HOMESTEAD, Pa. — Stand at Eighth Avenue and Amity Street — near the heart of a forge that built America — and follow the signs.

Fresh blue paint outlines thick white letters and arrows. And all signs point to “The Waterfront.”

Here in Steel Valley, where heavy industry is a distant memory, development is about dollars and sense — and survival.

Andrew Carnegie, Frederick Law Olmstead, Henry Bessemer — men of incalculable influence before and after 1900 — all breathed industrial life into this rust belt community with a river running through it. It’s no longer a steel town. The water of the Monongahela, which for a century cooled hot metal from the mills, is now the centerpiece for a community’s resurgence.

Steeply embedded against the hills opposite Pittsburgh, high above the old industrial waterfront, Steel Valley — an amalgamation of the boroughs Homestead, West Homestead and Munhall contrast that city’s steely grandeur.

Built for workers at mills once considered the most advanced in the world, the region is an answer to anyone wondering why Steel Town is so described.

The area barely skirted economic demise in the late 1980s when Big Steel left town and the subsequent resurgence of its waterfront as a draw to consumers there, in the late ’90s, means that rather symbiotic relationship may not have changed much.

The Monongahela flows north, one of only a small number worldwide, including the Niagara. But when U.S. Steel shuttered the Homestead Works in 1987, pretty much everything else in Steel Valley went south.

“We were so bad down here, we’d sit at the borough building, and we’d make a bet that that cockroach would make it across the street before a car came and ran over him. We had nothing down here,” West Homestead Mayor John Dindak said.

“During that down period of about 9, 10 years, I don’t know how we were able to survive,” West Homestead Mayor John Dindak said. “All the young people moved out of town. I can relate that to, case in point, we had a little-league team, ages 8 to12; we had to disband that because there were no jobs. No kids.”

It was a scene that drew national attention, as much for the significant loss of American industrial heritage as for the glaring spectacle of economic vulnerability it became.

In the early ’90s, after the work dried up, Dindak was considering auctioning the name of his borough to the highest corporate bidder in a “your name here”- style plea for investment.

The media took notice.

“I offered to sell the name of West Homestead for a million dollars. The only bid I got, some guy called me and said, ‘wha’d ya got for $10,000,” Dindak said.

At that time it wasn’t uncommon for municipal employees in West Homestead to pool their money into the Pennsylvania state lottery to help save the town.

“I came up with a gimmick. I got all the borough employees, they pitched in a dollar and we started playing the lottery. We never hit the million dollars.”

Just up the road, in Homestead proper, where the famous Carnegie Steel strike turned deadly in 1892, killing 12 and wounding 11, bankruptcy had already taken hold.

The boroughs together were desperate.

A total about-face

Nowadays, Filenes, Macys, TGI Friday’s, Dave and Busters — many of the nation’s best-known chain restaurants, department stores and a hulking knot of waterslides tangled high into the air called Sandcastle mark the latest chapter in this icon of post-industrial adaptability.

These stores are the new waterfront.

They come at a cost, though — underwritten by residents who, by Pennsylvania standards, pay a lot in taxes, while the development’s rate is cut dramatically as part of an incentive that drew them here.

Taxes for residents in the three boroughs vary, but the rate is about $35.50 per $1,0000 of assessed value.

It’s a small figure by Niagara County standards, where relative to income, residents pay some of the highest taxes in the nation.

But the new development in Homestead is like a place built for a different audience, somewhere in the foggy hills of Pittsburgh’s most affluent suburbs — in other words, shoppers.

Developers with the Enterprise Zone initiative, which flagged the steel valley after its collapse, say some of Pittsburgh’s most affluent outlying areas loom above the glowing mass of storefronts below them and just across the Homestead Bridge.

Today, it is not uncommon to see women pushing designer baby carriages and donning equally designer outfits strolling though the mall-like boulevards just beneath the bridge.

“This has really become a regional entertainment and shopping complex,” Steel Valley Enterprise Zone Corp. representative Charles Starrett said.

“The City of Pittsburgh for a long time was really underserved. This place has attracted a lot of people with money, and the developers knew that. The Squirrel Hill part of Pittsburgh (across the river) is the richest part of Pittsburgh. The developers looked towards that,” he said.

“If you look across the river, they’re building new homes that are worth $500,000, $600,000,” Homestead Mayor Betty Esper said.

Had the clearing of the old factory riverfront and development been up to the city alone, they’d be seeing the other 70 percent of what Esper said is about $550,000 in taxes collected by Homestead each year.

The rest goes back to the developer for maintenance, and to pay county and school taxes, she said.

“The waterfront was bought by a private developer, they developed the waterfront. The borough had nothing to do with building (it). They did the infrastructure, they did everything. We didn’t put a penny into it.”

She said a “Tax Increment Financing” strategy agreed to by the state and county resulted in a 20 year “mortgage” scenario, with the city seeing a larger share of the revenues annually, about 3 percent per year, as bonds are paid off.

“They built the house, and we’re paying the mortgage,” Hoffman said.

“Where the waterfront is, most of that property was owned by the borough and during World War II, in the ’41, ’42 era, they put the defense plant down there to roll the steel to support the war effort.” Esper said. “That’s where most of the population was, below the tracks. They evicted everyone, I guess, what else can you say.”

Workers were offered jobs in the new, bigger complex when the government consolidated the various mills and shops to produce armor plating for ships and tanks.

When the industry began its decline, the Homestead Works was an obvious choice for sale.

“The Navy gave it to U.S. Steel for 10 cents on the dollar,” Esper said.

“So (after the plant closed) U.S. Steel sold it for $10 million to Park Corp., which, they made 100 percent profit — and gave nothing back to the borough, by the way.”

A man representing Park Corp., a liquidation and demolition company, began making his rounds in the area between 1988 and 1989, getting to know the area politicians, including Dindak.

“Ray Park ... was also in the salvage business. All the steel mills here, the cranes, the rolls, the machinery, the railroad tracks — he took them all and sold them for salvage.” Dindak said. “He was a shrewd man. There were 400-something acres of buildings here.”

“He called me in one day and said ‘John, I’ll tell you what I’m doing. I’m developing this property for a developer.’ And that’s exactly what he did.”

Park Corp. then acquired the land when the plant turned in its keys to the city and, after selling the scrap and clearing the land for nearly a decade, found others in the wholesale redevelopment business to pick up where they left off.

Continental Real Estate, of Columbus, Ohio, stepped in for the bells and whistles — soliciting each of the scores of chain retailers and food vendors now parked permanently on the river’s southern bank.

“When U.S. Steel shut down it took 60 percent of our tax-base. The waterfront pulled us out,” Esper said.