Vitkovice Iron Works

A few years ago, while visiting Ostrava for the first time, we drove by an old steel mill. Petra pointed it out with a frown, like it was a scab on the city. Tall brown stacks and a mad maze of pipes and conduits around 19th century brick workshops. It is a short streetcar ride from the city center and visible from nearly everywhere.
Since that first visit, the site has begun to be transformed.

As part of a redevelopment project, an industry museum with modern accents has grown inside one of the workshops. The round gas "Gong" has had its roof permanently raised to create an auditorium with seating for several thousand people. As you enter, you step onto thick steel plates skillfully riveted together. It is the original floor. Outside art installations are blended into the industrial skeleton. An interactive science center faces the site, its mirrored facade literally reflecting its namesake.

Petra, knowing how interested I am in all things technical, suggested that we go on a tour of the steel works. We put on our hard hats and of we went! The tour was in Czech, but between Petra's translating skills and the signs explaining the process in English as we went it was no problem.

The tour included a ride up the funicular which dumped ore into the top of the blast furnace. The view from the top looked out to Ostrava in the north and the Beskydy mountains to the south. Rather than riding the funicular down, our guide took us downwards as the pig iron would have flowed. Our entire tour group, maybe 15 people, fit easily inside the chamber.

Don't look down!

The pig iron and slag exited the furnace at the bottom. Petra was there with her dad to see the last batch of iron flow out of the blast furnace in 1998. Ostrava, no longer communist, no longer the coal capital of Central Europe, would have to reinvent itself once again.
The tour ended in the control room with a computer animation showing the vision of Vitkovice's future.  I'm excited to see the end product!