Quote:
Originally Posted by Centropolis
i remember how filthy the air was around this plant.
there's also probably some quite serious environmental impacts around/under the plant, depending on what all of the historic uses were.
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Unfortunately it was a power plant so it almost undoubtedly is saturated with PCBs which are the worst possible contaminent. They are responsible for an extremely high possibility of very very nasty birth defects. Of course this plant is probably also laden with lead and asbestos as well as other heavy metals resulting from the incineration of coal.
It really should be saved, but that's going to be extremely expensive. I worked on the sale of the old Emerson Electric Plant in Ithaca NY which is a PCB Superfund site where they probably manufactured some of the equipment this building used to house. The environmental remediation required was intense. My hometown was also a PCB Superfund site as a boat motor plant had been dumping PCBs directly into the river for decades. When I was a kid they damed up the entire river, diverted into huge pipes, and then scraped the silt down to bedrock with mining equipment and took it away in huge rubber lined dumptrucks. They just found even more PCBs downstream (actually in the city park on the river where I used to play in the waterfalls and catch crawdads) and this time clear-cut all the trees in the park, again diverted the river, and built a processing plant on site that probably took up four or five acres of park land for two years. They ran all the mud in the entire site through giant bladders that allowed the contaminants to settle out of the mud and then processed it giant silos. I don't like to think about how much time I spent in the creek and park there as a child because there was some extremely nasty contamination there.
Point being that transformers were basically filled with PCBs and they are extremely nasty chemicals that linger for a long time without breaking down. Sites that were contaminated with PCBs are typically permanently banned from residential use because pregnant women are virtually guaranteed to miscarry or have exotic birth defects if they come in contact with them. Unfortunately that doesn't bode well for this facility because it's probably soaked into the ground under the building and even saturating the concrete or brick structure in areas.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SpireGuy
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This is why no one takes preservations seriously, this building is nice, but it's not worth saving, there's literally thousands upon thousands of identical buildings to this one, many with much more of the original cornice tracery and moulding, all over the city. Taking time to complain when one nondescript mere decent undersized structure comes down debases the voice of preservationists when something much more noteworthy like that Burnham warehouse comes down.
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