The Company Town: Fabric, Steel, and Beauty

Unfortunately, while in Milan on a business trip, I was unable to have much in the way of time to tour the city.  I had a brief side-quest to Maranello to visit Ferrari facilities, which I treat in my other blog.  I did get to thinking just a bit about manufacturing heritage during the trip, however, and wanted to set out some thoughts regarding these two heritage rich cities: Johnstown, Pennsylvania and Maranello, Italy.

These are, at their hearts, company towns.  Or, at least, one was and one still is.

How can they even be compared?  Maranello is the home of Ferrari, not only one (if not the) most prominent car brands in the world, but recognizable brands globally.  Over 90 percent of all Ferraris ever made are still on the road.  Ferrari has made fewer than half a million vehicles over its entire span of existence – Toyota makes far more cars in a year than Ferrari ever has.  (It’s also likely, no matter what improvements and technologies are involved, if you let a Toyota sit untouched for a couple of years, it’ll still start.  Not so much the case with Ferrari!) 

All of that said, Maranello is synonymous with Ferrari.  The headquarters for both its car production and various racing teams are all within Maranello.  Old Italian homes line up with coffee shops festooned with Ferrari red, checkered flags, and renditions of championship-winning race cars and exquisite, one-of-kind exotic road cars.  The streets are filled with the shouts of schoolkids on a field trip, exclamations of excitement and wonder in dozens of different languages from thousands of tourists…and the singing, zinging notes of Ferraris being road-tested, track-tested, and driven about. 

By contrast, Johnstown is a fraction of its former self.  From its peak population a hundred years ago, Johnstown has been reduced by 75%.  What once was a city held closely by its own coal dust and smoke pouring from steel blast furnaces is now largely a pretty quiet town.  Older people far outnumber the younger.  There are tourists, sometimes, in Johnstown – either people visiting relatives still in town, or the occasional industrial heritage enthusiast or artistic metal worker coming to learn at the Center for Metal Arts.  A parade of Ferraris driven enthusiastically through Johnstown would occasion news coverage whereas, in Maranello, the inhabitants don’t even bother to look.

Johnstown’s current population is around 18,000, down from over 70,000.  Maranello is even smaller, with 17,000 people, more than a third of whom are employed by Ferrari in some form or another, with the rest as family members of employees or employees at businesses in the area (almost all of which are directly impacted by Ferrari’s presence.)  Johnstown was the home of a massive, four-facility steel-making enterprise owned by Bethlehem Steel, and a smaller United States Steel plant.  At its peak, more than 20,000 people were employed by the steel industry, so roughly a third once again, with the balance as family members and employees of businesses, government services, and others in the area. 

It’s difficult to square these circles, other than to note that Maranello is a champion of the globalized world, and Johnstown was, at least in part, shattered by it.  Maranello still receives pilgrimage from all corners, where at least some would say that Johnstown doesn’t matter anymore. 

It does, however, matter to me. 

What would happen to Maranello if, for example, Ferrari left?  It would be at least as disastrous as what happened to Johnstown – after all, Maranello as a company town is starting with fewer than 20,000 people, almost all of whom are related to that one company. 

This won’t happen, of course – Ferrari’s market capitalization is over $60 billion at the time of this writing, which places them just behind General Motors and ahead of BMW and Mercedes, both of which make and sell orders of magnitude more cars every year than Ferrari.  Ferrari’s total production – over all years of operation – is fewer than 350,000 cars.  General Motors makes 350,000 cars in any given month…none of which are as globally desirable as any Ferrari.

Steel in Johnstown, by contrast, was the ultimate commodity.  At first, of course, during the rise of Cambria Iron Company in the second half of the 19^th century, it was claimed that a worker in the Johnstown facilities could get a job anywhere that he (always he!) wanted, given the level of training and experience that they would receive.  The railroad rails milled by Cambria Iron were the envy of the country.  The seeds planted by the founders of Cambria Iron in the 1850s were part of what would become an enormous, continent-spanning industry that drove an economic engine that pulled millions of people across the Atlantic (and, in another way, the Pacific) to work, to raise families, and to build a new country. 

Other seeds planted included that of global conflict and a global economy, although a global trade of some sort had been happening for centuries.  Johnstown helped, in its own way, forge a path for Maranello to come to prosperity.  By helping create and drive the new, industrial, worldwide engines of commerce, people all over the planet would become aware of and, in some cases, wildly desirous for luxury brands and performance cars. 

We judge the results based on where we are in history, in relation to the events before us.  That’s an assessment that needs to be made; at the same time, however, we should know that results are always “pending.”  The future isn’t here yet (quantum physics argument notwithstanding in the world most of us inhabit).  If it hasn’t happened, the only thing we can do is start that sentence with something like the word “Currently.”  I am not a fan of adverbs, but when used in this context, they reflect an evolving reality.  History leads to the future, but we can’t assess both the same way.