The Company Town (10 page)

Much of this was made possible by two hugely successful products: Corning Ware and television tubes. Known to generations of yard-sale aficionados as the indestructible casserole dishes embellished with a blue-cornflower pattern, Corning Ware was invented by accident when a scientist inadvertently jacked up the temperature of a laboratory oven. While the company did sell the resulting Pyroceran to the Defense Department for missile nose cones, the glass was far more profitable when made into cookware that could go from the freezer to the oven without breaking. Memorable magazine advertisements showed a Corning Ware casserole dish half immersed in a block of ice—and half sticking out into the flames of a blowtorch. In 1959, its first year on the market, consumers snapped up $15 million worth of Corning Ware.

The product was also advertised via Corning's favorite medium: television, on such popular programs as
Cheyenne
and
The Lineup
. As the exclusive supplier of bulbs for U.S. television-set manufacturers, Corning Glass Works was responsible for the guts of over 11 million sets sold in 1965, both black-and-white and color. Not that these were Corning's only wares: According to its annual report, that year the company produced 43,000 different products in thirty-seven manufacturing plants. By 1970, it would have international sales of $166.7 million.
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The Glass Works' community-development efforts would escalate even further following a 1972 flood that left four feet of water standing in the downtown area and 6,000 townsfolk homeless. Amid rumors that the disaster could prompt the company to leave Corning, Amory Houghton Jr., who'd become company chairman in 1964, went on local radio to assure employees that their jobs were secure and that the company intended not only to rebuild but to expand operations in town. With major help from the company and its foundation, the business district and its central thoroughfare, Market Street, got a complete facelift and became home to a new city hall, an open-air skating rink, a shiny new Hilton Hotel (now a Radisson), and a new office building for the Flint Glass Workers local. Other additions would include a spiffy new corporate headquarters, built on the site of the original plant, and the Glass Innovation Center.
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These developments, however, coincided with a violent swing in company fortunes. With its sale of television tubes in decline—the Japanese were eclipsing U.S. television makers—Corning in 1975 closed five domestic
plants, ended the manufacture of black-and-white bulbs, and reduced employment by 40 percent. In the early 1980s, it sold its remaining lightbulb plants.

Then an unexpected savior appeared in the form of the Reagan Justice Department: In 1982, the feds announced the breakup of AT&T. That company would be forced to divest its Baby Bell companies and to accept the end of its monopoly over long-distance telephone service. This was Corning's opportunity to deploy a new technology.

Since the 1960s, Corning scientists had been working on a new kind of cable to carry voice transmission—thin strands of optical glass that could transmit higher-quality voice signals than the much-used copper cable. Although Corning felt its years of unremunerated effort and an investment of $100 million had resulted in a technological breakthrough by 1970, AT&T never supported the Corning efforts, being engaged in its own fiber-optic research. The ill winds that buffeted AT&T in 1982 resulted in a windfall for Corning: Later that year, MCI, backed by junk-bond money from Wall Street, placed an order for 100,000 kilometers of Corning's cable—a $90 million purchase. Sprint Communications followed with a similar order the following year.
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Such good fortune seldom lasts—and at times it presages ruin. To meet these orders, Corning had to make its biggest investments in company history: $94 million in new plants and equipment. By 1986, this meant profitable growth with more than $220 million in sales. But by the following year, there was a glut in fiber optics, with new competitors entering the field and the major trunk lines complete. Sales rebounded a bit with orders from local phone companies—and in 2000, the company had $7 billion in sales and a market value of $100 billion. But by 2001, after the company took on huge debt to build more capacity, fiber-optic sales tanked for good. Sales fell by half, and company stock plummeted 95 percent. Corning, which had a workforce of 40,000 in 2000, laid off 19,000 workers, including 3,500 in its hometown. CEO James Houghton, who'd retired in 1996 after thirteen years at the helm, was drafted to return and help revive the company. His personal stockholdings, once worth $129 million, had plunged to $1 million in value.

After a rousing speech at the company's annual meeting, Houghton sold the company's precision lens business, exited telecom photonics—which
expedite the movement of light through fiber via lasers and amplifiers—and closed four of the company's five fiber-optic plants. By 2004, Corning Inc. announced it had cut its debt in half, to $2.7 billion and, rather than losing money, had earned $163 million in the first half of that year. It has been in the black ever since.
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By 2009, Corning had placed a new major bet—on liquid-crystal display glass for an ever-growing list of consumer products including lap-tops, digital cameras, navigation systems, video games, and personal digital assistants. It is still involved with fiber optics, along with materials used in emissions- and pollution control and more than 150 other materials. Company employment in the town as of 2009 stands at just under 5,000, with almost 3,000 spread between Corning headquarters and its research center, and the rest in production of materials for auto and truck catalytic converters. Corning Inc. is still much involved in downtown renovation, helping develop deteriorated buildings into retail and residential properties. Its community development wing, Corning Enterprises, and the foundation also participate in local school district programs and spend $2 million a year on child-care facilities, where half of the six hundred-odd slots go to kids of employees.

No one claims that such initiatives are purely philanthropic—clearly having a pleasant, resource-rich downtown and good schools helps Corning Inc. attract and retain employees. Its startlingly modern headquarters buildings, sited next to the picturesque Chemung River, also serve notice that this is a cutting-edge operation. In the eyes of professionals such as Corning's research-and-development scientists, the town with its amenities and low cost of living even compares favorably with places like the San Francisco Bay Area, observes former chairman James Houghton. “What we're doing in Corning is totally in our self-interest,” he told me. “It's smart business.” The business-district rejuvenation and the glass museum—support for which runs to $20 million each year—help build Corning's brand name and public goodwill. Some might say these efforts qualify for that dirty term “gentrification.” But one only has to compare Corning's business district with that of atrophied upstate burgs to see that gentrification isn't always something to sneeze at.
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Another group of company towns emerged in the early twentieth century, defined by a different sort of idealism—once again motivated by corporations' desire to escape from urban wilderness and often the necessity of locating close to natural resources. These “industrial satellite” towns, however, were different from earlier company utopias in one key way: They were the province—and experimental playthings—of architects rather than of visionary capitalists. It is an approach that seems much more modern today, as we are accustomed to the notion of the architect as visionary (thank you, Ayn Rand). At the same time, the architectural style exhibited in most of these towns was anything but avant-garde.

One of the first of these was U.S. Steel's Fairfield, Alabama, located close to the iron ore, limestone, and coal needed for production in the Fairfield Works steel plant. (The town, first called Corey, was originally owned by Tennessee Coal and Iron, a company the J. P. Morgan interests dramatically absorbed in 1907 largely to stave off a stock market panic.)
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Fairfield was part of a group of company towns that seemed to deny their industrial purpose. Here, planner George Miller and architect William Leslie Walton erected a series of craftsman-style homes in a sylvan setting. Like several British company towns inspired by England's “garden city” movement, the reigning aesthetic was preindustrial.
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Indian Hill, a suburb of Worcester, Massachusetts, built for the Norton Co., resembled a colonial New England village, complete with cottages, leafy streets, steepled churches, and a town square. In Tyrone, New Mexico, one of several company towns built for copper-mining company Phelps Dodge, architect Bertram Goodhue adopted a rococo motif, with mansions, a school, and a hospital reminiscent of buildings in coastal Spain.
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The streets of Atco, Georgia, built by the American Textile Co., were lined with modest clapboard bungalows evocative of nineteenth-century Southern country villages.
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Aluminum maker Alcoa built settlements with similar structures in both Alcoa, Tennessee, and Massena, New York.
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Lynch, Kentucky, built in 1917 in Harlan County by the U.S. Steel subsidiary U.S. Coal and Coke Co., featured a sandstone-block commissary, post office, theater, hotel, hospital, churches, and schools; workers lived in single and double houses with asphalt shingles.
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Altogether, around forty new industrial towns were constructed from 1900 to 1920, in which single-family homes came in numerous varieties—
but in which the repetitive looks and gridiron pattern of earlier company towns were “obsessively avoided,” in the words of architectural historian Margaret Crawford. The factory, mill, or mine was consistently out of sight of the residences.
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It was in this same period that American modernist architecture began to make its mark. By the final years of the nineteenth century, celebrated Chicago architect Louis Sullivan was already developing the modern sky-scraper with such edifices as the Carson Pirie Scott department store in the Windy City and the Guaranty Building in Buffalo, New York. By 1900, thirty-three-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright was recognized as the chief practitioner of the Prairie School of modern homes, marked by flowing lines, open space, and a functionalist absence of fussiness. Observers celebrated Wright's Larkin Soap Co. administration building in Buffalo for its radical use of plate-glass windows, built-in furniture, and air conditioning. But in the midst of such developments, the new company towns seemed to draw aesthetic cues from another place—possibly from Agatha Christie or the New England novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Modernist touches were rare: Torrance, California, was virtually alone in making such aesthetic choices. In that oil-refining center, working-class residents were turned off by architect Irving Gill's spare, streamlined houses, which seemed only to connote austerity and poverty. Instead, they opted for California bungalows, with their gardens, privacy, and associations with the British Empire and rural life. From the late twentieth century on, many model company towns would face daily life in disguise, pretending to be something other than what they truly were.

But for a number of companies, aesthetics—and the comfort of the workers housed—was a matter of little concern. Such companies focused only on the bottom line and saw their employees strictly as a means to the end of profit, perhaps as something less than full-fledged members of the human race. They seemed almost to take delight in exploiting their workers, to the point of justifying the most extreme claims of political radicals. These were the enterprises that flourished in the kingdom of coal.

Straight Creek is a narrow zigzag valley that runs up into the mountains from Pineville. . . . The houses are low shacks set up on stilts, scattered in disorderly rows up and down the valley floor. . . . The A.P. man and the gentleman from the
Courier-Journal
. . . keep looking around behind things as if they felt the houses had been put up to hoax them. They refuse to believe that people can be so badly off as that.

—JOHN DOS PASSOS in
Harlan Miners Speak
(1931)

 

 

 

 

S
ome American phenomena cannot be exaggerated: The rhetoric and guile of a Louisiana politician. The head-snapping recklessness of a New York City taxi driver. And the near-totalitarian, super-exploitative conditions of life in a coal-mining company town.

The basic formula for coal towns was as follows: Companies built their settlements, sometimes little more than camps, close to the mines. To recoup this investment, they made it a condition of employment that workers live in rental housing there—employees were not allowed to buy. The owners, or “coal operators,” as they were known, barred outsiders including peddlers or businesses not affiliated with the company, and any such persons daring to enter risked arrest for trespass. Operators paid workers in cash or scrip—company-issued money, denominated like U.S. currency but redeemable chiefly at the company store—at the end of the month, with deductions for rent and utilities and sometimes for school fees and taxes. And when workers ran out of money between paydays, as
they often did, they had little choice but to turn to the company store, where they could get credit in the form of scrip for time already worked but not yet paid. Potentially, then, they were always living on credit. Prices at the store were noticeably higher than elsewhere, but outside merchants tended to discount scrip by 10 percent to 25 percent. Should a miner become injured and unable to work, the company evicted him and his family from its housing with as little as ten days' notice. Eviction also occurred if the miner went on strike, and if he died in a mine accident, his family had to leave.