It’s a landscape that immediately conjures up the American films that Jérôme Fritel devoured as a kid. Except that in place of blowing tumbleweed and John Wayne plodding across Monument Valley on horseback, it was Fritel driving a rented Chrysler SUV through the ruins of a vast and vanquished industrial empire here.

“So very big. So like your wild-west ghost town,” the French filmmaker said of Sparrows Point, eyeing the craggy range of pitch-roofed sheds and tall, gaunt smokestacks sprouting from a stretch of Bethlehem Blvd.

The journaliste réalisateur (director) was over from Paris to film footage of the American steel industry as part of his documentary on steel kingpin Lakshmi Mittal.

I was there for guidance, having covered the mill since the 1970s, written a book about the place and chronicling its final days for The Brew.

Lakshmi Mittal’s eponymous company ran the mill (not particularly well, most say) several years ago.

Fritel interviewed me about Mittal’s place in the history of Sparrows Point, once the biggest steelmaking complex on the globe – a place that made enough metal to build 5,000 Empire State Buildings before it fell into the quicksand of bankruptcy last year.

Mittal, I told him, was one of the enablers of that descent.

Once, in 2005, the Indian billionaire jetted here from his London headquarters and promised steelworkers everything but new investment. He unloaded the place in 2009, when the U.S. Department of Justice forced him to divest one of his American steel mills, and he picked Baltimore.

Fritel is filming a 90-minute documentary about Mittal, a very controversial figure in Europe, for Channel Arte, the French-German public television channel.

On Sunday, the Paris journalist, two cameramen and I journeyed to “The Point” – ten miles down the Patapsco from the Inner Harbor  – to size up what has happened since two industrial salvagers, Hilco and Environmental Liability Transfer, took ownership of the peninsula.

No Meat On the Bones

Many of the bones of the steel-saturated peninsula still remain – sheds that stretch a third of a mile long and bottle-shaped furnaces that ascend up to 200 feet in the air. But the sky above them was crystal clear on Sunday, and the earthshaking knocks of “Big L,” digesting iron ore and coke to make molten “pig,” were absent.

On the harbor side of the peninsula, the mills that had produced pipe for the Alaskan pipeline, wire for slinkies and “strand” for metal and concrete buildings had long ago disappeared, their locations vaguely traced by rust-streaked rail tracks.

The salvage companies aren’t expected to disassemble the “L” furnace until next year. There was an eerie silence the nearer you got to the soot-covered, erector-set structure (much of it barricaded off from access) as it baked in the afternoon sun.

Several of the sheds along Beth Blvd. bear signs that half-heartedly seek users for their vast, vacant spaces. At the other end of the mill, the fortress-like Main Office hides behind a sea of weeds.

“This place has so many ghosts,” marveled Fritel, as we talked about how The Point had stamped Baltimore as a factory town when it arrived in 1891 – and how it may, in the future, lead the way to reborn manufacturing and a port for super-sized ships.

Here are some more pictures of Sparrows Point today, interspersed with a few from its storied past.