[Alberta's Child]

It declined.

Take a look at the steel content in any car or piece of heavy equipment today compared to 60 years ago.

It declined ... but I repeat myself.

And do you really think taconite mining in the Mesabi Iron Range of Minnesota declined because of foreign competition? Many of these "Rust Belt" cities were established as industrial centers because they were located on Great Lakes shipping lanes for this iron ore.

[central_va]

As short as 70 years ago Baltimore had huge ship yards, steel mills and even produced destroyers for the USN. Now it has the “inner harbor” with retail stores, bars and a nice aquarium. What a joke.

[DuncanWaring]

Paraphrasing a WSJ article I read a few years ago:’

“In 1950, one-third of all the manufacturing capacity on the face of the earth was in the states that were on the Great Lakes - Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, etc.

Thirty years later they were calling it the Rust Belt.”

[hinckley buzzard]

You are right about the importance of the Great Lakes. Cleveland was a world steel center, and after Detroit the world's #2 auto mfg center for years. The huge lakers (think Edmund Fitzgerald) full of ore, coal and lime could pull right up and dock next to the steel mills in the Flats, and the railheads to the auto plants of the Big Three.

I recently talked with an elderly gentleman who worked in Cleveland for a steel company after WWII. That one corporation alone ran a fleet of over 60 freighters on the Great Lakes, and that was only a subsidiary of the main business.