The other day I watched a documentary about Redstone and its mining history (among other things). I’m not going to name the movie, though if you’re genuinely interested in seeing it, shoot me and email and I’ll tell you privately. I’m breaking down my observations into three or four posts. This is the third, the first is here and the second here. You (obviously) don’t need to have seen the film to understand what I’m talking about.
The Company’s execs actually lived in Redstone. Go to the downtown area and you can see their mansions. Nobody who can afford a mansion wants to live downtown anymore, and so they’ve been converted into hotels or subdivided into co-op apartments (it helps that they’re near the university).
Because of this, it was a bit of a surprise to see that they put up the smelters in the city, rather than having them located somewhere else. Smelters are, essentially, smoke-stacks used in the extraction process. They generate a lot of polution. There were a lot of them out in Redstone’s little sister town, Blackrock. Blackrock retained one of them as a monument, but they’re all gone from Redstone, so I didn’t know they had ever been there.
Anyhow, I found it strange that they would put them in town rather than moving them out to somewhere else, since the executives themselves had to breathe the air. I guess NIMBY wasn’t around yet.
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3 Responses to Mining In Redstone: Pollution
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Were the smelters near the big houses? If they were in eyeshot, but not within smoke range, they might make you proud to be an industrialist.
In the Northeast, the housing pattern is often consistent. Housing for workers is near the factories, which were there because of the water power. Needing the water for power meant building in a place with hills, and as you go uphill, you go up in social strata, as well. So you have worker housing, then further up housing for shop foremen and the like, then past that were the middle management houses, and the big mansions up at the top of the hill.
A4
A4: yup. There’s a reason it’s called Beacon Hill, I think…
I don’t know where the smelters were. I would guess not near the mansions. However, Redstone is in a valley and my experience of having previously lived in a valley with industrial output was that the mountains tend to trap the bad air in. Additionally, the mansions are also in a more elevated part of town. I’m not sure how they could have avoided it.