Post Industrial Baltimore or Rebirth of Industries with New Technologies?

I have used the term post industrial city a few times myself usually thinking of Bethlehem Steel or other industrial giants that used to fuel and pollute Baltimore and give tens of thousands good paychecks. Bethlehem's sprawling peninsula jotting into the Patapsco River beyond Baltimore's Harbor is certainly the posterchild of old industry with its smoke belching blast furnaces, its flows of liquid iron and blackened factory shacks. Yet, even steel making is still alive in Baltimore and, actually, with only a tenth of workers, and in the hands of Russian steel giant Severstal, almost as much steel is made on Sparrows Point as in Bethlehem's heydays. http://www.makingsteel.com/sun.html.
But then, can and should Johns Hopkins Hospital (now Maryland's largest employer) or MICA (Baltimore's "coolest" college) really replace manufacturing? Should knowledge, creativity and ideas be a substitute for making actual physical things? In the virtual age, can people really exist without products that take up actual three dimensional space? Should what is made really always be made in China?

The SavWatt Building, housing the University of Maryland, Offices and manufacturing

Wicomico Street at Carroll Camden is testimony of a glorious past where industrial products came

 

 

 

and went by rail right to the door

SavWatt, a new company in the market of the emerging technology of LED lighting (light emitting diodes) doesn't seem to think that manual labor or assembly is dead in Baltimore. http://savwatt.com/. Today they opened their corporate headquarter  in Carroll Camden, an old industrial area just south of Pigtown. On Wicomico Street is a wonderfully sturdy concrete building with 8 floors. It was made for manufacturing with heavy columns and thick floors and its own rail track entering the first floor.

The company employs only 30 people to date and certainly enters a crowded market. Nothing is really made here in Baltimore, diodes are just assembled to become modern light fixtures. Yet, this company shows that there is use for these old industrial buildings, that there are jobs for making things and that made in the USA doesn't have to be just nostalgia, not in the country and not in Baltimore. And that the product being made here can be a product with a bright future. Literally.