Raised in Dundalk and the son of a retired Baltimore City police officer, award-winning photographer (and occasional Baltimore magazine contributor) Joe Giordano witnessed first hand the fall of Bethlehem Steel and its blow to the workers, families, and fabric of his hometown.

His work has been featured in The Guardian, GQ, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, and City Paper where he served as photo editor. Giordano’s “Struggle” series, his portraits of Civil Rights and Black Power-era leaders, is in the permanent collections at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Reginald F. Lewis Museum.

Giordano’s ongoing current project, Shuttered: Images from the Fall of Bethlehem Steel, opens with a preview Wednesday evening at the Baltimore Museum of Industry from 5:30-7:30 p.m. and then remains on exhibit through April 2020.

With his new show—amid renewed debates over trade and tariffs and the role of unions—we asked Giordano about the exhibition and its relevance today.

Other than growing up in the shadows of Sparrows Point, what prompted this decade and a half, continuing effort?
The pictures, I want to use as a warning. They aren’t intended as political, the idea started during the George H.W. Bush steel tariffs in 2002 when I started shooting for the paper [the Dundalk Eagle]. They are harbingers of corporate ownership.

They look like images of the post-industrial America. Why did you use the word harbingers?
General Motors and Unilever are gone. The Amazon warehouses and Wal-Mart and Under Armour will be gone someday, too, and Amazon isn’t going to worry about the impact on workers when they pick up and leave—not unless you get back to unions and have some representation. They just leave everybody behind.

The photographs convey a loneliness. The sense of abandonment is palpable.
Intentionally, there are no shots of molten steel, of the product being made. Everyone has seen those. These are photos of the hulking monsters (the weathered steel mills) that were left behind and the people left behind.

How many photographs are in the show?
About 30. I didn’t count [laughs]. But the installation looks great.

A lot of interesting faces. Faces and images of small houses, American flags, and unions hall that communicate a certain pride and dignity among the retired steelworkers.
In 2010, I was at union hall for an announcement of benefit and pension cuts. Some of the shots are the reactions from a lot of elderly people who counted on those benefits and pensions.

Growing up in Dundalk, you obviously knew guys or knew guys whose father or uncle who were steelworkers.
My grandfather didn’t work at Bethlehem Steel, but at Eastern Stainless in Colgate. They made some of the steel that went into the St. Louis arch. My 92-year-old grandmother still lives there.

At a time when so many fewer breadwinners are in union jobs, it’s almost impossible to imagine the huge role those unions and big mills and plants played in the community.
It wasn’t just working together, but working for a common good. They were not just wage employees; their lives were centered around the union. There are two union halls right next to each other on Dundalk Avenue. Obviously, they needed two. That should tell you something.

What have you learned from this project?
The importance of unions. I’m in my mid-40s and I think my generation took a lot for granted—like unions. Unions hurt themselves in the past, too, with some of their mob ties, bad investments, and poor leadership. But as the old guard fades away, I do think today that unions, like SEIU, are now are attracting younger laborers and that gives me hope and young leaders like New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who defends workers’ rights.

“The only thing left behind was a 55-foot wooden flag pole, a marker that took 25 years to rust and fall apart and disappear, too,” Sally Riley, of the Historical Society of Baltimore County, says of long gone Warren, Maryland. For decades after the town was buried beneath 23 million gallons of Loch Raven Reservoir water, adds Riley, who will be presenting her research on Warren this Sunday at the Historical Society, boaters would look for the lost flagpole and tell stories of the old sunken mill village.

By the late 19th century, Baltimore’s clean drinking water was in short supply. The polluted and sometimes depleted Jones Falls could not fill the needs of city’s growing number citizens so, in 1881, the first Loch Raven dam, the lower dam, was built, forming a reservoir. But it still wasn’t enough to meet demand.

Plans for the massive 2,400-acre Loch Raven Reservoir as we know it today started as Baltimore City Council ordinance 141 in 1908. “GIGANTIC TASK AT HAND” read the headline in The Sun when the project, part of a $5-million water improvement effort, was approved that year. (The reservoir’s name was coined after Luke Raven, one of the first settlers in the area, along with the Scottish word for lake.)

Construction of a new 51-foot upper dam, eventually containing 1.5 billion gallons of water, began in 1914. But it also was a stopgap, failing to meet the demands of the city’s 600,000 residents and expanding industrial base and plans were in the works to build the dam up to its current 240-foot height. The problem, however, was that a thriving mill town sat on the banks of Gunpowder Falls, directly in the hollow just north of the dam.

At the time, Warren was home to cotton, flour, and grist mills, three churches—St. Paul’s Protestant Church, Warren Methodist Episcopal Church, and Warren Baptist Church—a public school, general store, post office, and more than 900 residents.

After the project was approved, it was learned that city officials had been quietly—or secretly, some say—in negotiations with Warren Manufacturing Co. to buyout the mills and the town, in order to level them. In 1922, after several years of legal haggling, the citizens were given the boot, the mills and town dismantled, and eventually the whole of Warren disappeared under 23 billion gallons of Gunpowder water.

Today, the only intact remains of the town are four bungalows—residences of company management at the time—that were relocated out of harm’s way to Old Bosley Road. Otherwise, there are only a handful telltale remnants of Warren gravestones and stone fences around the reservoir’s edges.

Fortunately, the city water department, for reasons still unknown, sent photographers to document life in Warren in a series of gorgeous, if depressing, pictures (more than 70 are included in Riley’s presentation) before the town was dismembered. The black and white photos show girls walking across the original Gunpowder bridge, the company story and men gathered on a porch across the street, company houses on Main Street, and children playing in the schoolyard near the lost flag pole.

Riley adds that she occasionally still meets people, like local writer Ann Kolakowski, who will tell her that their grandparents, or great-grandparents grew up in Warren.

“My grandmother lived to be almost 104 and when she was 99, when my brother and I were clearing out her house—she was moving to an assisted living facility—and I came across an old school notebook that read: Marian Brown, Domestic Science/Warren School, Maryland. I was like, ‘What the hell is Warren School?’” says Kolakowski, who published Persistence: Poems of Warren, Maryland in 2014, inspired by the town and her family’s story.

Kolakowski then recalled that as a child she used to go fishing with her family in a section of the reservoir they referred to Schoolhouse Cove. “I can remember my parents asking me to look for the flagpole there, but I never knew why.”

Warren actually reminds Riley of Sparrows Point, the old Bethlehem Steel company town, where my grandparents lived when she was growing up. “One of my favorite childhood memories was driving there for Sunday dinner with my parents,” she recalls. “There were a lot of kids who lived in Sparrows Point then and it was wonderful. I loved their old house. Of course, that’s gone, too. Another ghost town, I suppose.”

Editor’s Note: This story is from the collection, If You Love Baltimore, It Will Love You Back: 171 Short But True Stories from Senior Editor Ron Cassie, due out Oct. 1 from Apprentice House Press at Loyola University Maryland To support local stores, it can be also pre-ordered through bookshop.org.