Preserving El Paso's history in iron

By CHRIS ROBERTS

El Paso Times

EL PASO -- It once was a smelter's raucous, sweltering heart. Now the brick structure erected in 1901 on the Asarco site is silent. Dust drifts through broken window panes and shrouds antique equipment inside.

Until recently, the building's boilers made steam that pushed pistons and spun turbines generating power for machines that extracted valuable metal from chunks of the Earth's crust. When the smelter was first established in 1887, the treasure was lead, which other companies formed into ship ballast, bullets and even toys. Later it included copper, shaped into wire that carried telegraph messages and pipes that routed water into homes and businesses. Other metals followed.

It could be said activities made possible by the "Power House" -- currently one of only two buildings slated for preservation at the site -- also pumped life into El Paso in those days.

From the early 1900s to the end of World War II when mechanization began to replace workers, the plant provided between 1,000 and 2,000 steady jobs, said Monica Perales, who wrote the book Smeltertown, Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community. Asarco took advantage of cheap labor in El Paso and Mexico, she said, at the same time employing cutting-edge technology.

"It was a very modern industry. When we think about El Paso's past, we like to think about the rugged West and we tend to overlook this technology," said Perales, a University of Houston history professor who grew up in El Paso. "It's amazing to think that some of this machinery has withstood the test of time."

Ed Santiesteban started at Asarco in the 1970s and worked there until the plant closed in 1999, when copper prices plummeted. He now works as a consultant with Project Navigator, the company responsible for demolishing and cleaning up the plant. He praises the durable handiwork of those craftsmen.

"Those guys had some savvy back then," Santiesteban said. "They were designing and building this stuff."