dave1949
Super Star Member
I ran across this today and thought it interesting for what history may have to teach us about civic problems and how they eventually get solved. Not a lot has changed within that basic paradigm since then.
The street scenes are interesting in and of themselves with the old cars, trolley electric lines above the streets, and tracks. One thing that hasn't changed, there was no place to park. :laughing:
Stunning Photos of 1940s Pittsburgh: Life Before Effective Air Pollution Laws
There a couple of pollution events that are referenced in the slide show.
The 1948 "Donora, PA Death Fog" Oct. 26, 1948: Death Cloud Envelops Pennsylvania Mill Town
1948: An inversion layer settles over the rust belt town of Donora, Pennsylvania, trapping industrial pollution in the atmosphere. When it clears six days later, 20 people are dead, another 50 are dying and hundreds will live out their days with permanently damaged lungs.
The companies connived with the U.S. Public Health Service to cover up the facts of the incident and succeeded in doing so for half a century. Whistle-blowers were silenced; records disappeared. It wasn't until 1994 that a full accounting of what happened in Donora was finally published.
The 1939 "Black Tuesday" in St. Louis, MO
A look back
"ST. LOUIS City dwellers woke up on Nov. 28, 1939, in a thick fog of acrid coal smoke. Suburbanites heading to work saw a low dome of darkness covering neighborhoods east of Kingshighway.
In a streetcar downtown at 8 a.m., a commuter told the driver, "Let me off at 13th and Washington - if you can find it." Motorists drove slowly with headlights on. Streetlights, still on, made ghostly glows.
The day became infamous as Black Tuesday, the worst of many smoke-choked days in what was to be St. Louis' smokiest cold-weather season. The city already was known for the nation's filthiest air, worse even than Pittsburgh's.
The reason was the area's reliance on cheap, dirty, high-sulfur "soft" coal dug from the hills and hollows across the Mississippi River in Illinois. St. Louis' first anti-smoke ordinance dated to 1867. But as the city grew in population and industry, the smoke kept getting worse.
In 1936, after years of civic debate, city aldermen required homes and businesses to install mechanical stokers in furnaces or burn "washed" local coal.
In 1937, Mayor Bernard F. Dickmann named his first assistant, Raymond R. Tucker, as smoke commissioner. Tucker, a former mechanical engineering professor at Washington University, was thorough, studious and dedicated.
In time, city leaders realized the only solution was to ban soft coal. Metro East interests threatened to boycott St. Louis products. Then came Black Tuesday, fortifying the reformers."
The street scenes are interesting in and of themselves with the old cars, trolley electric lines above the streets, and tracks. One thing that hasn't changed, there was no place to park. :laughing:
Stunning Photos of 1940s Pittsburgh: Life Before Effective Air Pollution Laws
There a couple of pollution events that are referenced in the slide show.
The 1948 "Donora, PA Death Fog" Oct. 26, 1948: Death Cloud Envelops Pennsylvania Mill Town
1948: An inversion layer settles over the rust belt town of Donora, Pennsylvania, trapping industrial pollution in the atmosphere. When it clears six days later, 20 people are dead, another 50 are dying and hundreds will live out their days with permanently damaged lungs.
The companies connived with the U.S. Public Health Service to cover up the facts of the incident and succeeded in doing so for half a century. Whistle-blowers were silenced; records disappeared. It wasn't until 1994 that a full accounting of what happened in Donora was finally published.
The 1939 "Black Tuesday" in St. Louis, MO
A look back
"ST. LOUIS City dwellers woke up on Nov. 28, 1939, in a thick fog of acrid coal smoke. Suburbanites heading to work saw a low dome of darkness covering neighborhoods east of Kingshighway.
In a streetcar downtown at 8 a.m., a commuter told the driver, "Let me off at 13th and Washington - if you can find it." Motorists drove slowly with headlights on. Streetlights, still on, made ghostly glows.
The day became infamous as Black Tuesday, the worst of many smoke-choked days in what was to be St. Louis' smokiest cold-weather season. The city already was known for the nation's filthiest air, worse even than Pittsburgh's.
The reason was the area's reliance on cheap, dirty, high-sulfur "soft" coal dug from the hills and hollows across the Mississippi River in Illinois. St. Louis' first anti-smoke ordinance dated to 1867. But as the city grew in population and industry, the smoke kept getting worse.
In 1936, after years of civic debate, city aldermen required homes and businesses to install mechanical stokers in furnaces or burn "washed" local coal.
In 1937, Mayor Bernard F. Dickmann named his first assistant, Raymond R. Tucker, as smoke commissioner. Tucker, a former mechanical engineering professor at Washington University, was thorough, studious and dedicated.
In time, city leaders realized the only solution was to ban soft coal. Metro East interests threatened to boycott St. Louis products. Then came Black Tuesday, fortifying the reformers."
