Recycling scrap metal has become one of the few viable business models in the economically depressed 53210 ZIP code in Milwaukee. The city was once an industrial giant powered by machine shops and metalworking manufacturers such as Compo Corp. on Fond du Lac Ave. Credit: Rick Wood

SHARE Interactive Map In the 1970s, when Milwaukee ranked among the nation’s best cities in terms of infant mortality, the city had a strong manufacturing backbone. This was most in the north side ZIP code of 53210 (shown in red on this map), which today has the city’s worst infant mortality rate.This interactive map shows jobs then and now in 53210. You can also view the map as a PDF. Click image to enlarge About this series The Journal Sentinel this year is taking on an issue we have too long ignored - the death of children before their first birthday. Infant mortality is a crisis not just of public health, but of ethics and morality. The rate at which infants die in our city is unacceptable. In today's newspaper and online, we focus on the economic underpinnings of the problem. - Martin Kaiser, editor Empty Cradles In 2011, the Journal Sentinel took on an issue we have too long ignored – the death of children before their first birthday. Infant mortality is a crisis not just of public health, but of ethics and morality. The rate at which our infants die in Milwaukee is unacceptable. We are continuing to examine the problem and point to solutions. Go to: Section | Blog

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The southern Chinese city of Guangzhou has mastered many of the trades Milwaukee championed in the last century: machinery, motors, metalworking. Guangzhou's boom has coincided with the sunset of manufacturing in Milwaukee, which in mere decades lost one of the nation's densest concentrations of mass production.

The two cities crisscross in another way:

Babies in China's industrial heartland now have a far better chance of reaching their first birthday.

In Milwaukee, one baby under the age of 12 months dies for every 95 who live, making it one of America's most fatal cities for infants. A generation ago, Milwaukee was one of the safest.

Among registered residents of Guangzhou, one baby dies for every 210 who live. The Chinese data, vetted by the World Bank and United Nations, often miss migrant workers in factories, but their infant survival rates are improving markedly as well.

Infant survival and economic competitiveness tend to move on the same sliding scale. Study after study reveals survival chances increase in communities and nations with rising wealth and stability - just as young life is threatened by economic crisis and upheaval.

The issue is especially acute in Milwaukee, a once-muscular manufacturing city where the infant mortality rate in some neighborhoods now rivals that of Third World nations. As civic leaders embark on just-announced efforts to eliminate racial disparities and cut deaths to historic lows, the central city fallout from 30 years of industrial downsizing underscores the biggest challenge in turning the tide.

"Wealth leaves the city and infant mortality rates rise," said Thomas LaVeist, a professor of public health at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. "Not just in the United States, but worldwide."

From developing nations such as India, Vietnam and Brazil to mature economies such as Germany and Japan and post-communist states such as Poland and Estonia, countries around the world are making consistent and measurable advances in infant survival.

With one notable exception.

The United States has fallen behind.

The U.S. slid from 12th best in the world in 1960 to 30th in 2005, according to rankings from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In a broader set of 196 nations tracked by UNICEF, the U.S. has fallen to 45, where it ties with Montenegro and Slovakia. It lags all of western and eastern Europe, all of developed Asia, as well as Belarus and Serbia. It's only narrowly better than Bosnia and Bulgaria.

The leading cause of infant death in the United States - complications from preterm birth - has spiked 36% since 1984, according to the CDC. More than one in 10 white babies are born prematurely, twice the Greek national rate. For black babies, the rates are much worse.

This is even more true in Milwaukee, which helps set the national extremes for infant mortality and a broad range of other social distress indicators, from poverty to high school dropouts. More than half the city's babies who die were born prematurely.

Within the city, the most fatal of all districts is an eerily quiet ZIP code called 53210.

About four miles from downtown and the lakefront, 53210 idles on the city's north side. In its heart is an economic vacuum. Rows of factory buildings stretch for miles - an industrial graveyard that creates a canyon of concrete and barbed wire. The sheer size and number of empty factories testify to the high-decibel, high-employment economy that flourished when shifts ran around the clock, between World War II and the 1980s, before global competition increased dramatically.

The strip was home to global manufacturing leaders such as A.O. Smith Corp., which welded the undercarriages for nearly every American-made passenger car, and Briggs & Stratton Corp., which built the small engines powering virtually every lawn mower. These days, the signs on the buildings are different.

"Guard Dogs on Duty," is all that's posted on one.

"This building is illegally occupied or unfit for human habitation," is stapled to the door of another.

"We buy junk cars" is hand-lettered on the fence of a sleepy gravel lot.

Trees grow through cracks in the pavement.

The surviving companies no longer offer entry-level factory jobs, the kind that once offered a first step into the middle class. Master Lock Co., the last remaining big company in 53210, has gone from 1,300 to 380 employees at its flagship plant.

But the maker of padlocks requires education and technical skills to operate its automated production lines. Manually intensive unskilled work is carried out at plants in Mexico and China.

In 53210, one baby dies for every 59 who make it.

Even that is misleading.

The western half of the ZIP code includes stable middle-class homes that blend into the affluent suburb of Wauwatosa. It includes Sherman Park with its tidy lawns and wide porches and Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare-St. Joseph hospital, known for decades as the "the baby hospital," a resource for the area's uninsured and poor mothers.

It's the eastern half of the ZIP code, where industry rose and fell, where babies perish.

"Few want to live there," said Laurene Laehn, president of SET Ministry Inc., a family-focused social agency in the area. "Many young families rent there and move as soon as they can afford to."

Sometimes mothers move in when they are pregnant and move out after their children die, often without leaving a forwarding address for the nurses and social agencies meant to help them. A community that was once a bastion of Milwaukee's emerging black middle class is now an enclave of isolation and unrootedness.

"It's a revolving door," said Judy Fitzpatrick, a veteran social worker at Rosalie Manor, which provides services to pregnant teens and their families.

The urge to leave

Tiffany Weddle wants to get out.

She moved into 53210 two years ago, renting the top floor of a duplex two blocks from the factory zone. Almost immediately, she wanted to leave. Drug traffickers congregated on the front porch "like they owned the place." On three occasions, she heard gunshots outside her windows. She keeps her four daughters inside. She found cockroaches inside the refrigerator. She lost sleep.

The 36-year-old is pregnant, this time expecting a boy. And once again, the household finds itself in turmoil. No sooner had she saved money for new beds and mattresses than an infestation of bedbugs left the girls with sores and welts. She threw out the new mattresses and bedding. Thousands of dollars, gone.

Weddle has been working since high school. She's traveled to Atlanta and San Antonio as executive assistant to the director of a social service agency and most recently worked at a day care center.

Her fiancé, Eddie Caldwell, the father of her two youngest girls, has full-time income and benefits at Alro Steel, a manufacturing firm in Wauwatosa. They are looking for a new apartment. To cover the cost of the move, Weddle figures she'll need to let at least one of her bills lapse for a month.

"We'll probably be sleeping on the floor," she said. "We'll be eating a lot of bologna sandwiches and noodles."

Three weeks before her due date, she sat at home and - keeping a hand on her expansive belly - recounted a scare in her 35th week, when she had what appeared to be early contractions. A doctor said it was a false alarm. The incident coincided with a mad-dash search to find a new apartment before the baby arrived.

"I didn't want to bring my baby into this house," Weddle said.

Fallout from economics

In an age when developing nations are building more and more things for the world economy, Milwaukee's north side has been building less and less; and that's having a dramatic impact on the babies born there.

The World Health Organization studied metropolitan areas in the Americas, Asia and Africa: "We can see that children in the poorest 20% population are twice as likely to die before their first birthday compared to children in the richest 20% population."

China shows how quickly a nation can shift.

As recently as 1950, it was among the world's poorest nations with high levels of malnutrition, illiteracy and an infant mortality rate of one in 10. Conditions were worst in the rural villages that supply migrant workers for the industrial cities. Today, United Nations data shows infant mortality rates in even some rural interior Chinese provinces are better than Milwaukee's rates.

Research underlines how economic change affects infant mortality.

"It's not just a black thing," said Franklin Goza, a sociology professor who specializes in population demographics at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. "If you are a poor white person, your baby is more than twice as likely to die during its first year of life than it would be if it was a wealthy baby."

Goza studied all the urban census tracts in Ohio, another Midwestern manufacturing state. Using four decades of data, Goza was struck by an increase over time in the number of white babies who die in poor census tracts, calling it a "strong and consistent inverse association."

A Duke University study in 2008 found increased odds of preterm birth for non-Hispanic white women in tracts "with high unemployment, low education, poor housing, low proportion of managerial or professional occupation, and high poverty."

In Milwaukee and the U.S., infant mortality is most acute in African-American communities. Even black mothers in professional occupations have higher infant mortality rates than poor whites.

Researchers who have looked at the internal biological triggers of premature birth, such as genes and chemistry, argue stress is often a key factor in prematurity. So what happens outside the womb - an eviction notice; the anxiety of an unsafe environment; struggling without a job - can affect what happens inside it.

Harvard University sociologist William Julius Wilson was one of the first to link economic upheaval to a chain reaction of collapsing social structures that end with perpetual insecurity.

Using the economy of the American inner city, he described a domino effect.

It starts as one household after another loses income and cannot patronize neighborhood merchants, who go out of business. Storefronts become vacant and unlighted, inviting crime. Housing prices plunge, or stay depressed, leaving owners without equity for loans. Chronic financial uncertainty creates tension in the household. Families go into survival mode. Physical fitness and schoolwork fall by the wayside.

In Milwaukee, such a chain reaction transformed the central city.

In 1970, the city's black poverty rate was 22% lower than the U.S. black average; today, Milwaukee's black poverty rate is 49% higher than the national rate. In 1970, the city's median family income for African-Americans was 19% higher than the U.S. median income for black families. Today, it's 30% lower.

During that time frame, the overall rates of poverty and unemployment in 53210 tripled. When the housing sector collapsed under the weight of subprime debt, the area felt the impact with particular force. "Nearly every block in the ZIP code has problem properties reaching the sheriff sale stage," according to a study of 53210 by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Infant mortality is the ultimate misery index.

Frequent infant deaths nearly always coincide with lower life spans, hypertension, high blood pressure, respiratory issues and diabetes.

"The infants are like the canary," said Geoffrey Swain, medical director of the Milwaukee Health Department and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. "They are the most vulnerable. They are the first to drop off when conditions are bad."

The U.S. infant mortality rate is 7 deaths per 1,000 live births - far outpacing 3 in post-unification Germany and 2 in Japan.

Milwaukee's overall rate was 11.9 in 2006 and has since improved to 10.4, but it remains the nation's seventh worst big city. The black rate stands at 14.1.

In 53210, the overall rate is 17.

Force, pace of change

All northern cities lost heavy industry in the transition to the era of raw global competition.

What sets Milwaukee apart is the force and pace of economic change.

Black Milwaukeeans were downsized with unprecedented force because they relied more on low-skill labor than African-Americans in any other American city, north or south. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, Milwaukee at its industrial zenith ranked as the nation's best city for African-American industrial laborers.

In 1970, as the city approached its peak output and employment, 43% of black Milwaukeeans drew paychecks as industrial laborers - punch press operators, riveters, assembly-line workers, forklift drivers. The work was unglamorous but paid the mortgage and sometimes the college tuition bill. Only Detroit, with 39%, came close to Milwaukee for black factory labor.

In its halcyon days, the city was known as the "machine shop of the world." The city absorbed continuous waves of industrial migrants from the south. They powered the machine shops, factories, breweries and tanneries.

From 1950 to 1960, a decade that saw Milwaukee's black population triple, the newcomers included Alice and Robert Weddle of Tennessee - Tiffany Weddle's grandparents.

Robert Weddle found employment at A.O. Smith, a 148-acre campus of cathedral-sized factories.

The Weddles bought a home and raised 14 children, including two sons who worked at A.O. Smith. At its peak in the 1970s, a third of the company's 9,000 employees were black. It was the biggest industrial site in the city.

Even the smallest machine shops in the area employed 25 to 50. The bounty of work created an enclave of stable neighborhoods nearby and supported black-owned jazz clubs, tailors, law firms and restaurants in what was known as Bronzeville.

"Everybody could walk to work," said Willie Carter, 65.

Carter moved to Milwaukee from Mississippi with his parents when he was 5. He also ended up at A.O. Smith.

"Milwaukee drew a lot of people from the South to work here," he said. "You could get off the bus, knock on a door, and go to work."

In those years, Milwaukee was making major strides in black infant survival.

By 1981 in Wisconsin - when four of every five African-Americans lived in Milwaukee - the state had the third best black rate of infant survival in the nation. White mortality rates in Milwaukee were falling as well and better than the national average.

The city sent a Department of Health nurse to visit every mother for every birth. Today, Swain said, city nurses visit less than a tenth of all at-risk mothers in just the city's worst ZIP codes.

Follow the rails

The city owes its unique industrial geography to the Milwaukee Road railroad, the longtime anchor of the city's economic foundation. The railroad once hauled so much made-in-Milwaukee freight it became the nation's fifth-biggest rail carrier. Industry sprang up along its tracks and spurs.

Tracing the Milwaukee Road's path through 53210 provides a lesson in the 21st century economy.

A.O. Smith exited the auto business in the 1990s and reinvented itself as a water-technology company. It sold the plant in 1997 to Tower Automotive Inc., which filed for bankruptcy in 2005 and closed the Milwaukee factories. The city is tearing down the old factories and hopes to create an industrial park. Next door was the sprawling Koehring Machine Co., which employed over 1,000; today Koehring is a scrap metal yard.

Farther south was a campus of six factories that belonged to Briggs & Stratton, which called itself the world's largest maker of small air-cooled engines. Briggs employed more than 700 factory workers in the factories - not including the on-site headquarters of its electrical products division. Today the buildings are vacant.

Willie Carter, the A.O. Smith veteran, operates a scrap metal lot on 30th St. It used to be a Milwaukee Road shipping office and freight rail depot. The site was in constant use, clogging N. 30th St. as trucks and trains shuttled in and out.

The Journal Sentinel canvassed 60 of the old industrial properties in the stretch that slices through 53210. Some made shoes, brewing equipment, potato chips, embroidered vestments for priests. But the biggest among them stamped, forged, welded, plated and fabricated metal.

Nine of the 60 have been torn down and exist as empty lots. Another 18, including A.O. Smith and Briggs, are empty or partially used as storage space.

Some found nonindustrial uses: the headquarters for the T.L. Smith Co. machinery company has become a Genesis Behavioral Services facility, where intoxicated people are given a cot and fed the next morning. Walter H. Knapp Co., which made electrical controls for railroads, is the location of a state corrections center. Several old machine shops are churches or ministries.

Fewer than one in four retains an industrial use - and most of these are a shell of their former size: Logemann Brothers Co. is a machinery maker than ran three shifts with 225 workers. Today it has 12.

Twelve of the sites became scrap metal yards.

Art Arnstein grew up in the area and watched it change. He is co-owner of United Milwaukee Scrap LLC, the largest of the area's scrap metal collectors, and has been buying up empty factories on the N. 30th St. corridor, including the Koehring site.

Another of his properties on W. Fond du Lac Ave. has an electric sign that announces daily rates for aluminum and copper. Hundreds of people arrive each day with plastic bags of aluminum cans, which the company buys for about 70 cents a pound.

"People today are destitute and need to feed their families," he said.

Every day, Arnstein says, he is forced to turn away job applicants. His company has 145 workers in eight former industrial sites that once employed more than 2,000.

"This is the economy of the inner city," he says. "It helps keep the city clean."

He used to resell scrap to foundries in the Midwest. That, too, is changing.

As factory demand in the developing world has raised the price of metal commodities, the firm increasingly ships containers full of scrap metal to foreign factory cities, where it gets a second life, being hammered back into new products.

Arnstein's fastest growing export market:

China.

Ben Poston of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.