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model city usa: the environmental COST OF VICTORY IN WORLD WAR II AND THE COLD WAR
ANDREW JENKS
ABSTRACT
Long shrouded in a cocoon of national-security secrecy, the history of the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works site in western New York sheds light on the enduring environmental, political, and social costs of victory in World War II and the Cold War. A micro-study of a nuclear waste site, this article analyzes connections among U.S. nuclear weapons waste management and the environment, local politics, grassroots activism, and international diplomacy. Ultimately, it argues that a spirit of patriotic sacrifice, combined with a culture of secrecy, overrode concerns about safety. The end result of that sacrifice is today a legacy of environmental contamination and the progressive decline of local democratic controls over natural resources.
| IN 1892 A MYSTERIOUS MAN named William T. Love arrived in western New York. A self-styled westerner, he promised to bring the spirit of an enterprising West back to the feckless East—in this instance to the Niagara Frontier, which had somehow been passed over in the great rush to tame the western frontier and make it useful. Against the backdrop of the famous Niagara Falls, this Elmer-Gantry-like figure spun visions of a Model City "free from defiling vapors." Fueled by "the late wonderful advance in electricity and by the aid of our limitless water power, we can heat and light our city by electricity and operate our factories by water power, in an atmosphere of ideal purity." Love published maps of a Niagara Frontier retrofitted for his vision of progress. One map depicted a five-mile canal connecting the upper and lower Niagara Rivers, which bypassed the legendary cataract. At the canal's end on the lower Niagara an artificial falls had been carved into the gorge, flowing into the river below and generating immense quantities of power. The envisioned power plant supported an industrial "megalopolis" to the north called Model City, which Love convinced the New York State Legislature to charter as his own personal company town. Model City, in Love's map, stretched all the way to Lake Ontario, neatly divided into boulevards and avenues. "No skill, art or effort will be spared to make it the most beautiful city in the world ... a monument to the progressive spirit of the age—to the genius, goodness and greatness of the American people."1 |
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While Love's Niagara Power and Development Corporation convinced a few hardy businessmen to take up residence in Model City, his company also excavated about three thousand feet of a canal leading northward from the upper Niagara River. Then he ran out of money in the late 1890s and the entire enterprise collapsed. For decades residents of the city of Niagara Falls swam and fished in the canal during the summer and skated on it in winter. By World War II, Hooker Chemical bought the canal and transformed it into a chemical waste dump. In 1952 Hooker threw soil on top of the filled canal and sold the land to the Niagara Falls School District for one dollar. While the school district built a school directly on top of the chemical wastes, the parents of baby boomers built suburban homes on adjacent land. By the late 1970s, as the toxic wastes percolated to the surface, the American dream turned into a suburban nightmare and the area gained notoriety as the infamous Love Canal—the ecological disaster that has since become the poster child of technological hubris and corporate greed.2 |
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