View out my back window in 2002. It’s the last absolute vestige of the old polluted industrial past of this neighborhood when industrial zoning was completely mixed with housing. Our block at a total of about 12 tenement apartment homes, which varied from three units to eight. The rest of the entire block was taken up by what was originally a shoe factory that had evolved into a mattress factory and ended that way.
The typical 1885 no law tournament had two windows back in front. I never thought much about the smoke stock in the backyard, only because there were so many sources of pollution the dominant sources with a large complexes like the green point incinerator and sewage sedimentation ponds, or diesel and gasoline transfer facilities a couple blocks away on the east river. It was around the time or year that I took this picture that a massive diesel and gasoline spill occurred about 3 AM on the east river. All of my windows were open since we usually got a nice breeze off the river from the north and west. I woke up and could not breathe. I could not breathe on the level of Covid. I gasped more until I passed out when I woke up I heard about the spill on the East River.
Of course, that kind of shit no longer happens in the gentrified Williamsburg. From the vantage point of this tenement thwe south breeze was unwelcome since it brought in the fragrance of human waste spread out in open sedimentation tanks. But it boiled down too, simply a matter of the evel of pollution since we were pretty much surrounded by it, including the elevated BQE three blocks away.
Every male on this block died of cancer by the time they hit their 60s. Living here longer than any place I had lived until I was illegally and forcefully displaced, I guess I carried that legacy because I developed bile duct cancer when I was 69 years old. At that time I would think about all the dead friends from the block where I spent most of my life.