Soot and Fire - Williamsburg's Environmental Legacy

by Bruce Hall

Mary Ziegler calls it a "choke collar" tightening around Williamsburg and to get an idea of what she means take a walk down to the waterfront as I did on the last Sunday afternoon of the summer.

Down at the west end of Grand Street, a group of Hispanic kids play on the narrow, half-acre sliver of grass in the shadow of the massive Domino Sugar plant. Nearby a young couple takes in the sunset from a bench next to an old brick chimney that stands like an obelisk - a monumental relic from Williamsburg's industrial age. Just a few dozen feet away, a new steel chimney, not much taller than its brick predecessor, has quietly emerged from the New York Power Authority's proposed 47 megawatt gas turbine power plant. Just around the corner on River Street, a young female apprentice in the martial arts silently practices her kata. Sword in hand, the budding karateka repeatedly thrusts, springs, spins, and parries as she unconsciously storms the barbed wire fortress.

A few blocks to the north, a cross section of Williamsburg residents trudge over bricks, broken glass, slabs of concrete, strips of corrogated steel, and the industrial flotsam from the old Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal to reach the waterfront and an unobstructed view of the Manhattan skyline. Hispanic families sit and inexplicably cast for fish in the East River while hipsters enjoy gritty picnics out on the crumbling piers.

Directly across the river is the Con Ed 14th Street power station. A block or two to the right is the proposed site for TransGas Energy Associates North 12th Street power plant. To the left, past the aforementioned North 1st Street power plant and the Williamsburg Bridge, the giant Hudson River oil fired power plant looms above the Navy Yard.

Six power plants are either proposed, permitted or operating along the 2 mile stretch that is the Williamsburg/Greenpoint waterfront. Once operational these plants will combine to emit hundreds of tons of toxic compounds and soot each year into a community that activists claim already suffers substantial environmental burdens.

Williamsburg's industrial past has left a legacy that continues to haunt the residents living here. Part of that legacy is a population with the third highest asthma rate in New York City. The Southside also has alarmingly high rates of childhood lukemia and lead poisioning.

It's notoriously hard to nail the specific culprits behind the high asthma rates but a growing body of scientific evidence consistently points the finger at the tiny particulate matter that results from diesel combustion and power plant operation. Commonly known as soot, these particles are drawing the attention of health and EPA officials because their microscopic size allows them to lodge deep into lung tissue or pass through the lungs directly into the blood stream.

"We're talking air pollution plain and simple. We are downwind, and the neighborhood is already over the top in terms of exposure," says Ziegler, who helped form Williamsburg Watch in an effort to stop the North 1st Street plant. "The edge of that power plant is 100 feet away from somebody's back window and a block and 1/2 away from a school. The siting is criminal."

Peter Gillespie from Neighbors Against Garbage agrees. "We're fighting this not only for the direct impacts but because we're oversaturated with these type of facilities and we don't think that's fair. That burden should be fairly distributed throughout the city because these are city wide issues."

Favorable zoning and large tracks of abandoned industrial land continue to make the neighborhood a tempting target for dirty industry. Ziegler, one ofthe few area artists who was here when packs of wild dogs roamed unfettered along the waterfront says, "Zoning these parts of Williamsburg for heavy, polluting industry may have been appropriate decades ago. However, the neighborhoods have changed dramatically, people are using these areas differently, and the zoning has not caught up with the changes." But seasoned activists and residents claim something else is at play as well.

"Look where New York Power Authority cited all their power plants - the Bronx, Williamsburg, Sunset Park - they are all communities of color. It's really obvious," notes Ziegler. Even the New York State Power Authority admitted in a January study that the electric generators it wants to install around the city would go almost exclusively into poor, heavily polluted, and predominantly minority communities.

The increasing realization that dirty industries were consistently being sited in these types of neighborhoods gave birth to the environmental justice movement in the late eighties and early nineties and it remains hard to argue that industry and agencies aren't siting these facilities in the path of least resistance. For instance, Census data shows that almost half of the residents in the Southside community near the North 1st Street plant live below the poverty line. "It's always been the case that if you're poor, a person of color, or an immigrant, you don't necessarily fight back like people with money would fight back," says Ziegler. "You don't have the resources, the contacts, the political power. You don't have the education to know that you don't have to take it."

Greenpoint and Williamsburg, depending on your viewpoint of course, have been the victim of geography and timing as much any type of uniform prejudice or classism handed down by industry or Manhattanites. Remember that at one point Williamsburg was something of a bulcolic playground resort for the likes of the Vanderbilts and Whitneys. The advent of the industrial revolution and its bigger, heavier industries changed the relationship between the two sides of East River and created a cycle of dirty industry, pollution, and health problems which community groups are now battling to break.

For the 19th Century industrialist Brooklyn had natural advantages over Manhattan. The cramped conditions of the Lower East Side put space at a premium. Williamsburg's spacious, relatively undeveloped waterfront was an ideal place for entrepeneurs to create newer facilities capable of handling the larger ships and bulky goods that Manhattan could not. Huge warehouses and factories could be built in close proximity to Williamsburg and Greenpoint docks whereas the narrow, jam-packed streets of lower Manhattan made maneuvering goods to older and increasingly dilapidated port facilities difficult.

In response, Manhattan shifted to more specialty manufacturing and textiles while Brooklyn tackled the new heavy industries. Greenpoint became a magnet for ironclad shipbuilding. Williamsburg soon boasted more than 100 foundries as well as distilleries, sugar refineries, factories, lumber, brick, coal yards, and gas works. By mid-century more ships were docking in the newly consolidated city of Brooklyn than in Manhattan.

Writers at the time glorified the soot and fire as signs of America's industrial brawn and progress. Walt Whitman, crossing the Brooklyn Ferry on an summer evening in 1856, marveled at Williamsburg's "foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night, Casting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow light over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets."

Whitman's early reverence for industry would culminate with the so-called precisionist painters of the early 20th Century who brought industrial boosterism to the canvass. Charles Sheeler, Preston Dickinson, and Elsie Driggs abstracted America's industrial sites into depopulated landscapes of clean lines, flat colors, and repetitive man-made shapes. German contemporary and Bauhaus guru Oskar Shlemmer referred to the style as an "instinctive repudiation of Chaos and a longing to find the form appropriate to our times." Nature had been subdued, in most cases eliminated, and replaced by an orderly, man-made environment of steel and concrete.

Elsie Driggs' 1927 painting of a Pittsburg steel mill is one of the genre's few works that at least offers hints of the toxic byproducts of the industrial age. At the time she remarked, "this shouldn't be beautiful, but it is." Her initial instinct was correct. To Henry Ford "the man who builds a factory builds a temple, and the man who works there worships there" but Henry Miller saw it differently. The future literary icon and international sex fiend would look back on his childhood Williamsburg and remember "the black hands of the iron molders...(and)...the grit that had sunk so deep into the skin that nothing could remove it, not scrap, nor elbow grease, nor money, nor love, nor death...not even the rain could wash away the grit."

For Miller, Williamsburg was a place of a place of "grim soot-covered walls and chimneys." The factories lining Newtown Creek threw off a toxic sludge that covered the water's edge with a suffocating silt and their noxious emissions filled the air of the surrounding communities with a foul stench. And, at around the same time Sheeler was busy painting slick, stainless homages to such industrial behemoths as the Hudson Avenue power plant's steam turbine, writers for Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration noted that, "the grime and smut of industry have long since obliterated the original verdancy" which gave Greenpoint it's name.

The 1970s brought the container revolution to the shipping industry and Brooklyn lost out to the newer, deeper port facilities of New Jersey and elsewhere. Most of Williamsburg's original heavy industries left. They've been replaced by garbage transfer stations, light manufacturing, sprawling art studios, and an amalgam of third world-style junk exchanges, glorified industrial scavengers, and fresh immigrant peddlers who move everything from old refrigerators, taxi cab doors and truck fenders to discarded answering machines and shoddy stereo equipment.

"We're still getting the environmental burdens of industry but we're not getting the jobs that manufacturing has historically provided," according to Gillespie. But there's some hope on the horizon. Gillespie, along with others, have been instrumental in pushing the 197a plan - a community initiated, comprehensive look at the needs of Williamsburg and Greenpoint communities.

First and foremost, the plan aims to correct the glaring lack of public space in Williamsburg with expanded parks and waterfront promenades - an idea Brooklyn's early industrialists apparently never considered. Gillespie believes, "There are more creative solutions than putting these power plants in the heart of the Williamsburg/Greenpoint community. We think of the East River as an asset and we'd like to see it developed in a way that benefits everyone. That includes open space, mixed use, clean environmentally sound manufacturing, and affordable housing."

The groups behind 197a can claim some success. New York State bought the brownfields at the end of North 9th and has leased them to NYU for playing fields - hardly the first choice for the community advocates but when you consider that the ballfields will be nestled between two power plants and a Waste Management garbage transfer facility, it could have been much worse.