NEW YORK — In 1962, when New York city planners first proposed a sewage treatment plant for the residents and businesses of Manhattan’s West Side, they picked a spot on the Hudson River around 72nd Street. The neighborhood, however, was well on its way to becoming what it is today — the white, upper middle class district of stylish brownstones, grand co-ops and newfangled condominiums known to most Americans as the backdrop for the TV sitcom, Seinfeld.
Neighborhood resistance to the plant forced the city to select an alternate location. The plant site was then moved up the Hudson River to a plot between 137th and 145th Streets in the Black neighborhood of Harlem.
It was just another story in a long-standing American narrative of environmental injustice against communities of color; white politicians and planners shifting the noxious, the unpleasant, and the dirty public and private works of our cities onto neighborhoods with minimal political influence.
The North River Wastewater Treatment Plant, as it is known, began construction in 1972. By the time it was partly operational in 1989, it was already controversial — spewing fetid, rotten-egg odors and coinciding with an increase in asthma rates and other respiratory related ailments in the surrounding area.
Back when the plant was first proposed, the city placated Harlem residents with a strange and novel promise to build a massive 28-acre park atop the plant. Riverbank State Park didn’t become a reality until nearly two decades later, in 1993. The Olympic-size pool, skating rink, cultural center and 2,500-seat athletic complex became a refuge for the many families and residents who live on top of each other in West Harlem.
Still, the complaints and stench continued. In 1994, outraged residents planned a “flush in” — a simultaneous flushing of hundreds of neighborhood toilets — to illustrate the dangers of the plant to the environment. As late as the year 2000, citizens warned of a “sewage Chernobyl.”
The ever-present hazards lurking beneath the recreational facility nearly blew their cover this past Wednesday. The pleasant facade transformed when a fire broke out in the engine room of the North River Plant and heavy smoke engulfed the park.
(cited from : newsone.com)
