Within the span of a few days, Anchor Glass abruptly closed its container factory in South Connellsville; its flood-damaged competitor, Glenshaw Glass in Shaler, was pushed into receivership by a lender; and a smaller but likewise troubled maker of handmade artisan pieces, L.E. Smith, found a buyer.

Glassmakers here of all kinds are having trouble, beset by some of the same types of competitive forces that roiled the steel industry years earlier -- overcapacity, rising production costs and markets that are shifting to plastics and other alternative materials.

"It jumps at you when you are in the supermarket," said Theron Downes, a glass expert at Michigan State University's School of Packaging. "Now the mayonnaise jars, the jams and jellies," are in plastics.

The soaring cost of natural gas, the most common fuel used in glassmaking, has added to the burden of U.S. producers, as have rising oil fuel prices, which have made shipping of glass -- a heavy commodity -- more expensive. Imports have made inroads too, although there is much debate about the extent of that damage.

"The glass industry is falling down the same path as the steel industry," said Ray Burhop, a retired Anchor executive and Florida-based consultant to the glass container industry. "It's much like steel used to be -- high capital operations with the needs of high volume and very efficient operations in order to make a profit."

Despite the difficulties, the region continues to maintain a diverse array of speciality glass makers and, of course, boasts the headquarters of PPG Industries, a global maker of flat glass used in architecture, automobiles and industry.

The industry -- ranging from small art shops to large consumer and industrial goods makers -- employed an average of 3,896 people in the six-county metropolitan Pittsburgh region last year, according to the most recent data available from the state Department of Labor & Industry.

Besides PPG, which has a windshield fabrication plant in Creighton and a glass technical center in Harmarville, the bigger players are Anchor Hocking Specialty Glass, of Monaca, a Global Home Products Co. that employs about 540 and boasts it can make just about anything in glass; and the approximately 300-employee World Kitchen plant in Charleroi, the maker of Pyrex glassware. There is also American Video Glass, a joint venture glass supplier to the Sony television complex in Westmoreland County.

On the other side of the scale is the Behrenberg Glass Co., of Delmont, which employs 17 in making bent glass products for restaurants, hotels, and museums. Youghiogheny Opalescent Glass Co. of Connellsville is a little larger than Behrenberg and makes flat sheets of stained glass; it operates a retail store in an old train station. Behrenberg also produces blown art glass.

In between the big and the small are midsized shops such as Kopp Glass of Swissvale, a 135-employee technical glass- maker that manufactures aircraft lenses and night vision glass used by the military, and Jeannette Specialty Glass, a custom glassmaker whose products range from street lights to glass sinks.

Just like their bigger cousins in commodity products such as jars and bottles, specialty glassmakers face problems too. Chief among them are price pressures from imports, natural gas price increases and rising employee health care costs, said Ted Sarniak, the owner of Jeannette Specialty Glass.

"China right now is selling items to our customers for one-half the price that U.S. companies sold them for in 1986," Sarniak said. "It's just tough for us to compete when you're paying 40 times more for labor."

Kopp, which got its start making glass for railroad signals more than a century ago, now serves about 10 diverse markets. One of those markets -- aviation -- was hit hard by the slump that followed the 2001 terrorist attacks. But sales to the military in another market -- technical glass with night vision applications -- has improved.

Changing markets and lifestyles have challenged other glassmakers as well.

These days, new brides are just as likely to register for a lawn mower at Home Depot as for a wedding gift of fancy glassware -- a shift that played a part in L.E. Smiths' troubles and the demise a few years ago of its Westmoreland County neighbor, the Lenox crystal plant in Mount Pleasant.

When Lenox closed the plant -- the last Lenox crystal facility in the United States -- the company's corporate parent, Kentucky whiskey maker Brown-Forman, said European suppliers could make its stemware and gift items at 40 percent of the U.S. cost.

Economic development officials tried but failed to find a buyer for the Lenox plant. Other glass makers cited world overcapacity in the industry as a reason for their lack of interest. The plant site was turned into a retail outlet -- the Mount Pleasant Glass Centre -- and the glass-making furnace and other equipment is being sold for parts.

"The market changed from higher-end products to lower-end products," said John Skavio, president of Economic Growth Connections, which purchased the Lenox site with the Westmoreland County Industrial Development Corp. "Basically the market is now Wal-Mart and similar stores that sell lower-priced commodity products."

Since a Chinese glassmaker can copy gift products made by L.E. Smith and sell them in the United States below Smith's production costs, it makes sense that its prospective new owner, industrialist William A. Kelman, plans to capitalize not on price but on the company's reputation as one of the last remaining makers of hand-molded ornamental and decorative glassware. Kelman dreams of making Smith the Harley-Davidson of glass.

"Saving Smith can't be underestimated. Glass was, arguably, the first industry in the region after agriculture," said Don Gould, who managed sales for the previous owner of L.E. Smith and helped keep the lights on at the facility while a buyer was sought. "Job retention and growth is important but the industrial tourism impact promises to be significant."

With tourism in mind, the hope is for Smith to be the focal point of an industrial heritage center with other artisanal companies renting space. Located near the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Smith is an example of why the region stretching from Corning in upstate New York through Pittsburgh and southern West Virginia was once called America's "Silica Valley."

"We're not going to take our eye off the ball and look at what the Chinese are producing," said Kelman, also the president and CEO of Pittsburgh Annealing Box Co. "Our clients are more interested in the romanticism of L. E. Smith's history, American made and closing in on 100 years of existence. Historically, this has been a very impressive tourist destination."

In Fayette County, Anchor's surprise decision a week ago to shut its South Connellsville plant and idle some 340 employees is an indication of the continuing erosion of the market need for glass containers and the difficult competitive situations that can mire mature industries.

For decades, baby food jars for Heinz and Gerber and every green Rolling Rock beer bottle that touched the lips of thirsty consumers were manufactured in South Connellsville by Anchor or its predecessors.

But those regional competitive underpinnings were lost when the baby food business shifted and Latrobe Brewing -- the maker of Rolling Rock -- became part of multinational Belgian beer giant, InBev, which had a relationship with another glass maker, Owens-Illinois. That manufacturer is the largest maker of glass containers in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand and one of the largest in Europe.

The Owens-Brockway division of the company remodeled and reopened a closed plant in Brockway, Jefferson County, to make Rolling Rock bottles with the distinctive horse head logo and the number "33" on the back.

After losing Rolling Rock, Anchor shifted production of green bottles for Yuengling, the Pottsville brewer, from Connellsville to a plant in Elmira, N.Y.

The Heinz baby food plant in Pittsburgh, now owned by Del Monte, long ago switched to Owens Illinois as a glass supplier. Gerber, which once used Anchor to supply a plant in New York state, now ships baby food in plastic containers, joining other food manufacturers that have moved away from glass to plastics, foil and other alternatives.

Glenshaw Glass, once the center of a crumbled empire built by John Ghaznavi, was crippled by flooding on Sept. 17 that knocked out glass-making furnaces. After two furnaces were restarted, a third developed a leak and molten glass poured into the plant's basement.

Glenshaw faces serious obstacles to its survival, according to its court-appointed receiver, Margaret Good, of the Meridian Group, a management consultant and expert in corporate finance.

Good spent her first week on the job huddling with employees, suppliers and vendors. She reduced the salaried work force and unsuccessfully attempted to get 300 production workers to agree to temporary cuts in wages and benefits while she looks for a buyer.

Glenshaw is known in the industry for perfecting quick product turnarounds and being able to produce short runs for customers willing to pay a premium for smaller lots of bottles and other containers.

Good said that capability -- introduced by the ousted Ghaznavi after he took over the company in 1988 -- is one of the plant's selling points.

"This company has very flexible machines. It has the ability to change molds quickly, better than anybody else in the industry," she said. "We need to convince a buyer there is a market for that."

After his initial success at Glenshaw, Ghaznavi's G&G Investments company acquired in 1993 a majority interest in Consumers Packaging Inc., Canada's largest glass bottling company. Consumers in 1997 bought Anchor Glass Container, which included the Connellsville plant.

When Consumers fell into the Canadian equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2001, Ghaznavi was ousted as chief executive. He subsequently bought back control of Glenshaw while Owens-Illinois bought Consumers' Canadian glass plants for $150 million.

The Connellsville plant ended up as part of the separate Anchor Container Glass, now the third-largest U.S. maker of glass containers behind Owens-Illinois and the French Compagnie de Saint-Gobain.