When Acme Steel decided in the early 90s to spend $400 million turning a Riverdale cornfield into “a continuous thin slab caster/hot strip mill complex,” Archie Lieberman saw a photo opportunity. He persuaded Chuck Nekvasil, Acme’s director of investor and public relations, to hire him to document the construction. “My main point was to show the bravery and the skill that went into building the plant,” says Lieberman, who’d worked with Nekvasil photographing other steel mills but is probably best known for his book Farm Boy. He traveled from his home near Galena to visit the site every week from 1994 to 1996. “Archie fell in love with the project,” says Nekvasil. “He became an Acme person. When employees saw Archie in the plant they’d wave to him.”
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The new mill ran at 89 percent capacity during 2000, but many of the products it turned out were selling at their lowest prices in 20 years. Acme sold $349 million worth of steel in 2000–and lost $24 million in the process. “The plant is state-of-the-art,” a company official said last summer. “Someone will operate it in some form.” But the losses continued through 2001, and no buyer could be found. In October it was shut down.
