beams, rails and pipe they produced could be shipped to all points of the country, if they weren’t absorbed into the construction of Chicago itself.

Acme opened a plant in Riverdale in 1918 as the Acme Steel Furnace Company.  Acme Steel employed 1,400 workers during the Great Depression, and by the 1950s ranked among the top 300 largest manufacturing companies in the nation. In 1964, it merged with Interlake Steel, itself a combination of Federal Furnace and the By Products Coke Company – they were located just across the Calumet River from Acme’s plant.  By the 1970s, Interlake Steel Group employed 3,500 in the Chicago area and posted annual sales of nearly $700 million, even though the American steel industry had already started its uneven descent.

Smoke Rising from the Indiana Harbor Works Plant
image from NW Indiana Steel Heritage Museum photo gallery

Steel making is dirty, dangerous and energy intensive, so maybe it’s natural that the industry should move to emerging economies less concerned with protecting their labor force and their environment.  When the steel industry first got started in the US, native born workers wouldn’t take those jobs, but the steel mills could staff themselves with immigrant labor.  The immigrants worked 12 hour days until late in the 1920s, and the unions didn’t get a foothold in the mills for another 10 years.

Decades later, when foreign competition gained ground with lower labor costs and government subsidies, the Americans still had the advantage of massive capacity in plants already built, but their calculations about whether to maintain or modernize them were getting more complex.

The big integrated mills weren’t just expensive to build, they were hugely expensive to operate.  Reheating a blast furnace after it’s cooled down costs a lot, both in energy and in stress on the equipment, so the blast furnaces would run continuously for years at a time.  Every 15 years or so they’d need to be overhauled, their insides gutted and relined with new refractory brick.  When the No. 7 furnace in East Chicago was overhauled in 2014 the operation took all summer and cost $70 million.

By the 1980s, more steel makers faced with maintaining old equipment were opting to reconfigure as “minimills.” They’d skip the costly process of reducing raw iron in the blast furnace, and focus on the latter stages of processing steel.  A minimill might have an electric arc furnace for melting steel scrap, another furnace for finessing the alloy’s chemical balance, and a continuous caster for extruding semi-finished goods.  To be cost effective, integrated mills need to put out at least 2 million tons of steel a year.  A minimill might put out 200 to 400 thousand tons a year, and the electric furnace could be started and stopped to meet changes in the marketplace in something closer to real time.

Relining Acme Steel's Former Blast Furnace

Acme Steel spun off from Interlake in 1986, unhitching itself from its blast furnace and the coke ovens on the other side of the Calumet.  By the early 1990s, it employed 1,200 workers, about the same number the old Acme Furnace employed at its Riverdale plant.  It was still using oxygen furnaces from the 1950s, but in the 1990s they invested in a continuous caster – a major modernization that would allow them to skip the intermediate step of casting molten metal into ingots first, before rolling it into sheets, bars or rods in a separate process.  The continuous caster extrudes metal through a track of rollers into long, semi-finished products.  Acme’s new caster was employed rolling out spools of pipe.

They never quite recovered the investment. Mike says it helped put the old Acme Steel out of business.  By 2001 they were in bankruptcy protection and finishing a phased shut down.  The next year, the shuttered plant was acquired by investors headed up by WL Ross.  Ross got his start as a bankruptcy adviser, he says he helped clean up the mess left by Mike Milken’s junk bond buyouts in the 1980s.

By the 2000s, he wanted to intervene more directly to turn troubled industries around. And there was clearly still money to be made in steel.  Competition is global and margins are slim, but world consumption was exploding.  The US was enjoying its housing boom and a new heyday for really big cars.  Emerging economies were racing toward the middle class, pushing up prices for commodities of all kinds, from metal to meat.

Ross’ investment fund first created International Steel Group to reorganize Pennsylvania Steel.  In 2002, ISG Riverdale reopened as a minimill employing 250 workers.  In 2005 the company merged with Ispat Inland Steel Company in East Chicago, and LMV, a holding company controlled by an Indian steel magnate, to form Mittal Steel USA.

Blast Furnaces of the old Acme Steel

That was also the year Mike took an internship at the ISG Riverdale plant.  He says it was different from a big, union shop. Which is not to say the workers at Riverside weren’t unionized.  They were a rough around the edges, but their roughness mainly expressed itself as hijinks.

They used to call him Monica (you know, because he was the intern); they once glued a little crown cut from a styrofoam coffee cup to the top of his helmet and called him to the shop floor to see how long before he figured out why everyone was chuckling.  But then when he broke his foot in an accident involving a radio flier wagon and a flight of stairs (not at work) the guys in the machine shop made him a little stick figure model to commemorate the incident.

Mike says the Riverside plant itself was almost quaint.  The carts and moveable equipment all still said “Acme” on them.  They didn’t melt their own iron anymore, it trundled over from Indiana in torpedo shaped rail cars, the big vessels of molten metal passing through residential neighborhoods, apparently without incident.  If it were to harden en route they’d never extract the iron from the car.

They made it into high alloy steel in oxygen furnaces that date back to the 1950s.  The whole room was coated in thick coat of kish – carbon particles exhaled as graphite dust by the steel as it's chemistry is refined.  Mike says it glitters in the air, it rains over everything, settling as a thick gray smudge.  The continuous caster was newer of course.  They used it to cast high alloy steel into spools of small pipe that would be used for making things like knives and golf clubs.

After graduation, when he took an engineering job at the former Inland Steel mill in East Chicago, their continuous caster would be turning out spools of pipe for oil pipelines and sheet metal for the auto industry -- materials for big industry and massive infrastructure projects.  A 3,100 acre integrated mill, the East Chicago plant, now known as ArcelorMittal Indiana Harbor, is the largest plant in North America.  It employs 4,900 workers and puts out 9.5 million tons of metal a year.

Collectively, America’s big integrated mills still produce almost 90 million tons of steel annually, and have remained attractive acquisitions, even if no one is building new blast furnaces in the States anymore.  Inland Steel was acquired by ISPAT, another company controlled by the Mittal family, in 1998.  Ispat Inland became part of Mittal Steel USA in 2005.  Then, in 2007, Mittal Steel and Arcelor, the 2 biggest steel companies in the world, merged into one.

Indiana Harbor Ship Canal
image from NW Indiana Steel Heritage Museum Photo Gallery

When Mike came to work at the Indiana Harbor plant in the summer of 2008, world steel was still booming and the ArcelorMittal was on a buzz, calling meetings at their Indiana plant to announce all the great new benefits they’d be extending.  A few months later big banks were collapsing and all those new benefits were quietly dropped.

The steel industry has always cycled between boom years and catastrophe – by 2010, the industry was cautiously recovering, by 2013 it was declaring a rebound.  Back in 1999, the Chicago Tribune ran a feature on the steel industry that profiled Inland’s famous No. 7 furnace (built in 1980, 10 years into American steel’s decline) and the trends that had gone on to close two-thirds of the nation’s blast furnaces in the 20 year since it was built.

Workers were boasting to the reporter about the hellish working conditions, and about their deep attachment to their work, an attachment the reporter attributed to “the lore of the furnaces, and the psychological rush of harnessing raw – and potentially deadly – power to create something.”

The reporter observed that the process of steelmaking is basically unchanged from what it was a century ago, when Inland first opened the mill.  But engineers are still employed refining the process, partly because molten metal doesn’t readily submit to controlled study. Before computers, Mike says engineers would use water models to project how it would behave, because water has the same “kinematic viscosity,” it pours the same way.  Now they use computer modeling to study fluid flow, heat transfer, factors that might cause molds to break, or cause defects in the steel.  They’d test the latest equipment being pitched by vendors.

Steel mills use water applied with a system of nozzles for cooling.  One of Mike’s projects at the East Chicago plant was to investigate a new cooling system.  For a year, they took measurements, studied blue prints, consulted with nozzle makers and other engineers, and concluded the new system would have definite advantages – it was more flexible and could reach parts of the process that were particularly hard to access.  But in the end it was shelved as too expensive to implement.

The global financial meltdown did not help.  The Indiana Harbor Plant tightened its belt. Workers who could retire did so.  The company reassigned engineers, including Mike, to work as supervisors on the floor. That was technically a step down, though Mike says he liked the work more.  He hadn’t been drawn into the field by the promise of computer modeling. “I’m very hands on.  I want to build things…I want to be part of the process.”

On the floor there was lots of moving equipment and parts were always breaking, there were literal 

fires to put out.  Between castings, the supervisors and their crews would go over every part with a checklist, performing audits and writing maintenance reports.  The supervisor takes attendance, makes sure everyone’s appropriately deployed – and then inspects the quality of the steel as it rolls out from the of the caster.

Steel moving through a continuous caster
image from ArcelorMittal

The molten metal starts to cool as it passes through the casting machine, it forms a hardened skin, or sleeve, that allows it to move smoothly over a system of rollers that are working it into shape as it passes over them.  If the metal cools too fast or too slowly, it might break out of the sleeve and create big problems.  Or if a roller gets stuck, or mucked up with pieces of debris, it’ll leave tell tale imprints in the finished steel.

A ladle of molten metal can be worth a million dollars.  Mike says you’re taking chemical samples throughout the process to make sure the composition of the metal is right – if it’s not, you can sometimes fix it, but steel can also be “poisoned” by an excess of certain ingredients, like copper for instance.  And once it’s poured, if it doesn’t react the way it’s supposed to in the mold, it could spill over, or explode – like a lethal home baking project.

So the work was interesting, but the atmosphere was tense.  And that rash of retirements only widened an experience gap created by decades of industry consolidation. The floor was manned by a lot of guys with 30 or 40 years of experience, and a few new guys with 1 or 2 years.  It wasn’t easy to be a 27 year old, supervising salty workers in their 50s and 60s.  And there was nobody with 10 to 15 years who could remember how they were trained.  The old guys were often impatient to stop and answer questions, or to show the new guys what they knew.

He recalls there were a lot of strong egos, a lot of communication accomplished by in your face shouting matches – a method encouraged by the physical intensity of the mill, which is basically a huge open air warehouse.  It’s freezing in winter, or sweltering when they’re pouring steel.

“You can easily kill yourself.  You’re not always sure what you should or shouldn’t do,” Mike recalls.  There’s molten metal, poisonous gases and explosive steam.  “Mistakes are either life threatening or they cost a lot of money.”

There were several guys who died while he was at East Chicago plant.  One guy got crushed by a leg of a gantry crane; another was crushed in a truck-rail collision.  One of the supervisors was killed by a sudden steam explosion; a senior supervisor he knew succumbed abruptly to mesothelioma -- he woke up one morning and he couldn’t breathe, they rushed him to the hospital and he was dead before afternoon.

The mills needed to be staffed around the clock, and they were short staffed, so everyone was logging in long hours. The long hours meant that Mike was making good money, and also that he had no outside life, so he wasn’t spending any of it. He paid off all his student loans, and then he started socking as much as he could in retirement account. And then, after 4 years, he had enough.

Inside the Shed
image from NW Indiana Steel Heritage photo gallery

“I got to the point I realized it was important to me to respect and like the people I work with,” which was not the overriding atmosphere at the mill.

Now, he jokes that he uses more of the skills he’d hoped to use as an engineer working at the bike shop.  It’s certainly a hands-on job – with a lot less housekeeping and filing of reports.  The mechanics each have an area of unofficial specialty based on their favorite kind of bikes.  Owen Lloyd, one of the shop's owners, gets any English tourers or racers that come in the door.  “Owen’s an English three speed kind of guy,” Mike’s a Japanese road bike kind of guy himself.

Even customer service never approaches the stress of the mill.  A lot of Blue City Cycles’ customers are in the service industry, they’ll do the mechanics little favors, like bringing donuts to the shop.

Some customers won’t bring their bikes in for service until they’re completely unrideable, they make for entertaining stories -- like the guy who came in with a flat that he’d kept riding even as the inner tube was forced out of the tire and wrapped around the rear gears, he rode it until the wheel wouldn’t turn anymore.

Then there’s the customer who had her bike in for brake adjustments a few times, and then came back one day to buy the tools and cables to do the repair herself.  “We love that,” Mike says “We were like give us a call if you have any trouble…”

Feel good stories aside, you’d expect the most significant drawback to Mike’s career change would be the effect on his financial well being .  His earnings have been greatly reduced.  Probably part of the reason he can swing it is because he’s not raising kids right now.

But the bike shop also helps sustain him in indirect ways. Because it effectively ties all of them in with a community -- of customers, and of owners and employees of the neighboring businesses .  They’re embedded into the neighborhood; it’s quality of life benefit that spills over in immeasurable, but material ways.

The clearest example is Mike’s apartment.  It’s just few blocks from the shop; he pays a very reasonable rent.  He leases it from the girlfriend of the owner of a business across the street.  It’s an apartment that’s been in her family for many years, so she probably doesn’t have to bring in big rents, she rents the other apartment to one of her boyfriend’s employees.

Trying to live on a bike mechanic’s wages would be very different in Logan Square, where DNAInfo just reported a developer’s plans to build 500 square foot “micro apartments” with rents starting at $1,200 a month.

Logan Square renters are paying a lot for their neighborhood’s amenities – it is better stocked with hip restaurants, boutiques and bars -- and for the street vibe that comes with them.  Bridgeport has a street vibe too.  It’s not based on cool-factor or cache, it’s the vibe you get from running into 5 people you know between the coffee shop and the drug store, and Mike thrives on that.

He lived in Humboldt Park near Logan Square before he worked at Blue City Cycles, he says it felt more transient, people live in an apartment for a few years and then they’re gone.  There were plenty of neat restaurants and neat little bars.  “I’m the target demographic for a lot of that,” he says but he thinks there’s something a little artificial about them, like they’re decorated new to imitate the kind of quirky, run-down color you find at a place like Bernice’s. “Why not just go to Bernice’s?” The beer costs half of much.  And you might swap some stories with Mike Okelman there.

A Chicago Pipefitter: the Wages of Work

Plumbers and Pipefitters mural by Charles Johnston
the original is at 254 Higgens Ave, Winnepeg, Manitoba

Joe Mancari graduated from De LaSalle high school with Al Ribskis [They Call Me Mr. MGB] in 1975. Joe’s main memory of that period in history is the looming possibility of being drafted for Vietnam.  He remembers Al as one of the smart kids at school; he sometimes describes his younger self as having been a knucklehead.  He has fond memories of warm evenings spent hanging out with the guys on 26^th Street; when he was older he’d spend some time in the fast lane at the Rush Street bars.

Decades later, though, the striking difference between Joe’s path and Al’s is that Joe’s has been steadier.  He’s lived his whole life in 3 houses within 6 blocks of the house his family settled in when they first came from Italy, when Joe’s father was still an infant.  And he’s been employed by just 2 employers in the past 38 years.

Joe’s a union pipefitter -- a servicefitter more specifically, he says the other pipefitters call them sissy fitters because they don’t break their backs welding new pipe, they make repairs on big HVAC and refrigeration systems that are already installed.  He hasn’t been unaffected by changes in Chicago’s economy during those years.  His first job had him working on refrigeration systems for meat packing plants; the second has him maintaining the temperate environment for offices and data centers in the towers downtown.  For decades, the basics of heat, ventilation and air conditioning didn’t change much, but the innovations have accelerated in the last 10 years.  Now equipment makers race to outdo each other in efficiency, green features and electronic controls.  In some cases the equipment’s so new the service fitters are working out kinks the manufacturers can’t tell them how to fix.

So Joe has done well by his wits, but the fact he’s had just 2 jobs in 38 years is related to the fact he’s lived his life in 3 houses within 6 blocks, because the union has helped give his career its stability, and he needed connections to secure a foothold in the union.  Joe’s vividly aware of that because his father, who was a plumber, wasn’t in a union when Joe was a kid. Back then the unions were controlled by the Irish and the Germans, Italians could only get a foot in the door if they paid somebody a bribe.  Jimmy Mancari wouldn’t pay anybody a bribe, even though he was raising 6 kids and earning just a little more than minimum wage.

In his son’s day there would be big fights about integrating the unions.  In the 1970s, the Justice Department filed civil rights suits to force the unions to open their ranks to minorities; in the 80s, the unions pulled their apprenticeship programs out of Washburn Trade School when the Board of Education demanded they double minority enrollment; by the early 1990s a federal judge ripped the pipefitters union in particular for its racism, arguing that African Americans were effectively screened out through “an informal word of mouth system through which many white members are referred to jobs.”  Eventually, Joe’s uncle, Joe Tassone paid the bribe that got Joe’s father into the union; years later he was in a position to help his son access the system that had once excluded him.

Joe’s uncle had an interesting career arc of his own.  They called him Joe Nickels, from his days as a newsboy during the Depression outside the Metropole Hotel.  When Al Capone came out he’d buy a paper from every newsboy out front, and he’d pay them each a nickel, even though the paper only cost a penny.  As an adult, Joe Nickels started a plumbing and heating business in Chicago, but connections drew him out to Las Vegas.

Vegas has been a gambling town since the 1930s, when construction crews brought in to build the Hoover dam first jumped the town’s population from 5,000 to 25,000.  The male laborers, far from their families, were a natural market for showgirls and gambling.  A collection of local businessmen, mafia bosses and Mormon bankers built on that theme, and the city’s population doubled every decade as they did it. Joe Nickels didn’t do plumbing for the casinos, he laid sewers for all the new tract housing springing up around them.  Within 5 years of resettling in Vegas he had 6 trucks and 10 guys working for him, and he was pulling in millions of dollars a year.  But he’d also contracted a gambling habit and he was losing it as fast as he could pull it in.

An Octopus Furnace: Front View (adapted to burn gas)

As a kid, back in Chicago, Joe Mancari was following along with his father to help him out on residential plumbing and heating repairs.  He learned all the fittings and saw some very old equipment still doing good service in the basements of Bridgeport.  He remembers the old octopus furnaces that ran on coal and worked by convection – the hot air lofting up from the basement through each arm of the furnace to big grates in the floors.  The coal was held in a hopper and fed into the furnace with an augur.  If a large lump of coal jammed the augur, a pin connecting it to the motor was designed to break, so the motor could spin freely without grinding itself out.  Joe would climb into hoppers to replace broken shear pins his father couldn’t reach.

Today he says the most important thing he learned from his father was his work ethic, it’s the inheritance he’s passed on to his own sons.  He had planned to be a plumber himself, to follow in his father’s footsteps.  But when he went to the plumbers union on graduating high school, the waitlist for the apprenticeship program was 6 years long.

An Octopus Furnace: Rear View

So with his father’s permission he enrolled in Coyne Trade School.  The Campus was in Lincoln Park then, it’s just north of the old meat packing district on Fulton Street now.  Coyne was founded on the eve of the eve of the 20^th century to train electricians, an emerging trade at the time.  By the 1950s it was known for its training in HVAC and Refrigeration as well.  After eighteen months of night courses, Joe finished with employable skills, but still couldn’t get a job without a union card, and you couldn’t join the union without a job.

“You had to know somebody,” Joe says today.  His father called Frank Young whose plumbing supply business at 59^th and Ashland brought all the local contractors in through his doors.  Frank Young helped match Joe with a piping company called Resco, now Mid-Resco Services, who asked the union to take in their new prospective employee.

Mid-Resco had a north side crew and a south side crew.  In heating and cooling as in life, there was a natural rivalry between them, at least the south side crew would entertain themselves with stories about things the north side crew had done, like by-passing safety controls for quick fixes that blew up on them later.  Among themselves, they made a point of fixing their own mistakes quietly in house.

Joe was just out of school, he was motivated to learn, it wasn’t long before clients were calling up to ask his bosses to “send the kid over.”  Mid-Resco brought him out from house basements to the equipment rooms of big commercial and industrial facilities.  They afforded him a tour of the local meat packing plants while they were still running – Chiapetti’s, Bo Packing, Peer Foods.  He recalls the sound of the cattle crying in the slaughterhouse, the big bins full of animal parts – like the hopper full of eyeballs staring up at him like they were shocked to be there -- and the chill of the workrooms, which were all refrigerated, the workers wore protective steel mesh gloves that carried the cold to the bones of their hands.

The Original Ammonia Refrigeration System: Built by Ferdinand Carre in 1859

The meat plants used old ammonia refrigeration systems.  Ammonia is poisonous and flammable and had been replaced by “safer” chlorofluorocarbons like Freon in most other environments, but it is cheap and efficient, especially at very low temperatures, and so it’s still used for food processing in particular.  Today, the ammonia industry describes itself as the safety refrigerant because it doesn’t destroy the ozone and you can easily smell it if it leaks.

Substances aside, refrigeration in the meat packing plants is based on a cycle of compression and rapid expansion that has been fundamentally unchanged since the 1870s, when it was first used to make ice to replace the stuff harvested from lakes in winter and stored under sawdust through the year. The refrigerant is first compressed and condensed into liquid, then pushed through an expansion valve.  The sharp drop in pressure sparks a flash of evaporation that pulls heat out from the refrigerant, chilling it enough that warm air blown across it turns cold.

It sounds improbable, but apparently it works.  In his second job, Joe would be working on similar systems used to cool the core of the towers downtown.  In winter, the envelope of an office tower is heated, but chillers cool the heat from equipment at the core all year round.

Ammonia Refrigeration Equipment

After 18 years, Joe was ready for a change of scene.  He took a job with Competitive Piping in 1997.  Competitive Piping has been headquartered at the Chicago Board of Trade ever since a heroic rescue job during the great Loop Flood of 1992.

As the flood made Chicagoans aware, coal fuel was once fed into deep sub-basements in towers throughout the Loop by a system of tunnels underground.  Later, the tunnels were strung with electric lines, the sub-basements are still filled with mechanical equipment.

In April, 1992, a contractor driving a piling into the bed of the river struck too close to one of the tunnels.  It took awhile for the pressure to break through the tunnel, but after it did, the leak was visible in the river above – it looked like water circling down a giant drain.  Water filled the tunnels and sub-basements, shutting equipment down and creating giant electrical hazards.  The IRS granted disaster extensions on tax returns; the Chicago Board of Trade rattled world markets when it closed for 2 days.

It took weeks to plug the hole and empty the basements; the lawsuits would wind on for years.  Crews were still trying to stop the hole with mattresses when Competitive Piping helped bring CBOT back on line before anybody else.  They flew in replacement chillers by helicopter, they finagled permission from city bureaucrats to operate them from flatbeds parked in the street. They sent divers into the sub-basements with underwater welding equipment to install take off valves in the submerged piping.  The valves tied in hard rubber hose that reached out to the chillers in the street.

Competitive Piping's Headquarters since 1992

Some years later, Joe got to work on another helicopter job for the CBOT.  They were installing cooling towers on the roof.  It was a carefully choreographed performance.  The city shut down the streets, but only for a tight window of time.  Spectators held their breath as the helicopters hoisted the towers upwards, staying steady as they could so the towers wouldn’t start to swing on their tethers.  Joe worked the rigging to prepare them for the lift.

In the years since he started at Competitive Piping, the trading floors have given way to big server rooms for processing electronic trades.  The servers generate great loads of heat that must be cooled constantly and that make repairs more urgent, because anything that shuts them down can cost traders millions in a short span of time.  The constant innovations designed to make heating and cooling more efficient make old equipment obsolete more quickly, particularly the electronic components, and not all the new equipment works right the first time it’s installed.

But many of the basics of the business remain the same.  In the summer, Joe says the most common service calls are for motor repairs.  As ComEd struggles to meet peak demand, the voltage sometimes drops in unannounced brownouts – he says that’s not supposed to happen but he’s seen it on his voltmeter.  When voltage drops, amperage rises, and a surge in amperage will burn a motor out.

In the winter, the most common calls come when tenants under the mechanical floors complain they’ve got water pooling in their ceiling, and that’s usually because water left standing in chill coils over winter have frozen and cracked.  A big building is constantly balancing the air it exhales through the exhaust systems with fresh air it takes in from outside.  Joe says if the balance isn’t right you can feel the resistance when you go to open the doors.  And if the damper that brings in fresh air into the air mixing chamber gets stuck, frigid cold from outdoors will freeze the coils used to condition the air that’s blown through the ducts.

For a big system, the air mixing chamber is the size of room.  It has a door with a tempered glass window on it so you can peer in.  Fans move the air in tornado-force winds inside, so you have to shut them off before you open the door.  Joe will isolate the coils and force air through them, then spray them with a foam that bubbles where the air leaks through tiny cracks. There may be dozens of them, and he’ll patiently braze each of them closed.

Over the years Joe says all that work in very cold environments takes a toll on your joints  - as it probably did for the meat workers with their chilled hands.  But it has also afforded a good life for his family.  His sons are adults – he sent them both to college.  One of them is a materials engineer, the other a doctor of pharmacology.  He and his wife raised them in a house next door to his father.

In fact, the lot their house stands on originally came with the house his father bought for $16,000 in 1966.  Those were his father’s low wage days, he bought it with a loan from the credit union at St. Jerome’s and a spoken guarantee from a friend.   Joe and his wife designed their own house themselves, every detail the way they want it, from the placement of the windows to the extensive insulation, to the materials in the pipes – there is no rattling PVC in Joe’s house.  It reflects what he knows about heating and cooling and pipe, it also reflects the benefits of the union that helped guarantee, over the span of a whole career, fair compensation for work well done.