Mike Orlando stood outside the shuttered steel mill where he’d worked for decades, gazing at chipped paint, faded signage and rust-covered fencing.
“It’s eerie being back here,” he said.
For well over a century, that 450-acre facility along Suisun Bay was what locals lovingly called Pittsburg’s “heartbeat”: a bustling plant that supplied well-paying jobs, many of the tin plates used in the U.S. canning industry, and an unmistakable source of community pride. Named after the Pennsylvania steel capital, this working-class suburb about 40 miles northeast of San Francisco came to embody the mill’s blue-collar ethos…