Step into the sounds and stories of a steel mill town 

In collaboration with The Roebling Museum, we created three custom mobile tours using the STQRY platform, expanding the storytelling both within the museum and bringing it out into the streets of the town that hosts it.

One tour is designed to accompany visitors through the museum's exhibition, underscoring key exhibits with Oral history segments of the workers who made the town. The other two tours take visitors on a walking tour through the streets of Roebling, criss-crossing company housing and the perimeter of the mill. Tour stops are accompanied by custom soundscapes that shift by location and proximity to the mill, immersing visitors in what it meant to live within earshot of a working mill. The sounds of daily life permeate the experience: industry clangs, family chatter, meals being made, laundry being done. The immigrant families who made up Roebling’s workforce are brought to life through professional voice acting.

From early labor strikes to quiet, everyday moments that made hard times bearable, the tours capture life in Roebling at the height of steel mill production. The tours invite visitors to explore the commonalities and differences in lived experiences by workers from all walks of life and corners of the globe. Immigrants from far off Hungary to the deep south lived in the shadow of the mill with all its smog and noise: these tours encourage visitors to ask if they too would make the same decisions in their shoes.

The Roebling Museum exists to save the stories history sometimes forgets: industrial workers, caregivers, children. This project helps visitors remember the choices these people made, the lives they built, and how their experience shaped our world.