Donora, Pennsylvania is a small town, about an hour south of Pittsburgh, with a population of 4,500. The steel mill there closed decades ago. There is no bank, no gas station, no grocery store and no McDonald’s.
In 2017, journalists and University of Pittsburgh professors Jeanne Marie Laskas and Erin Anderson went to Donora, bought a house and stayed for three years, reporting on life in this one, small town.
Cement City is their new 10-part documentary podcast about the people of Donora. WESA’s Priyanka Tewari sat down with Laskas and Anderson to talk about immersion journalism, how small-town politics echo the national stage and the pride Donorans feel for their home.
Priyanka Tewari: You went to Donora for the first time in 2017, and then you actually ended up staying for three years. What prompted your curiosity about this town and what compelled you to stay?
Jeanne Marie Laskas: If you can imagine 2017, just after the inauguration of a new president, a lot of people — journalists — were confused. Like, How did we miss that? I was among them.
We were thinking, How do we come to understand America in this way that's happening right in our backyard? And [Erin Anderson and I] determined that we should go hang out somewhere and learn. And we found this little town, Donora, Pennsylvania.
We didn't want to just pop in somewhere. We wanted to stay. And so we bought a little house and plopped ourselves down, and there we sat for three years, watching and becoming part of that community.
What prompted you to actually buy a house?
Laskas: It was a question of commitment. We [weren’t] just going to helicopter in and talk to some people. We just really [were] going to stick around and be there first thing in the morning when the kids are getting on the school bus. [We wanted to be there for] all the things that happen on the margins of what one thinks of as an important day. It was every bit of it that we were interested in: the granular detail.
The central story in the series is that of a local election. Why was the election so compelling to you?
Erin Anderson: One of the things that's important to understand about the project is that we went in without a story in mind. This is something that is in Jeanne Marie's wheelhouse. I [work] in audio, and she does a lot of work in immersion journalism.
The election was really interesting because [there were] a lot of really interesting things happening at the local level that were really starting to reflect and echo things happening at the national level in politics.
Now here we are, on the eve of another election that feels eerily similar to the one that we had back in 2016 when we were first coming into this project. It just has become even more interesting, how much this sort of microcosm of this tiny town reflects what's happening nationally, as well.
Who came up with the name of the podcast, Cement City?
Laskas: I'm going to say probably Erin.
Anderson: The house that we end up buying is in a neighborhood called Cement City, which [is] full of 100 or 150 poured concrete houses that Thomas Edison designed.
As we [developed] the story and [thought] about some of these bigger questions that were trying to answer, one of the things was just: What do you do when you have this town that was built as this city on a hill, in this moment in time with a very particular dream of what America would be and what the good life was?
They were thinking, This is the perfect system. There’s this mill, and these people can work at the mill and everything's right there and you don't have to leave the town and it's all this perfect self-contained system that, obviously, is no longer functioning in that way.
These houses became, for us, a metaphor for what that dream looked like.
[They] were built with such a vision of permanence. They were going to last forever, in the way that the town was meant to last forever—the dream of the town—and it didn't.
What keeps the people of the town there?
Laskas: That's a beginning question we had that we felt almost embarrassed for asking. It seems like an outsider question, [but] it’s the obvious one. Like, Why are you staying here [in] this town that fell apart, and had this smog disaster that killed a bunch of people, which was the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history?
A lot of difficult stuff happened to this town, and yet there's a core of people that never left. Their families never left, their children never left. And why?
It is one of the driving questions that we have, and I would say, by the end of the series, we really do attempt to answer that. It’s not really about the town. It’s not really about the people. It's really [about] what makes you belong and matter.
In Donora, you really matter. You are Donoran. There is this pride [in being Donoran], and it inspired me because I don't have that for any place that I've ever lived. And I wanted it, you know? I wanted to feel that. And I got to see that, in these people. They believe in their town. It matters.
Cement City is an Audacy Original podcast available at cementcity.org and wherever you get your podcasts. The last two episodes of the 10-part series are scheduled for release on November 6.
The audio for this story was produced by Susan Scott Peterson.
