Unless you're involved with the steel industry, you would have little reason to turn onto Vanguard Parkway, just off of Emerson Street in the industrial area of Rochesterbetween Mt. Read Boulevard and Route 390. Until now.

There, on a piece of land that used to be the city dump, sits Klein Steel Services' 132,000-sqare-foot facility built in 2004 and the 62,000 addition to be completed this fall. And, in front of the building, rising out of an otherwise unremarkable landscape, is a blazing yellow steel sculpture that will stand eight stories high when the finishing touched are added early in July.

For Rochester's internationally known artist, Albert Paley, the installation of a monumental piece is not unusual. In recent years Paley has created enormous steel sculptures in Rochester, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cleveland, not to mention Mexico, Austria, and Japan. In his Washington Street studio is the model for a100-foot-tall piece for National Harbor, a 30,000-person village under construction on the Potomac River south of Washington D.C.

But there is more to this story than just a new piece by Paley. It's about how art and industry can be mutually beneficial. And it's about a company led by two outspoken mavericks for whom commissioning an eight-story sculpture is indicative of bold vision in other areas.

"Threshold," the Klein Steel sculpture, speaks eloquently of Paley's process. The work consists primarily of leftover plates from which animal and plant shapes were cut for Paley's St. Louis Zoo gates. The lost-and-found organic shapes provide a counterpoint to the geometric forms of the overall structure. In terms of plate-cutting technique and engineering, the piece represents Paley's relationship with the company; in terms of its audacity it symbolizes Klein Steel's future.

Paley has been a company client for over three decades. He is not a major customer financially, but there are other measures.

"As far as the business, it's small," says CEO Joe Klein. "As far as the impact on our organization of doing this incredible work for Albert, it's huge. The one customer who has impacted us the most is Albert."

"Paley has driven us to get better and better," adds John Batiste, the company's president.

When Paley moved to Rochester in 1969 to teach goldsmithing at Rochester Institute of Technology, an 18" piece would have been considered large. At the time, Paley was one of the world's leading jewelers; enormous sculpture was not on the radar.

But, as a counter-cultural person, Paley grew uneasy with the classism that jewelry represented. Only wealthy people could afford his work and they would only wear it a few times a year. He wanted more exposure.

"With ironwork, no matter who paid for it, it's out in the public realm," says Paley. "People see it. It enriches the social fabric."

In the late 1960s goldsmiths were second-class citizens in the art world. Museums were not interested in their work, critics ignored it, and only university galleries displayed it. Paley's teaching salary was low; his materials - gold, silver, gemstones - were expensive. The top price for studio jewelry was $300 for a brooch. (One of those brooches sold at auction last year for $60,000.)

The year he quit goldsmithing Paley had 13 one-man shows. It was not easy to give it up, but he felt confined.

"I have to do something totally. I can't do a little bit of this and a little bit of that," he says. "It might seem similar - it's all metal - but it's very different. You sit at your jewelry bench with classical music on and it's very detailed. With iron you swing a sledge hammer and it's dirty and very macho, a whole different environment."

With iron he could expand his artistic experience and bring his work to a broader public with tables and lamps. Eventually, iron would allow him to interface with architecture.

"For me it was a whole new area of exploration, an historical connectedness and historical vocabulary that had laid dormant. It was a real challenge for me to try to bring this latent aesthetic into a contemporary vocabulary," he says.

When the Renwick Gallery in Washington D. C. commissioned him to create a gate in the early 1970s, Paley made the leap.

Paley traded his jewelry bench for a sculpture studio, but there was one problem: he didn't have any money. So, to buy steel, he headed to the scrap yard. After losing some pieces to poor-quality steel, he decided to buy it new. But he couldn't afford 20'-long bars. That's when he discovered Klein Steel.

Klein's traditional customers range from Eastman Kodak buying a few pounds of steel for its tool and die shop, to a contractor renovating luxury boxes at Buffalo's Ralph Wilson Stadium buying100,000 lbs.

"I'd go over to Klein every Saturday morning and climb through the dumpster to find steel," says Paley, who typically found hundreds of pounds of odds and ends. "Joe would help me load it into my car. I broke the springs on my car."

Years later, when he began to get major commissions, he turned to Klein for another reason: to cut the large pieces. At first, Klein could cut a circle or a square, but Paley's sculpture is about sensuous form; he wanted more.

"I asked, ‘Is it possible to cut a serpentine line?' They said, ‘No, we've never done that.'"

They were willing to try, but the first cuts were sloppy. That's when Paley started to challenge - and transform - the company. He said he needed it cleaner and, after Klein's employees made the necessary adjustments, he got what he wanted.

Klein's other clients came in and saw the cuts. They didn't know the company was capable of that level of work. It wasn't long before they started asking for cleaner, curving cuts.

"Because of the quality I was demanding for my work, indirectly I became a quality controller for certain things," says Paley.

And it didn't stop there. In recent years Paley has needed even more clarity in his forms. He left Klein for companies that had the latest water jet and laser cutters.

"We started losing some of Albert's work, so we put in a laser cutter," says Klein. A water jet was added a short time later. The two machines cost the company close to $1 million.

The laser cutter traces shapes from a computer drawing, cutting them perfectly. The water jet cuts through thick steel with water and fine-grained sand at a pressure of 87,000 pounds per square inch. No grinding or finishing is needed; when the cut piece comes off the table it's done. And the shapes can be replicated at any size, 8" or 8'.

It wasn't long before the new machines attracted business beyond Paley's. "We now do some of the finest plate processing work in the country," says Klein. "It's directly because Albert kept saying, ‘There's too big a gauge mark when you lead into the plate.' The quality of our plate burning has been driven by Albert."

Technological enhancement does not come easily, but Klein is willing to pay the price. "We'll do anything to make sure things are right for Albert," says Klein. "Some of this stuff we've never done and he's never done. We've had to throw away thousands of dollars. We wouldn't do that for anyone else. Our desire is to be the finest steel processor and distributor in the world. In order to do that you need innovation and creativity."

"The name of the sculpture is ‘Threshold,'" says Batiste. "We're always on the threshold of getting better."

Klein Steel was founded in 1971 when Klein's father, who had a junk business, damaged a steel piece on his truck. He needed a new piece, but no one would sell him the steel. So he started a company. Joe Klein began to run the company in the early1970s at the age of 22.

He has always welcomed photography students and sculptors to the plant. "I liked to see our stuff turned into art," says Klein. "From our first days we would sell material cheaper to sculptors than anyone else."

Klein Steel is an unusual company in another way. Its two top executives are outspoken critics locally and nationally. Last year when the Rochester Small Business Council chose Klein as Businessperson of the Year, he shocked many in attendance at the luncheon by giving an impassioned and blunt speech about the current state of affairs locally.

He has no regrets, insisting every word was factual.

"The corruption of our leaders and the acquiescence of our citizens combine to make a state in which our most vulnerable citizens are worse off here than anywhere else," says Klein. "Our young in Rochester, in a lot of cases, are not being taught to read and write and, in some cases, are being shot in the street. It's obscene and unfortunately I don't see it improving any time soon."

Klein, who is vice-chair of Mayor Robert Duffy's literacy campaign, is also a board member, treasurer, and self-described go-fer at Rochester Prep, a successful charter school on Brooks Avenue.

While Klein speaks out against state and local officials, Batiste, the company's president and a retired major general who led the Army's 1st Infantry Division in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, is a prominent critic of the Bush administration. He wants the United States to be successful in the War on Terror, but, he says, the Army and Marine Corps are at a breaking point.

"We have a government gone amuck," says Batiste. "We have an executive branch that's unbridled and a congressional branch that has abrogated its responsibility for six years, hasn't asked the tough questions or provided the oversight that our constitution requires them to."

While officials at many companies don't make waves, Batiste sums up Klein Steel's philosophy: "There's no shortage of moral courage in this company."

There's no shortage of aesthetic courage, either. The decision to build the sculpture was not universally popular. "Some people resent that we spent money on it," says Klein. "We have gain-sharing here, so they say ‘You paid out money that should have come to us.'" Still, he insists, "This has been good for the whole organization."

Initially, Paley had been asked if he had a few pieces that might be placed on the grounds. "We were almost done with the construction and we started walking backwards and he started looking at all the angles," says David Feinstein, the company's chief financial officer. Feinstein was Paley's business consultant before he was hired by Klein. "I started to say something to him and he shhshed me up because his brain was concentrating on it and he said, ‘This calls for something grand.'"

"I said it has to be fairly grand so that when you look down the street you can see it," says Paley. "Then I went with the scrap. It's still my line and form - transparent screens - a very constructivist thing. We painted it safety yellow, which is always related to industry. Rochester is so gray, yellow is such an expansive color; it would help offset that."

Paley never creates a major piece for a site without considering the work's meaning. "With all of my pieces, I try to have a work appropriate to the site, not just in terms of proportion," says Paley. "How does it give a profile to the institution? So I wanted to kind of symbolize the steel industry. They do cutting and forming; when they built their new headquarters, I wanted to create a work that showed that process." Later this year, a book on the sculpture will be published.

On a recent afternoon, Hun Vu, the company's manager of plate burning, walked around the piece, pointing to the shadows on the ground.

"I really like the way, depending on where the sun is, an animal will appear," says Vu, who has worked with Paley for 20 years. "A rhinoceros, a seahorse, or a swan. From the beginning of the project it might look daunting, but after a while you get used to it. It's more fun than working on the usual work. This sculpture involves almost all of our machinery."

Company executives view it symbolically.

"It's about the relationship between the artist and Klein Steel," says Feinstein. "It's about saying we're here to stay. We're a factor. It's about saying manufacturing in upstate New York is leaving by leaps and bounds, and you know what? We're building an 180,000-square-foot building right here to do manufacturing because we believe in it. It's about Joe spending a lot of his time trying to make the state a better place, trying to make the city a better place. It's about being part of the community and when you build a structure like this that can be seen by planes flying overhead - that's permanent."

"I think it's amazing," says Paley. "It started out as a business relationship but we've become good friends. My studio has been near bankruptcy a few times; Klein carried the debt until we were able to pay.

"The arts are seen as a peripheral, or quasi irrelevant activity to a majority of people," Paley continues. "The esoteric disciplines that are brought to bear in this industrial context are amazing. Artists, technically, are an anachronism in terms of industry. Even the thought process is seemingly illogical to the rational construct of business, but it brings another dimension here. The synergy is amazing."

As for Klein, he's still savoring "Threshold."

"Every day I drive in, I deliberately slow down so I can appreciate the sculpture and I try to really observe it," he says. "It's critical when you're in business to be able to observe reality accurately. I walk in happy."