The School of the Future:
The Social Construction of
Environmental Hazard in the Postindustrial Fringe
A Senior Thesis by Bridget Corbett Hanna
Bard College, Annandale-on Hudson, NY
December 2003
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROLOGUE ....................................................................................................... 3
INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................. 9
Historical Commission Lore ............................................................................... 9
THE BEST DOCUMENTED TOWN .............................................................. 16
The Great Swamp ............................................................................................. 16
Digging Holes ................................................................................................... 20
Transformations ................................................................................................ 23
Mapping the Neighborhood .............................................................................. 28
THE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT ....................................................... 31
Muskrat Pond .................................................................................................... 31
“A Midway Philosophy” ................................................................................... 36
The School of the Future................................................................................... 40
Managing the Facilities ..................................................................................... 43
Testing the Air .................................................................................................. 50
Intuiting Danger ................................................................................................ 53
The National Weather Service .......................................................................... 61
Russian Roulette ............................................................................................... 66
Hot Spots........................................................................................................... 74
CHANGING PLACES ..................................................................................... 77
Play Grounds ..................................................................................................... 77
Open Spaces ...................................................................................................... 80
Safety Zones...................................................................................................... 82
Waste Lands ...................................................................................................... 85
Exporting Toxins .............................................................................................. 88
THE RIGHT TO KNOW .................................................................................. 92
“Bhopal’s Babies” ............................................................................................. 92
An “Event” Occurs ........................................................................................... 97
Remember Bhopal .......................................................................................... 100
It Was Not Possible ......................................................................................... 103
We All Live in Bhopal .................................................................................... 104
Safety in Knowledge ....................................................................................... 106
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................... 109
Relevant Differences ....................................................................................... 109
BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................... 111
APPENDIX ..................................................................................................... 115
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PROLOGUE
I was ten years old when I realized that my mother couldn’t protect me from
everything. But because I’ve never been a parent, I hadn’t understood until now, nearly
thirteen years later, how much more traumatizing that knowledge must have been to her
than it was to me. “Don’t you understand?” she asked me intently last week: “don’t you
understand that a mothers’ only job is keeping her child safe?” She paused. “And I” she
continued, “…I have failed at this job.”
Of course she wasn’t talking about me. She was talking about my younger sister
Molly. Molly died of a extremely rare pediatric cancer called neuroblastoma at the age of
eighteen, after fighting – with all the explosive energy and exceptional dignity of youth
that approaches death – for four years against the disease. Although my mother told me
that her one consolation, when Molly died, was the knowledge that “I had tried
everything, and done absolutely everything that I could to save her,” she ultimately
perceives Molly’s death as her own unredeemable personal failure.
I think that most mothers would agree with her; that the failure to save their child
is unbearable. I will speculate further that it is perhaps those deaths that are most
arbitrary that are the most difficult, when disease or accident arrives suddenly and
invisibly. Though the poor must tolerate arbitrariness on a daily basis, cancers are among
the ills that visit arbitrariness upon all classes. Not in equal measure; but equally
suddenly, equally invisibly and violently.
Everyone who has had a sudden calamity befall them has asked the question,
Why? They have asked, How? With cancer, frustratingly, the answers are both
everywhere and nowhere. The world is increasingly suffused with carcinogenic
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compounds and untested substances, and yet the science does not exist that can prove,
beyond statistical speculation, the exact cause of any given case. And that is not enough.
I would like to point a finger. I would like to say there.
However, particularly within clusters of disease, there are often very strong
correlations. In 1990 a book was published called The Truth About Where You Live.
Using new computer technology to interpret statistics from the Census Bureau of the
United States, Benjamin Goldman created over 100 maps that ranked all of the counties
in the US on the basis of mortality rates, toxin emissions and concentrations, and
demographics. The vivid colors illustrating the distribution of illness make explicit the
relationship between pollution and disease, and the tremendous geographic disparities in
mortality rates. Generally the maps show a strong correlation between disease and
industry. There is also a very strong correlation between those sites and demographics
that are urban and/or poor and/or minority. The distribution of arbitrariness, again, is not
completely arbitrary. And in some of the worst areas, there are so many industries and so
many hazards, they are so suffused with poisons, that to point a finger at one, and say,
you, becomes similarly impossible.
The neighborhood that I grew up in, North Cambridge, MA, is by no means poor.
Statistically, for diseases like cancer, it is not the worst place in the country to be living;
but then, it is by no means the best either. It is a gentrifying neighborhood in a
university town, slowly recovering from its tenure as the semi-industrial fringe of the
growing city, and it has had some growing pains.
One of these growing pains was the John M. Tobin school, where my sister spent
three years, and I spent less than one; the fifth grade, in 1990-1991. My mother had
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transferred us to escape bad teachers at another school. I immediately got sick: I
developed allergies to our pets, began to get repeated pneumonias, respiratory and sinus
infections and colds and was diagnosed with asthma. An article from the The Boston
Globe (Landon, 1991) writes that I had “an immune-suppressed condition.” I just know
that my health has never been the same: and for the first time, I realized that my mother
couldn’t protect me from everything.
As she would later do for my sister, she did everything absolutely everything she
could. She took me to every kind of doctor, she pulled me out of school early in the year
and she became involved in a parents group that was convinced that the Tobin school was
suffering from “sick building syndrome.”
The story I remember as a ten year old about what was going on at that time went
something like this:
I am sick because the Tobin school is sick. It was built on top of a hazardous dump, and
toxic gas seeps up into the classrooms, where the windows don’t open. Almost everyone
in my class has an inhaler.
My sister didn’t get sick then, and because the school was supposedly safe after a
series of renovations, she remained there for several years with a teacher that she liked.
When she died, I couldn’t get the Tobin School out of my head, where it embodied, for
me, the environmental “problem.” I wanted to point. I wanted to say, there.
I went to the Cambridge Historical Commission and asked to see their file on the
Tobin. When I got there, the woman who helped me said “I remember when your mother
came in and looked at these same files ten years ago.” There were pictures of the “dump”
from 1933, trash and old cars strewn across the landscape ; gritty, ambiguous and
suggestive.
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But suggestive of what? I took a photocopy home, and I kept looking at the
smoking pit, staring in, trying to push through into the photograph where I could stand
up, sniff the air, walk around and touch the ground; pin down the rumors, thick as
thieves, that were blowing round and round.
I was not naïve enough, even then, to presume that I would find some kind of
irrefutable truth in all this searching. In fact, I wasn’t even sure what the question was. I
just desperately wanted to look. I wanted to pinpoint the “environmental” problem. I
wanted to know where this story I knew so well had come from and whether it was true.
This was where I knew to begin.
Because I was investigating one “environmental” problem, a professor suggested
that I might be interested in a project on another “environmental” problem. It was a
project for the 20th anniversary of the chemical disaster in Bhopal, India: and I said “the
what in where?” Although Bhopal had caused changes in the way hazardous chemicals
were viewed and treated in this country that had impacted my life and my ideas about
environmentalism, I had never in fact heard of it. Having mentioned it to a lot of people
since then, I know that I wasn’t alone.
Working on the Bhopal project (and eventually traveling there briefly) alongside
my little investigation about the Tobin brought me daily to a frustrating state of cognitive
dissonance. It did not make sense that these could be the same kind of issue. The more I
looked at these two issues, the more they rubbed against each other in my mind, the more
the idea of an environmental problem began to separate into layers: one that was about
people using all of the resources available to them to fight for the health of themselves
and their families, and another that was about the vastly different informational,
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economic and civic resources available to do that among different constituencies. While
the stories that connect cause and effect are as ubiquitous as the air that we breathe, it
turns out that the process that converts them into evidence and ultimately proof is
terribly expensive and only available to a few.
The issues at the Tobin are not, to this day, completely resolved. However, in
essence it is a story of successful activism and wielding of narrative: that is, a problem
was identified and re-presented and then money and cooperation were procured in order
to stymie, if not recoup, its potential dangers. Bhopal on the other hand, catastrophic
twenty years ago, is, even today, a gigantic open wound, perpetually unresolved and
intensely without justice. The scale of the event is beyond my comprehension: it had
taken only one death, only one loss, to profoundly traumatize and forever change my
family and my community.
Yet mothers in Bhopal have come out of traditional homes to take on the Indian
government, and an American Corporation and fight for the health and welfare of their
families and neighborhoods. My mother, an artist, is returning to school at the age of
forty-eight to pursue a career in “bio-informatics,” a field that she describes as “part
medicine, part computer science, part biology and part chemistry.” All, in their own way,
are continuing the fight to create safe spaces for the children they still have.
And so although I am anchored in Cambridge, the undercurrent to this project has
become the need to be able to face these two issues on the same page. This has become
my way of trying to say, there. Not at cancer, or any place, or anyone; but at the specter
of suffering and the logic of tragedy. To the ways that ideas about environment, safety
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and justice have to be able to negotiate with each other around the world, and what their
implications are. It is the best I can do.
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INTRODUCTION
Historical Commission Lore
On October 12th 2001, an employee of the Cambridge Historical Commission
(CHC) wrote a letter to two teachers at the Tobin School in Cambridge Massachusetts.
The bulk of the letter was an apology, as follows
Now, I must correct a major mistake of mine- the fault, I think, of “Historical
Commission lore.” In my talk [to your group at the Tobin School] I said that, when the
Callanan playground and the playing field were built (both substantially completed by
1938), the trash in the dump had not been removed, but compacted then buried beneath
layers of sand. Knowing how important it was to verify this, I looked again in the survey
files for the Cofran Pit site and the school for supporting documentation I could not find
any information on the treatment of the dump in the creation of the playground and
playing field. I asked Charles Sullivan, the Commission’s Executive Director, if he knew
of any additional information, which he did not. I am very sorry for making such an
important misstatement.(K.R. 2001, emphasis in original)
The teachers had brought the CHC in to speak about the history of the site of the
Tobin School, one that has been the subject of much conjecture and much investigation.
Still, it remains in 2001,at the writing of this letter, that in spite of themselves, no one
alive knows, or is ever likely to know, what went into the onetime dump below the Tobin
School, or who put it there, and when and where precisely. All that is possible is an
understanding of the site as it is today, and the combined effects of the building and its
history. Why then this obsession with the history of the site? Why this incessant
retelling of a story that, as the letter above evidences, cannot even be proven by the
historians, who yet, continue retell the story? Why, as importantly, am I compelled to retell the story?
There was a young woman who in my class at the Tobin in 1990-91 began
working at a house wares store near my mother’s home in Cambridge a few years ago.
When I walked by we would exchange a few words. She said she was trying to get to
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college. As the years past, we exchanged fewer words. Recently I walked by and went
in to speak with her and the conversation went as follows:
Bridget:
Hey S. Can I ask you a question?
S:
(stacking glass mugs in a precarious pyramid) Yeah.
B:
Were you ever sick with anything when you were at the Tobin?
S:
No.
B:
D’you know anyone who was?
S:
No. What’re you trying to be the next Erin Brockovich or something?
B:
Um, no, not really… I’m writing a paper. (pause)
S:
I live right next to there and I never had any problem.
B:
Where do you live?
S:
(pause) C____ St…(pause) Did you hear Ms. C___ just died?
B:
No. Who was she?
S:
Second grade teacher.
B:
I heard Mrs. S___ died too.
S:
Yeah but that was a few years ago.
B:
What’d Ms. C____ die of?
S:
Cancer. But so what. There’s a whole ton of people in Cambridge with cancer.(Hanna
Conversation 2003)
I hadn’t thought the question was that strange: I’d been sick. From my point of
view the story made sense. But this conversation is a microcosm: it shows the narrative
of neighborhood environmental activism in relief.
The question as to whether there is
illness is a flat no. The asking is, however, immediately identifiable: “What’re you trying
to be, the next Erin Brockovich?” Meaning making is part of a narrative world that is
precisely separate from the actual world. The story has already been told: any other
protagonist is an imposter, an indulgent replica. The question is tantamount to “what’re
you trying to be, the next Julia Roberts?” However illness is a baseline, used in circular
logic to reify its own normalcy.
The appropriate reaction becomes “so what” because the normal situation is that
“there’s a whole ton of people in Cambridge with cancer.” She wasn’t the only to think
so either. The first page in a binder full of notes from a teacher who had gotten sick
while he taught at the Tobin begins with the header “Kids that, I know of, who died,” and
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proceeds to list 5, along with anecdotal stories about their illnesses – mostly cancers (Z,
archive).
In this project I address a question about the reproduction of narratives about
environmental problems and the politics of collecting information that seeks to validate
them. I draw a loose curve which follows from Cambridge – my hometown – a city
obsessed with mapping, whose residents in the face of an unknown hazard call on all of
the resources available to analyze and re-present a story that can frame a set of
inexplicable ills at an elementary school, into the 1984 chemical disaster in Bhopal, India
and the urge to document that it generated, and how the narrative of Bhopal has betrayed
the city with its portability, that has betrayed the bodies of suffering people by
transporting the narrative with returning a meaningful effect.
I compare these two situations not because they are comparable or in any way
equivalents, nor because they have any particular connection. That is, they are no more
or less related than any two “environmental issues.” It is in fact the paradoxical way in
which they are both related and unrelated that I wish to plumb; the ways they are both
participant in a global discourse about “the environment” and yet have utterly different
ways of accessing it. How does this disparity manifest itself through mapping, evidence
and education?
There is particularly no basis for comparison of these two instances in terms of
their scale as human tragedies. One is tiny, contained, generic: the other gigantic,
catastrophic and singular (though not because the same chemical has never leaked in
other places at other times). It is simultaneously not my aim to set up any type of
relative, hierarchical or moral scale upon which to place the activists and actors who have
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worked on or are implicated in either of these issues. Everyone wants a safe life;
moreover, everyone wants safe, healthy children. It is my opinion, for what it’s worth,
that everyone deserves these things. Still the question of the differing scales of resources
available to provide these things is very important; the imperative to protect and fight for
the health of one’s family and community is, if not sanctified, far beyond my judgment.
David Harvey writes in his book Justice, Nature and the Geography of
Difference, that “… the ‘environmental issue’ necessarily means such different things to
different people, that in aggregate it encompasses quite literally everything there
is.”(Harvey, 1996 118) So what does it mean to talk about the “environment” on
differing scales? Kim Fortun asks in her book, Advocacy After Bhopal:
environmentalism, disaster, new global orders, “What does it mean to be an
environmentalist when the label is shared by George Bush and a tribal from the hills of
India? Is the mineworker who cooks his rice with firewood from ancestral lands a ‘forest
thief,’ as conservationists contend?”(Fortun, 2001 182) Harvey defines the problem as
one of perspective:
“Environment” is, after all, whatever surrounds or, to be more precise, whatever exists in
the surrounds of some being that is relevant to the state of that being at a particular place
and time. The “situatedness” of a being and its internal conditions and needs have as
much to say about the definition of environment as the surrounding conditions
themselves, while the criteria of relevance can also vary widely. (Harvey, 1996 119)
Therefore, it may be that exactly that imperative – though it sometimes pits
“environmentalists” up against each other – that constitutes grassroots activism.
My decision, therefore, to re-tell this story about Cambridge, yet again, is not
apolitical. Because the Bhopal disaster in particular has remained unresolved over twenty
years, the inverse of my will to retell it and your willingness it to read about re-inscribes a
curve that allows for a glut of evidence where there already exists the most citizen power
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– allowing that to create more while maintaining a viewpoint that is global in scope is
only to redraw the lines of inequity (a statement that requires, of course, gross
stereotyping).
Why, therefore, do I re-tell it?
The answer is unfair and yet quintessential of the problem: that is, I retell the
story because it is relevant to me. I retell the story because I know the question without
knowing the answer. I retell the story because the story is imbedded in my sense of
myself: I simultaneously depend on it and disbelieve it.1
Harvey writes that “all propositions for social action (or conceptions of social
justice) must be critically evaluated in terms of the situatedness or positionality of the
argument and the arguer. But it is equally important to recognize that the individuals
developing such situated knowledge are not themselves homogeneous entities but
bundles of heterogeneous impulses, many of which derive from an internalization of
‘multiple othernesses’ within the self…” (Harvey 1996 363).
That is, each person constitutes themselves through identity with a series of
groups, which are often externally conflicting. I identify as an individual, as a former
student of the Tobin school, as a daughter, sister and member of a family, as a person
from Cambridge, as an American, as a student in the social sciences at a liberal college
who has been trained and conditioned to be sensitive to and aware of global problems,
practices, and hypocrisies, as a white woman without children, and as someone working
1
And is this retelling just? At base it is common: at best it is self-aware. But what kind of academic work
can it generate? And on what authority can it claim to rest? It is at times historical, working from primary
and secondary source documents. It is at times anthropological, analyzing the practices and discourse that
have been generated by and through the topics that I am investigating. It is at times theoretical; what
constitutes these spaces, these different places? How do the geographical differences and imbalances and
narrative commonalities established between groups? Who has a Right To Know and who does not?
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with activists in Bhopal – among other things. What is, therefore, my “proposition for
social action”? What is my “conception of social justice”?
I know a story about the Tobin School anecdotally. Yet because it is imbedded
not only into my sense of self, but into the relationships that I have with both the people
and places involved, I have had difficulty separating what I knew from I have learned.
There is no way to erase my “positionality,” just as there is no way to will a forgetting of
what I know. So I retell the story to find out what it was and what it is and what it is not,
so that I can move on and tell other stories, having, I hope, situated myself. Having
looked long and hard at the “geography of difference.”
I also try to write the story of the maps and documents that I have collected. That
is, I attempt to write the story of the ways that those documents have and have not
succeeded in exerting power over it, in the Foucauldian sense. This should not be
confused with writing the history of the site itself. Although it is a history of the site, it is
an entirely and precisely secondary one that attempts to engage with documenting the
historicizing of the site as such.
I depend heavily on Harvey’s book in this paper, because the question that he
concentrates on, namely how to achieve or even conceive of environmental justice (and
environment and justice) in a world that encompasses so many environments,
communities and issues (that are often at odds with each other), underlies my
investigation. Since, as he writes, “…words like ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ convey a
commonality and universality of concern that can all to easily be captured by particularist
politics” (Harvey, 1996 119) this paper is left to consider the question of relevance. Can
it really be that being an environmentalist is as simple as being concerned with that which
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is relevant to you? What does this mean about “universality” then, or about “particuarlist
politics”?
I begin this story in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time of its settlement by the
British.
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THE BEST DOCUMENTED TOWN
The Great Swamp
The following narrative is pieced together primarily of from documents found in
the files and atlases of the Cambridge Historical Commission (CHC), Arthur Krim’s
1977 survey book of Northwest Cambridge (which was itself participant in the creation
of the CHC archive), and articles from the Cambridge Chronicle. These files contain a
few pages at a time of material from various sources that discuss the precise location
named on the file tab – designated by address or sometimes theme (i.e “brickmaking”).
So although I am writing it, it was in some sense already written for me. Atlases,
though not individually cited here, gave the best general sense of year to year change of
the spaces concerned, interspersed with commentary from the files. Even the unit I refer
to, Northwest Cambridge (NWC), does not really exist: on the ground they are particular
and quite distinct locations “north” and “west” Cambridge. However, this is Krim’s
distinction and I allow it, because the area I am talking about borders these two
neighborhoods – it becomes convenient because it the unit he uses.
The story, was therefore all too easy to construct; it is very similar to several other
histories written about the area (see, for example, Cook, Sheila 2001). The sources –
photocopied pages from here and there – so accessible and well trafficked, have become
a genre that produce “historical commission lore” and particular discourses about
marginality. To write about this area is to participate in that discourse. Harvey notes that
“The discursive activity of ‘mapping space’ is a fundamental prerequisite to the
structuring of any kind of knowledge” (Harvey 1996 111), even though the maps
themselves “are typically totalizing, usually two-dimensional, Cartesian, and very un-
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dialectical devices with which it is possible to propound any mixture of extraordinary
insights and monstrous lies” (Harvey 1996 4)
So a historical archive, particularly one like CHS that is geographically pre-sorted
down to street number, with atlases laid out year by year, is also creates miniature
mythologies that can have powerful social effects. Which is not to say that they are
untrue, only that they are a precarious towers of truth, each one exclusive of many others,
dependent on a particular interpretation, and balanced upon the one before. Which is
only by way of a reminder, as I begin to build my own tower, to look for those moments
when interpretations become capable of becoming their own truths, sudden social facts.
Cambridge Massachusetts was “perhaps the best documented of all the early
towns of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Because its field divisions were systematic and
its records methodical...”(Krim 1977 11). This city, growing around Harvard University,
was obsessively mapped, almost as though the construction of the city was itself an
educational project, documented for posterity.
Generally grounded by a basic grid pattern, American cities, have tended to bulge
outward in the path of least resistance under the pressure of capital. Since most sites were
chosen for reasons of commerce rather than fortification as in many European cities, they
have often been located on flat sites near water and so “accommodations to site have
mostly concerned battling marches, bridging waters, and filling in tidal flats rather than
overcoming choppy terrain.”(Conzen 1990 7)
In its topographical nature, Cambridge, MA, founded as Newtowne in 1630, was
just such a tract of land. It was swampy and empty, as the various Native American
tribes that had used it previously had been largely decimated by disease by the time that
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settlement of the area by the British began(Krim 1977 5). However, the original layout
of the town was not in the form of a grid. Newtowne was planned on a medieval model,
with a village center at Harvard Square and agricultural land grants spreading about from
that point (the original intention was that everyone would live in the village – the fields
were at some distance(Krim 1977 9)). Harvard Square, the nexus of the college, and the
lands in its general vicinity were lush and good for farming.
Mt. Auburn St. is an old thoroughfare (originally a Native American route)
leading out of Harvard Square to Watertown and marking the southern path, (the northern
would be Massachusetts Avenue) around a recessional moraine that had been deposited
as the last glacier receded. Now known loosely as a series of residential hills – Avon
Hill, Observatory Hill, Reservoir Hill, Strawberry Hill and Mount Auburn, this gentle
ridge forms the original, natural divide between Old or Mid-Cambridge(MC) and
northwest Cambridge (NWC) (Krim, 1977 4). On the MC side the moraine angles gently
down in dry, arable slopes. However, on the NWC side, curving around the muddy
shores of Fresh Pond, there was a wide, dank expanse known as The Great Swamp. It
was “a waterlogged landscape of swamps and ponds drained by the meandering Alewife
Brook and the Little River.” Heavy deposits of blue and red clay contributed to the “poor
drainage, which left much of the swamp stagnant and extremely susceptible to
pollution.”(Krim, 1977 4) – particularly because although the water table is very high, the
clay is almost impermeable.
It was mainly “a vacant wasteland of meadow grass, bramble thicket, and swamp
willow” (Krim, 1977 28) all the way up until the 1800’s. The swamp spread across
several square miles – west to the edges of Belmont, northwest up past the Arlington
18
border, and north into Somerville. Until then had been deemed useless for pretty much
everything except burying Catholics – who at that time were too stigmatized to be
granted a downtown cemetery. The shores of Fresh Pond were where the first industry of
NWC, Fredrick Tudor’s ice cutting business, began. During the winter the frozen surface
would be carved into blocks and packed into sawdust. It was a very lucrative business. It
was in fact so lucrative that it attracted many other men to the shores for the same
purpose, and the city eventually divided the pond into ice-rights, triangular zones cut
from the center, like a pizza.
However, it was difficult to get the ice to downtown Boston and to the wharves of
Charlestown to be shipped to South America, Europe and India. (Krim, 1977 28) Tudor
hired Nathaniel J. Wyeth, the owner of the Fresh Pond Hotel – a little resort spot on the
shores of what is now the city reservoir – as his manager. In addition to making many
technical improvements to the ice-making process, Wyeth partially funded the first
railroad extension out to the pond in1840 for the purpose of transporting Tudor’s ice.
Wyeth realized that a two-industry railroad would make more money than a oneindustry railroad. So, in 1844, he acquired a lot in NWC (now the site of the Jefferson
Parks housing complex). He leased this lot to Peter Hubbell and Almon Abbott, brick
makers hailing from the rich blue clay-banks of Coxsackie, New York. The condition of
their lease was that all material necessary for the kiln, such as wood and coal- as well as
the finished bricks - be transported using the new railroad extension. When this venture
began to make money, Wyeth, along with a few other local players, began to buy up or
lease the rest of the Great Swamp (Krim, 1977 29).
19
For the sake of ice, a firing industry was born. Clay was excavated, shaped, dried
in on-site in kilns, and then shipped out as bricks. The labor force was largely immigrant,
and usually camped in tents on-site until, little by little, workers cottages were
constructed. By 1893 the Cambridge Chronicle could admonish that
Cambridge people know, or ought to, that if there is one thing for which the University
city is famous – outside of its college – it is its product of brick – both the quantity and
the quality of that product. Cambridge practically controls the brick market of Boston
and the eastern part of the State, if not of New England.(Cambridge Industries: Their Rise
and Progress 1893, CHS archive)
In spite of this proud sentiment, several sources note that the quality of the
Cambridge clay was “strictly mediocre.”(Long, 1971) It should be noted as well that
already in 1893, Cambridge is the “University City,” defined by and arranged around
Harvard University, an school producing knowledge of the most authoritative variety.
The exportation of brick, then, was second only to the exportation of ideas from the
educational industry.
Digging Holes
NWC before the 20th century was:
…vacant land where offensive odors, disturbing noises, cluttered shipyards and polluted
water could be tolerated. Here were established icehouses and brickyards,
slaughterhouses and tanneries, railroad yards and streetcar barns, carriage factories and
cemeteries, a racecourse and a reservoir, the almshouse and an army camp. And around
this urban fringe settled the rural immigrants – the Irish and Italians, the West Indians and
French Canadians – who labored to create the industrial fabric.(Krim 1977 18)
What does it mean to be an urban fringe? In this case, it meant to be an immigrant
neighborhood; it meant to be in an area that was at the “fringes” of Old Cambridge and
Harvard Square. It also means to be a place in a state of flux. The 1977 architectural
survey book of NWC opens with the following paragraph:
20
The modern landscape of Northwest Cambridge, crowded with three-deckers and
shopping centers, overlaid with parkways and cemeteries, is the culmination of
generations of past decisions that were ultimately founded upon the inherent qualities of
the natural landscape. Once the assessments had been made that a swamp was
forbidding, or that the plain was fertile, these decisions often became accepted as the
definitions of the cultural landscape, and were perpetuated by succeeding generations
building railroads across the swamps and farmsteads on the plain. (Krim, 1977 .3)
Noting that the future is informed by the past and that structures are built on the
ground is, in and of itself, generic, and contributes to an essentializing view of spaces –
that is, inequities exists between them because they inherently must, rather than because
people have actively created them. Therefore, as Krim’s introduction to the project that
surveyed and entered a record into the archive of every single structure in the city, and
that has become a primary to which people refer to understand the logic of its history, it is
in no sense uncomplicated.
Whether or not these questions turn on the “assessments” (or possibly maps)
made about the landscape, it is true that the most easily used land in Cambridge was
settled first, and that the resources, such as clay, found in other areas, were used to build
the structures erected on that land. Cambridge consumed itself to grow.
The halls of Harvard were built from the clay ground, fired in the brick kilns of
Dublin St. (now Sherman St.) and Vassal Lane. In NWC, as in much of Somerville, and
the Back Bay of Boston (Domosh 1996), the valleys and ponds were filled with the tops
of hills. And not even the dirty work of brick making escaped a progressivist, idealist
interpretation, the earth from the ground mapped back into the cultural landscape,
rearranged and renamed.
Dull, inanimate clods though (bricks) may be, yet are they connected with us by ties more
close and strong than we sometimes dream of. Both they and we are clay, taken alike from
our mother earth, molded and tempered may be, by the fierce sun of adversity and every
changing circumstance into the shape and quality which are to fit us for our respective
21
places in the great economy of nature. They into temples and shrines and tombs for the
habitations of man; we into living temples and shrines, fit dwelling places for the spirit of
the living God, or tombs, maybe, of blasted hopes, desires, and aspirations. (Cambridge
Industries: Their Rise and Progress 1893)
The transformation of the land is presented again, as in Krim, as its own logical
conclusion: bricks, like people, are formde for the purpose of “taking our respective
places in the great economy of nature,” and, as importantly into a the space of religion.
Here, we inhabit the transformed earth in the same way that God inhabits the transformed
man. Therefore the transformation of the land brings us closer to God. Both man and
brick come from nature and go to God through this process of moulding space and of
building. Though the language and manifest goals of this motivation will change, this
idea of redemption through construction, transformation and progress will repeat itself.
Nothing is said, however, in these articles and files though, about, for example, the living
conditions or experiences of these “immigrant workers.”
The result of this constructive fervor was that, mainly in the period 1850-1900, no
fewer than 14 pits of various sizes and depths were dug in the area that had been the
Great Swamp during the 19th century by a number of different proprietors. Many of these
brickyards were taken over by the conglomerate New England Brick Company
(NEBCo.) towards the end of the century, and it was this conglomerate that dug the most
significant hole, right in the middle of the former swamp. Crowned by this 80 foot deep
and many acre-ed hole, NWC at the turn of the century resembled a gigantic sandpit,
interspersed with a few other of what Krim called “fringe activities,” such as the
poorhouse, the tuberculosis hospital, the cemetery and the stables.
22
However, residential building was encroaching from the Old Cambridge (OC)
direction, with it concern as to the problems inherent in digging very deep holes
everywhere. The City Engineer’s report of 1893 even stated that
The increase in malarial affections which, while centering and finding their greatest
activity in the immediate vicinity if these pits, are yet spreading over the city, is to us
sufficient evidence of this… (Cambridge Engineer's Annual Report 1896)
The disagreeable nature of malaria drove the city to begin to edge the brick
makers out of the area, though the last clay bed was not closed until 1955. By the middle
of the 20th century, the area had been totally transformed. What had been first a “vacant
wasteland of meadow grass, bramble thicket, and swamp willow” was then “totally
transformed in a few decades into an industrial complex of brickyards, drying kilns, and
clay-pits.” The clay industry left behind acres of “abandoned brick-works and flooded
clay pits” (Krim 1977 28) in its activity of constructing the “temples and shrines and
tombs for the habitations of man.”
However, the more affluent city center was running out of space and spilling over
into the “fringe.” What had been romantic from a distance was distinctly unpleasant next
door. Many of these abandoned sites fell into the hands of the City of Cambridge, which
embarked on a process of transformation of the “fringe” landscape. By the middle of the
twentieth century there was a “’substantial deficiency in all types of open space
facilities’” (Page, 1985).
Transformations
The bulldozers whine and creak as preparations continue for the next stage of development. Before
long, Cambridge will have long –awaited and badly needed playing fields. When that happens, in the
not too distant future, it will seem as though the former claypits and dump were never anything other
than beautiful playing fields. – From”Playing field emerges from former brick yard, dumpsite”
Cambridge Chronicle, 5 September 1985
23
This desire to transform was actively pursued. In 1970 the Cambridge
Community Development Department got a grant from the Ford Foundation to study the
different ways that the Municipal dump site could be used. The report came out in 1973;
called “Cambridge City Dump Site – Re-use Analysis” it concluded that that best use for
the space would be “recreational”(Page, 1985}). In 1985 the NEBCo. site, the largest pit,
and subsequently the municipal dump from 1951 to 1971, one block away from the
Tobin, was regraded as the Danehy field.2
However, the nature of what lay below, so to speak, was also well understood.
Shippen Page, in his 1985 article on the construction of the new park, wrote that “The
area behind Bellis Circle is still referred to as ‘the dump’ even though it hasn’t been used
as one for almost 15 years. Memories are important here.” (Page, 1985) Though the
plans of the city were rewriting the surface of the neighborhood, both the neighbors and
the land remembered the dump that had been there. Engineering considerations
concurrently had to be made to this history, and were then re-presented to the public as
controlled safety concerns. What became a high hill was then covered by a layer of thick
plastic, and layers of soft sod, and surrounded by gravel pits to release the methane
breathed up by the dump.3 A section of a city pamphlet on the Danehy park called
2
Of living behind the dump, one resident spoke "of the fires that burned in the dump. ‘Sometimes,’ she
says, pointing to the corner of her yard, ‘we had to take our hoses and put the fires out.’" She also
remembered the "sight of the horizon shimmering with the movement of rats." {Page, 1985} The rats had
come with the next great railroad expansion – the Porter Square subway stop (the station is the second
deepest in the world because they had to very far down to get past the clay and to the bedrock). Another
railroad extension was built from the subway site to the dump so that, on top of the soft municipal dump,
all of the rock and soil from the excavation could be dumped on top. Between these land dual disruptions,
the rats fled in panic- infesting entire neighborhoods.
3
Unfortunately, like so many great ideas, this didn’t work very well. Rainwater couldn’t drain from the
park; for years, weeks on end of soccer and football games would be canceled when the rain that fell would
sit several feet deep on the playing fields, refusing to drain. Meanwhile, the unfortunate buildings at the
bottom of the hill, outside the park, would end up with thirteen feet of water in their basements during bad
storms. It took years of engineering experiments, including a machine that roamed back and forth across
the sod, punching holes, to resolve the problem.
24
“Environmental Monitoring” (CHS file on Danehy), maps the site, showing the borders
of the clay pit, the borders of the park and the methane vent trench and gas monitoring
wells.4
The space was being rewritten, and this change to the landscape was accompanied
by changing demographics and residency patterns. In 1989 the city published a “North
Cambridge Planning Report,” which in addition to putting forth a vision of the future of
the neighborhood, narrativized the contradictions inherent in these transformations –
progressivism mixed with nostalgia.
As early as the 80’s it writes, already 47% of the residents living there had moved
to the area within the past 5 years. "Historically,” states the report correctly “the
neighborhood has been home to generations of French Canadians, Irish and Italian
families. While this is still true today, other immigrants from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean
and Central America have moved into the neighborhood in recent years. During the past
decade, growing numbers of higher income professionals have also been attracted to
North Cambridge. While in the past, the majority of residents fell into low or moderate
income groups, many of these newcomers are causing the median household income in
North Cambridge to rise substantially.” (NCPR, 1989)
Additionally it showed that the newer residents were younger and had higher
levels of income and of education than the older residents (NCPR, 1989). The
demographic, like the geographical transformations of the area over the past two hundred
years had been quick and drastic. The parallel and interrelated transformations of the
contours of the landscape and the inhabitancy caused confusion among both planners and
4
The only other thing built on this site is the Bristol Arms Apartments, which is surrounded by gas
monitoring wells. I do not know anything about health concerns in this complex.
25
residents, as is evidenced by the 1989 North Cambridge Planning report commentary on
demographic change
The degree and rate of population change occurring in North Cambridge has been noted
by many residents with concern. Long time residents, often the elderly or first time
homebuyers, are increasingly unable to remain in North Cambridge, while only those
new residents with substantial incomes can afford to move in. Residents fear this trend
will alter the fabric of North Cambridge and threaten to destroy the very qualities which
make the neighborhood an attractive place to live. (NCPR, 1989)
Here, the writers of the report spell out gentrification as the tragic logical paradox
(that it in fact often is) A neighborhood is so nice that new affluent people move there,
replacing the nice nature of it, and making it unpleasant for the nice people who can no
longer afford to live there. Thus the newcomers whose presence has ruined the authentic
and poor nature of the neighborhood, are blamed, and blame others, for having caused the
place that is now their home to become unpleasantly rich. What are the stories of the
place within which these ideas about change get situated? There is certainly a resistance
to change, even to “improvement” on some level. There are ideas about “authenticity”
and about class. Mostly though, these speculations center on ideas about class and
income.
Housing costs in NWC concurrently skyrocketed. There are dozens of new condo
complexes – on the site of the former truck yard of Portland Stoneware and in front of
W.R.Grace Chemical Co. There are co-housing – communal living – complexes. There
are fewer “family” neighborhoods because the houses are worth more if you divide them
up into smaller apartments, and there are fewer families. In fact, school age population is
on the decline, and one of the schools in Cambridge will probably be closed soon.
In the mid-nineties Massachusetts held a state referendum on the subject of rent
control, which was still in use in only three cities: Worchester, Boston and Cambridge.
26
Even though voters all three of those cities wanted to retain the system, the statewide vote
abolished it. Although the visiting international scholars still arrive every fall to fill the
graceful dorms at Harvard and the long hall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
the international immigrant population has declined, as has the school age population.
There is, however, some affordable housing in NWC. One of the ways that the
“authentically” working class feel had been to some degree preserved was through the
construction of three large housing developments – Jefferson Park, Walden Square and
Rindge Towers. All three were built by private developers and are constructed on former
clay pit sites.
Therefore, the majority of the affordable housing in NWC is built on these postindustrial sites whose contents are mainly unknown. NWC in the 19th century had been
full of slaughterhouses, tanneries and chemical companies like Dewey & Almey and
W.R. Grace. What is the relationship here between “affordability” and the “unknown”
nature of what lies below? This project does not deal with health concerns in these
housing projects; in fact I do not know if there are any.
There may not be any environmental problems at these sites; but the fact that I did
not investigate it, I begin to realize, investigating instead a school that parents went out of
their way to send kids to (rather than having no choice about where to live), deserves
consideration. Is NWC a different place to those who occupy or use former clay land?
In the 20th century Cambridge transformed 14 large pits, up to 80 feet deep, into
playing fields, schools, housing projects, an army base and a mall. Nearly all of these
sites are now regulated by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection
(DEP) under the Massachusetts Contingency Plan, the state version of the Right to Know
27
legislations that I will discuss later. Two issues begin to emerge about these sites: firstly,
who knows that they were there? And secondly, who knows what went into them?
The first establishes whether there can be a narrative made between health
concerns and what is in the ground; the second establishes what kind of narrative. Both
have implicate access to the historical record in questions about the health of bodies and
spaces.
Mapping the Neighborhood
Between 1965 and 1977 the City of Cambridge, in conjunction with various surveyors,
historians, and the Cambridge Historical Commission conducted an architectural survey
of the entire city, from east to west and A-Z. This project generated a file, for each
address, with a survey sheet and any other relevant documents inside announcing
everything from the first city map upon which the building appeared, to the type of siding
(clapbd? shingl? brick? stuc? asbs?…).5
This town, known “first for its university,” had become obsessed with its own
architecture, creating systematic mirror reflections of itself in section by section of the
city (starring, of course, those buildings built of brick). While the books generalize about
the neighborhoods, the files make of them tiny demarcated parcels, each with their own
collection of historical Xeroxed pages.
However, this does not exclude the process of mapping, much advanced now in the age
of computers. Older maps of the city are kept at the historical commission, but online at
the Cambridge Information Systems portion of the City of Cambridge website, it is
possible to download in PDF format nearly any type of current map that one can conceive
of. These include, but are not limited to:
*
Atlas of Cambridge
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
Census 2000 Demographic Atlas
Cambridge Bus Transit Map
Sewer and Drain Atlas
Water Distribution System Atlas
Tax Atlas
Tax Atlas 2000
Block Maps
5
However, it is worth noticing that, they in fact missed, according to Krim, (Hanna, Interview with Krim,
2003) quite a few buildings. Among other locations, they missed the strange Fireplace store, poised on the
remains of the old railroad track next to Fresh Pond and squeezed alongside Chico’s Sunoco station, and
they missed 445 Concord Ave., the uninhabitable U-store complex between Tobin and Danehy, that
happens to be a Superfund site.
28
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
Parcel Maps
Census Boundaries Map
City of Cambridge Map
Cambridge Community Gardens
Zoning Map
Zip Codes Map
Index Map
Residential Taxing Districts
Parks and Playgrounds (http://gis.cambridgema.gov/maplibrary/index.html)
The urban landscape of Cambridge has been written and rewritten. It is a layered
text. Harvey says of cities that they “form what we might call a palimpsest, a composite
landscape made up of different built forms superimposed upon each other with the
passing of time” (Harvey, 1996 417) What the Cambridge Map Index shows us, is that
they form similarly multiple layers of knowledge of those spaces, and that in this affluent,
self-conscious town, there are both the desire and the resources to produce and to share
that knowledge.
Maps have essentializing functions not unlike those that Krim attributed to the
landscape – that is, a map freezes a space into a moment in time and erasing all others.
This can allow the reasons for their structuring to be made invisible; or obscured by a
rewriting that explains why it already existed that way. For example, the parks and
playgrounds maps write NWC as one of the most desirable areas to live in citywide. The
demographics maps write it as ethnically diverse, albeit without comment of which
residents live on clay pits and which do not. Parcel maps show us the unit of the archive.
These are the ways that Cambridge is accessed today.
There is another PDF map of Cambridge online that is not shown on the City
website. This is a map from the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. (CHEJ)
29
This map shows two sets of data: one is the locations of Federal Superfund Sites, and the
second is the location of schools within half a mile. In section four of Middlesex County
there are twenty-five schools on the map. One school, though, is nearly on top of the
black dot of the superfund. That is the John M. Tobin School.
30
THE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT
Muskrat Pond
Beyond the narrative that I knew about the Tobin school, what is really known?
That is, what does the archive say? That is, what is really documented? Here I begin
again where everyone else begins: by going back and exploiting the maps & systems as
best I can to generate the story of one clay pit in particular. I want to understand the
story, but I also want to understand how it is constructed.
I begin with an excerpt from a bird watching guide, found in the Cambridge
Historical Commission’s file on “Cofran’s Pit.”
Muskrat Pond lay on the opposite side of Concord Avenue, near the foot of Vassal Lane
and less than one hundred yards from the eastern end of Cambridge Nook. It was a pretty
pool, not unlike some of those in the Brickyard Swamp, but much larger than any of
them, and very much deeper. As its name indicates, it abounded in muskrats, who built
their conical houses all about its quaking, treacherous margin. …Here it was that I shot
my first Duck – a Pintail – in 1863 or 1864, and here Ruthven Deane and I found several
Florida Gallinules – two of which we killed – in the autumn of 1868. There was a wide
stretch of boggy meadow just to the eastward, where Snipe and Yellow-legs alighted at
times, and where Carolina Rails were accustomed to breed. Both Pond and meadow have
long since disappeared, and in their place yawns a deep and unsightly clay-pit. –Birds of
the Cambridge Region (from CHS archive, undated)
That the only description of the Tobin site before the brickyard that is in the
archive comes from a bird watching guide allows for two related conclusions. Firstly, in
reading the file, it romances the pre-clay land as an untouched wilderness teeming with
nature – allowing for the construction of an anecdotal narrative in which the creators of
the clay pit function (in spite of bricks’ supposedly lofty place in the relationship between
nature, God and man) as the destroyers and disrupters of this idyllic spot. It becomes the
springboard for the story that tells about land that is destroyed and contaminated. Also,
however, it calls attention to the ways that discourses about space change over time: it is
quite possible (in fact likely) that there is no other description of the pond because a bird
31
enthusiast would be the only one who would find the space documentarily relevant – to
others it had no discursive significance.
Muskrat Pond was adjacent to Fresh Pond, and probably resembled the two small
ponds that still remain on the far side of Fresh Pond’s perimeter – protected as part of the
reservoir basin. According to the account above, it was the largest natural pond (save
Fresh Pond) in what was already by the time of his writing, known as the “Brickyard
Swamp” rather than the earlier “Great Swamp.” It was also the southernmost of these
ponds, save Fresh Pond itself.
Vassal Lane is one of the older roads in Cambridge. Originally it skirted the
marsh by Muskrat Pond, and looped away south from Concord Avenue (then Concord
Turnpike), the first highway to cut through the swamp out of Cambridge to the west.
Half of the chunk of land enclosed between Vassal Lane and Concord Ave. was
purchased in 1843 by Samuel M. Cofran (Cambridge Industries: Their Rise and Progress
1893) from a local landholder, and in 1885 he expanded the holding by purchasing the
part of the site with Muskrat Pond on it from Frederick Tudor, who was an investor in the
ice industry.(Long 1971)
S.M. Cofran opened a brickyard on the site, which he passed along to his son
about ten years later. The enterprise became known as Noah Cofran & Co. – Co. being
his partner Joseph Broussard. By1892 the business made three million bricks per year,
and employed 85 men, but “made all (the) brick the old-fashioned way, by horse power.”
In comparison to the huge Bay State Brick Company, operating just a block away and
manufacturing about twenty-five million bricks per year, the scale of the Cofran
operation was quite small.(Brickmaking 1893) However, the Vassal Lane site had the
32
additional disadvantage of being one of the only clay-pits without access to the railroad
line, a handicap that confined sales to the local Boston area market, across which they
were distributed by horse and wagon, more likely to sites within Cambridge such as
Harvard University.(CHC archive)
However, the operation was significant enough to transform the site from the
bird-hunting playground described above, into the described “deep and unsightly claypits.” In 1900 Mr. Noah Cofran stated that he was “out of health and cannot expect to
continue in active business.”(Long, 1971) He offered the land to the City of Cambridge
for purchase. At the time, the sixteen acres of land was valued at $39,400 including
$9,100 worth of structures on the property. These structures included two boarding
houses rented to men with families, a house for the co-owner, and a house for the keeper
of the teams. Also, there was a “line of sheds, with engine and boiler, shafting and other
machinery.”
Mr. Cofran offered the land to the city for the low price of $37,500, because he
thought “that the city could make good use of his land by ‘improving it’ as was done to a
part of the Bay State brick property,” that is, landscaping it into some kind of a park.
Cofran himself seemed to be begging for a force to fill and renew the space that he had
wrought. His business had run him “out of health;” the space, it implies, is unhealthy,
and should be “improved.”
At the time, “the clay had been worked down to an average of 15 feet, and he was
sure that there was clay enough remaining to allow work for 30 years or more.” Therefore
the property was still a viable investment for another brick company. Since the city had
dawdled in making a decision, the property was sold to the New England Brick Co.
33
(NEBCo) in 1901. NEBCo had been created with “the avowed purpose of getting rid of
the confusion of many small manufacturers” (Long 1971), an interestingly earnest
rationale for the creation of the conglomerate that swallowed up almost all of the
brickyards in NWC at that time.
However, the brick industry had bigger problems. Both the clay and the patience
of the increasingly close residential neighbors were wearing thin by the turn of the
century. The 1896 City of Cambridge Engineer’s report commented that “for a number
of years the question of restricting the excavation of lands in North Cambridge for brickmaking purposes has been agitated. The clay from enormous areas has been dug out to a
great depth, to the positive detriment of adjoining lands, the disfigurement of the locality
as a whole, and, it was feared, to the injury of public health.” So, despite its remaining
un-mined resources, Cofran’s pit, as it had come to be called, was closed in as an active
brickyard in 1905.(Long 1971) It was now not just Cofran’s health that was threatened
by this site, but the “public health” as well. Even before the hole was filled, therefore, it
is already inscribed as a place transformed from an Eden to a malady.
Subsequently the land passed through several hands, and the pit filled with water.
The 1916 atlas of Cambridge shows a large pond and names the site as the property of an
Abraham T. Thompson. Tax records have the city acquiring a lien on the property, then
held by Frank L. McAlister, in 1919, for a failure to pay taxes. (CHC archive ) However,
the city did not foreclose the parcel officially until 1927.
In the1931 Parks Report the city announced plans to have the street department
fill and level the Vassal Lane parcel within two years. In photographs dated1933, the
pond, known as “Cofran’s Pit” no longer exists. In its place a smoky wasteland of
34
abandoned cans, trucks, and garbage expands towards a distant row of houses (the blocks
bordering the parcel to the south, east and north had been slowly subdivided and
developed into two and three family homes between 1890 and1946). Between 1931 and
1938 half of the site was developed by the Parks Service (through a WPA grant) into a
playing field and baseball diamond called Callanan Playground (named after a Rev.
Patrick H. Callanan of St. Peter’s Church on Concord Avenue) (CHC Archive). The
other half of the site continued to be used as a municipal dump until approximately 1952
(C.D.&M 1997)
The land became public. According to neighbors, there were victory gardens planted on
the edges of Callanan Field during World War II. In any case, it is certain that in 1946
eight barracks were constructed on the field next to the park to house returning veterans
and their families. These barracks were demolished in the early 1950’s. In 1958, on the
end of the site closer to Fresh Pond, the Massachusetts National Guard Armory was
built.(CHC)
Through planting gardens and making parks, the city begins to rewrite the space.
But does that return it to the idyllic land of Muskrat Pond? After these changes it still
remains that to landscape an industrial site is to make its history invisible.
But so what? Before the European settlement of New England, the indigenous
tribes who lived there had heavily regulated the landscape. Burning maintained the
“forest edge” conditions that supported their preferred game (Cronon 1983), and the
tribes living in the Cambridge area were also engaged domestic agriculture, cultivating
“maize (corn), beans, squash and tobacco” (Krim 1977 5) In 1855, just as the Brick
Industry in Cambridge began to grow in earnest, Henry David Thoreau could sit down at
35
Walden Pond, only a few miles a way, and, bemoaning the loss of various species of
plants, birds and mammals, ask “Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature that I am
conversant with?”(Quoted in Cronon 1983 4) There is no such thing as a “natural” site:
every site has a history, the vast, vast majority of which, is, and will always be, utterly
invisible and unknowable to its occupants. Humans have settled these spaces for
thousands of years. The paradise of birds therefore, was no more “inherent” than
anything else.
Yet there remains the question of the dump. What was put into it, and by who?
We will never know, and that is part of what makes it a powerful story.
“A Midway Philosophy”
The trend that emerged after the end of the brick industry, was for the former sites
to be used for public projects (whether city projects like schools and parks, or
constructions of housing “projects” by private developers). The fact that they were
something of public hazards to begin with, contributed to their falling into the hands of
the city. These sites became the manifestation of a city and neighborhood that were
reinventing themselves as progressive, liberal, civilized urban environments. All of the
clay sites became implicated in this shift, most explicitly through the education project of
the Tobin School.
This also continues the discursive shift, wherein the language is explicitly cast in
terms of the public good, which will be projected “progressively” into the future. The
contents of the past, or the contents, so to speak, of the pit, will then begin to inhabit an
exterior discourse of rumor and history, because the progressive space of the public plan
does not, without some forcing, allow for the past.
36
In1969 construction began on three new Cambridge schools; the Martin Luther
King Elementary School, the John F. Kennedy Elementary School and the John M. Tobin
School,6 which was slated for the Vassal Lane site. In preparation for the construction on
Callanan Field, test borings were done across the property in 1966 and 1968 by the New
England Test Boring Corporation in order to determine the composition of the ground.
Differing types of landfill were noted across the property, down to a level of about twenty
feet, with clay below and a water level of about seven feet below ground. (H&A memo
to Conry 1987
The three schools were designed to exploit the most exciting educational and
architectural ideas that the late 1960’s had to offer. That is, they were designed to
combine education and architectural ideas into the ideal “learning experience.” The Tobin
School, opened in 1972, was built by the Aberthaw Construction Company from an
award winning design by Pietro Belluschi –“one of the world’s leading modernist
architects and Dean of the MIT Architecture School.” (Kay, 1972) The “improvements”
hoped for by Noah Cofran were finally, seventy years later, being executed. The site was
no longer going to be “out of health.”
Tobin was built for five million dollars, and was designed to hold seven hundred
students. A description from the Cambridge Chronicle June 3 1972 describes the “light
shafts descending from the roof to rotundas …The carpet forms and alcoves are a special
feature of the building, designed by the architect to provide students with alternate spaces
to conduct learning activities outside of the classrooms yet within the school building.” It
was a space for “alternatives” and experiments, it was “special.” The Tobin was not
going to be like other schools.
6
Mr. Tobin had been Superintendent of Schools for many years and was remembered as “tall and gruff.”
37
Another article from that time opened “What did your child get out of his school
building this week? Did it teach him that life is a monochromatic prison? That teaching
is a wide open loft or a contained box?” This phrase makes the discursive turn so
quintessential of the Tobin: while talking manifestly about the spatial attributes of the
school, the sentence is actually an indictment of various educational philosophies –
traditional education being the “prison” while the open school movement is the “wide
open loft.” The Tobin, this article implies, is more progressive than any of that – it has
moved on, melded the failed trends of the past, and has created the final synthesis. The
article continued –
Styles, fads, philosophies appear and disappear in plants outmoded before their education
devices. Between the vast often-dull spaces of the open school and the rigid boxing of
older schools stands Cambridge’s new Tobin School.
At the Tobin, a midway philosophy – half open loft, half enclosed classroom – is treated
with care and vitality in hexagonal arrangements… The two-story $5 million dollar
structure tempers or individualizes the institution as it clings to the neighborhood side of
its 10-acre lot – adjacent to a clutter of billboards, semi-factory structures, and a parking
lot. The cluster look springs from the double-loaded corridors based on hexagonal shape.
“An optimal relationship between the permanent and the flexible,” say architect Kenneth
DeMay. The grouping also gives the odd-angled classrooms gaily appointed playground
corridor corners, and varied hallways which relieve the large innards from tedium … The
architects like to look to the uniform material inside and out – the soft-toned concrete
blocks – as an element linking the community view with the student view. Though to the
visitor this seems a somewhat abstract conceit, the inside of the building is appealing in is
color, carpet, and finishings.” (Kay 1972)
As noted in the article, the experience of the interior is not very different from the
experience of the exterior. The school, all in all, is very experimental. But what does it
mean to say that it has “‘an optimal relationship between the permanent and the
flexible’”? What is flexible about the building? It is manifestly playful, that is certain.
The architects are concerned about the “tedium” of the hallways, it is individualized.
Importantly, it is built to balk the trend: it is an experiment, but it is meant to be a
38
permanence, not one of the “styles, fads and philosophies that will “appear and
disappear.” It is already perfect: it will therefore resist change. Additionally, the school
is involved in recasting the neighborhood, “softening” as it does, the “semi-factory
structures.”
Most of the classrooms were built as six-sided polygons with one window, not
designed to open. Part of the modern vision of the school was that it would be incredibly
efficient to heat. With a centralized HVAC system and tightly sealed windows and
doors, the environmental load of the school, in terms of burning fuel, were designed to be
as minimal as possible. Influenced by the recent energy crisis, the design of the school
took environmental and economic concerns as tantamount. Albert Giroux, director of
public information for the Cambridge School Department described it as a “sealed
building with little intake of fresh air”(Landon 1991).
The Tobin was a “new” vision, gloriously metaphorical and egalitarian, even in
the presentation of the drab concrete to all concerned. It was to mediate between the
increasingly wealthy zone to the south and the semi-industrial and now “modern fringe”
zones on Fresh Pond parkway. But what about the past? What about the pit? They will
become important, but they will simultaneously remain as unknown as they are at this
moment. We must remember that it is not precisely upon the past that this interaction
with this “school of the future” will occur, but upon the map, the remaining evidence, the
ephemera (that, having past, is now nearly as inaccessible as the future), and the
interaction between that archive and the original vision.
39
The School of the Future
The Tobin was designed to create learning “alternatives.” This project is an
alternative way of learning from the Tobin. What does the Tobin teach this investigation
and how is that knowledge different from what it intended to represent?
Designed to house two specific “alternative” programs, the idea that the
educational experience inherently spatial as well as pedagogical, was encountered at
every bend in the corridor of this school. The two programs originally located at the
school were a “Follow Through” program, and the “School of the Future.”
The “Follow Through,” at Tobin was one of many nationwide. It was designed to
be the “follow up” to the successful Head-Start daycare program, a program that supports
low-income, “at-risk” students. The Cambridge “Follow Through’” programs were
structured on the Bank Street Model, a hybrid of the open school movement that required
a bit more structure and organization. In theory at least, the Tobin was the perfect place
to house it.
The “School of the Future” was a program unique to the Tobin, to Cambridge,
and to the moment of its inception. Also called the “Computer School,” its mission was
to act as the testing ground for uses of computers and new technologies in elementary
education, information that would be compiled and then disseminated across the city.
Both programs were initially very well staffed and well funded.(Hanna Interview with
Tobin Teacher 2003)
The Tobin, then, housed projects that were specific to two important progressive
themes. Headstart, while an educational program, was also a social program – essentially
designed to provide a counterpoint to the disadvantages that poverty brings to educational
possibilities. Tobin therefore, in one half of the building was to some degree addressing
40
this problem of “the geography of difference,” since these geographies are often socioeconomic. The School of the Future on the other hand (and the other side) addressed the
question of information technologies, which are also heavily implicated. Computers were
giving this city another tool with which to map and categorize itself, that they would
pass on to their children. The power to enact change, as this project tries to illustrate (and
as many have before), begins, after all, with these two themes – economic power and the
power to understand and wield information. One level, the Tobin itself, at the moment of
its conception, can be seen as an “activist” project. On top of the old, unhealthy land a
new vision for a healthy future was mapped.
On January 26, 1972 four hundred students transferred to the Tobin from the
ancient Russell School on Fairweather St. – a semester later than planned because of
unplanned leaking of the roof and other structural problems with the building(Gifford
1971). Student complaints, from the very beginning included the concrete walls and the
huge size, but were balanced by general appreciation for other aspects of the building,
such as the huge new gymnasium and cafeteria.(Swanson 1972)
“Follow Through” ended up looking differently than had been hoped. The classes
had been designed to be at least 50% Headstart students in composition, but the Bank
Street model appealed to the middle class. Therefore, since Cambridge has a moderated
school choice program, Follow Through slowly became almost completely middle class
students. The “Computer School” suffered a very different yet parallel fate. Summing
up the parable, one teacher explained that it was “because it’s hard to always be the
‘School of the Future’” (Hanna, Interview with Tobin Teacher, 2003). Though the
program was ultimately successful in that computers began to be integrated across the
41
city in all classrooms using models developed at the Tobin, it was of course the cause of
its own demise, becoming year by year more obsolete.
The fixed, futuristic vision of the city school was losing its progressive edge as it
became integrated into the future and the city itself. As in the “workers cottages” of
North Cambridge, affluence was edging out poverty in the classrooms at the Tobin, and
with it the capital of its progressive vision. Future technology was becoming present
technology, depriving the Computer School of its singularity and its ability to map what
had not yet been thought by other locations.
Exacerbating the changes of the times were cuts in education funding and the
gradual return to focusing on standardized testing and schooling during the eighties and
nineties. “It just ended up more and more that you were a follow through teacher because
you’d always been a follow through teacher, but the stuff that went with that, all the
institutional supports, kind of evaporated.” (Hanna Interview with Tobin Teacher 2003)
As the two experimental programs became weaker, swallowed up into the larger,
increasingly undifferentiated school, the building’s unwieldy size became more and more
problematic. The intimate, “energetic” feeling, and dynamic exchange that had fueled
the schools in the seventies was forgotten: group staff meetings were moved to the
gigantic auditorium.
Symptomatically, the architectural details designed to foster community for two
tightly run schools, began to act as obstructions to the interactions of faculty and students
trying to be a part of one school. Teachers might work for a year in the building and
never get to know the people working in the other wings; the bending hallways,
impossible to see down, making it difficult to know what students, much less faculty,
42
were doing at the other end of the hall. This is just one way that the building is, in its
“flexibility” inflexible. How did the ideas that motivated the plans for this building
misstep? The Tobin School and ended up creating a studying and working environment
that was particularly incompatible with its progressive vision. One that was disruptive,
uncomfortable and possibly dangerous.
Managing the Facilities
Funding constraints and bureaucracy also conspired to leave the position of
Facilities Manager for the Cambridge Public School System vacant for all of the 1980’s,
contributing to the degeneration of certain building systems – not just at Tobin, but
citywide. There was money in the budget for the position, but it had never been
advertised for (CM Archive) . Therefore, people occupying city buildings were left
somewhat to their own devices.
Teachers at the Tobin became engaged in the process of figuring out the degree to
which the educational ideologies employed at the school were structurally predetermined.
Teacher initiated renovations and revolutions began to occur on both the physical and
theoretical levels, albeit limited by the basic construction of the building. The inside of
the building became progressively more riotous with color, such as murals of underwater
seascapes, the teachers having “personally painted the halls themselves, because they just
got so sick of this really ugly, dreary, depressing concrete… the paint job isn’t all that
good, and the colors aren’t all the same, and its kind of ticky-tacky in a way, but its better
than nothing.” (Hanna Interview with Tobin Teacher, 2003)
However, as it did even before the school opened, the roof continued to “leak
really badly. There’s just giant puddles when it rains, especially in the halls… originally
43
there was carpet on all the floors, but then they determined that to be poisonous and so
they took them up.”(Hanna Interview with Tobin Teacher 2003) The alternative
constructions of space that the architect built in have receive similarly mixed reviews,
though some aspects of the architecture seem to have been “put there by someone who
wasn’t a teacher, or if they had an idea they didn’t tell us what it was.”
Obviously larger in scale than would have been possible in a smaller building, the
facilities such as the library, auditorium and gymnasium have always been appreciated by
both students and faculty, with small caveats, such as their terrible acoustics, particularly
in the cafeteria, causing them to be incredibly loud. The general sentiment, however,
about the scale of the school, seemed to be that “I wish someone had said, every school
should have 300 kids, build something for 300 kids.”(Hanna Interview with Tobin
Teacher 2003)
Additionally, the problems that exhibited themselves around the school as a
whole, both theoretically and physically, immediately manifested themselves on a
smaller, more pernicious scale in certain classrooms. For example, the noise problem in
the cafeteria – partially mediated by the later installation of racks of banners and flags
hanging from the ceiling – echoed into the nearby basement classrooms. These rooms,
poorly designed for sound to begin with, were the location of some of the first complaints
registered about the building.
The wall-to-wall carpeting installed in most of the building dulled noise levels
somewhat. It was, however , impractical in a place like the Art room, and unlike some
other rooms, the Art room, near the cafeteria, was not equipped with acoustical tiles in
44
the ceiling and so functioned as a “cement echo chamber”(Z. 1980) from its first days of
use.7
Compounding the generally poor acoustics of the building, the ubiquitous unit
ventilators (UV’s) of the HVAC system were extremely loud to run. As a result of this,
many teachers switched the UV’s off while they were teaching, vastly decreasing the
circulation of air in the rooms (most of which did not have operable windows). In
addition to the high levels of noise in room # 139, there was a crawl space “about 3.5-4
feet higher than the art room and cafeteria floors. The large closet at the back of (the)
room backed up to this space & there were holes through which heavier-than air gasses
could flow,”(Z. 2) according to Mr. Z8, the teacher who taught there from 1973-1991.
Whether heavier-than air gasses were flowing, what those gasses might have been, and
what their ultimate effect would have been is uncertain. But why did he even think about
“heavier than air gasses”? Was there a story that implied that that was how dangerous
gasses worked, for example, how they had worked in the gas chambers of the Holocaust?
In Z’s notes imply certain attempts at narrativizing the issues he was facing. For
example, he writes that “The crawl space behind cafeteria & my room had large cracks in
cement floor which allowed methane gas & other toxic fumes to escape (I have
photos).”(Z 1) He generates evidence from the beginning, in the form of “photos,” yet
attaching that form of proof to the speculation that there are “toxic fumes” escaping, as
though the cracks themselves would be evidence enough to that. And later, “The school
was named as a former hazardous toxic dump site by The Boston Globe. The school was
built on the dump where toxic chemicals from (Dewey & Almey?) were piled.” Dewey
7
Because most of the carpeting in the school was removed in the early ‘90’s, deemed to be “poisonous” the
symptom of ‘ringing ears’ is basic to many descriptions of working at the Tobin School.
8
I use pseudonyms for the teachers and parents involved in order to preserve anonymity.
45
and Almey were a chemical company in Cambridge during the first half of the century.
There is no evidence that I have found or heard of that there are specifically “toxic”
chemicals in the dump (which is not to say there is any proof that there are not toxic
chemicals). However, the possibility that there are “chemicals” at all allows the easy
association with “toxicity.” “Toxicity” in turn, connects to a known chemical company
also in the neighborhood. Thus a narrative is built – it becomes possible, though
speculative.
The Boston Globe reference is to an article headlined “State Lists 226 New
Hazardous Waste Sites,”(Dabilis 1987) which reports on the new Department of
Environmental Quality Engineering list citing 226 sites where the disposal of hazardous
materials had been confirmed. The Tobin School – cited in the fourth paragraph along
with a variety of other locations including the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Hospital and
the Middlesex County House of Correction – is not among these 226.
That is, The Boston Globe does not name it as a confirmed hazardous waste site.
It and the other sites listed are on a different list of “408 potential sites that need to be
investigated.” But the fact that it is mentioned in an article by that headline blurs the
lines – it becomes hazardous, although it is technically only potential. This is where the
official discourse begins to deteriorate – it is easy to name something as being “potential”
when you are not “potentially” inhaling its fumes every day. In this example, it is
difficult to say whose narrative has the most authority – that of the teacher willing to
make the conceptual leap he believes needs to be made to safeguard his health, or that of
the experts who can label something “potential” and not “actual.” For Z the site is an
unknown, hemorrhaging its contents into his lungs. He must create a story.
46
Z’s narrative was the first about the toxicity of the Tobin school, and would
inform those that followed it.
Regardless of the details of his claims, it is clear that the gigantic HVAC system
that supplied ventilation the Art room never functioned very well. Mr. Z filed his first
grievance with the Cambridge Teacher’s Union (CTA) in 1979, six years after he began
working at Tobin. The key complaint cited in the grievance was the extreme
temperatures recorded in the classroom – arbitrarily from 60-90 degrees depending on the
day, and poor ventilation, particularly important in an art room. Additionally the
thermostat gauging temperature in the room did not function correctly.
At the last minute, Z added a final, crucial, caveat to his grievance, requesting the
“reinstatement of lost sick days.” Z's grievance, citing these concerns as contractual
violations of working conditions, was denied. In response to that grievance (#42-__-__),
the superintendent’s office, on March 20, 1980, stated that “This is not a subject for a
grievance. Heating systems are not mentioned in Article XV and hence cannot be
considered a contractual right.” Though Z, the first to address the issue to the union, had
felt supported by his colleagues, none of them showed up to testify on his behalf. He also
recounted in his notes that Mr. L “told school committee they could not grant this
grievance as it would open up many law suits.”(Z)
The question of lawsuits is perplexing if the subtext, indicated by the final clause
regarding sick days, is not taken into account. What Z was grieving about was not the
particularity of having to wear hats and gloves while he taught painting class, but a class
of irregular and unknown environmental conditions that he saw as contributing to the
decline of his health since he began teaching at the Tobin. His notes state that “prior to
47
his time I had no history of these ailments,” these ailments being bronchitis, pneumonia,
pleurisy, sinus and assorted pulmonary ills. By 1979 Z believed that “these conditions
have been aggravated, if not caused by the extreme conditions in the classroom.”(Z 1980
Attachment)
However, Z does not state any of his ideas about the land or its effect on his body
in his grievance. The document is strictly about the temperature conditions. Although
the scientific and legal language in which to couch these suspicions does not yet exists,
the possible narrative frameworks are understood by both parties – made explicit through
the references to “sick days” and “law suits.” The map of the land is already intruding
silently onto the map of the body.
That summer Z was let go by the city of Cambridge, even though he had seniority
over some of those who remained, including one Ms. A, who had been Z’s student
teacher in room139, and remembered wearing boots and coats to teach when Z was out
sick. According to Z.’s notes, A. testified to the CTA that her race, under Affirmative
Action laws, should not be a deciding factor, and that Z. should not have been let go.
That summer Z was hospitalized and operated on for “complications and hernia of throat
caused by constant coughing.”(Z 3) B was hired back the following year, but Mr. K
advised him to “’cool it’ if [he] wanted to hold [his] job.” Z wrote that he complied
because he had health bills to deal with and needed to keep it, but that “after a few years
& student deaths & teacher illnesses I ignored K’s warning.”(Z 2000)
Albert Giroux, director of public information for the Cambridge School
Department also noted “numerous health complaints from the three other Cambridge
schools constructed during that time”.(Landon 1991) After the failure of his grievances
48
and appeals, Z brought his documentation, including 80 pages of medical records and
logbook records of the classroom temperatures over several months, to the environmental
law firm McGregor, Shea & Dallober of Boston. According to Z’s notes, he paid the
firm thousands of dollars to “check on things – they basically took my money & did
nothing.”(Z 1)
A lawyers’ job in court is essentially to prove a relationship between a body of
evidence and a particular narrative, one that is exclusive of an opposing narrative about
the same body of evidence. However, the legal connection, the one of proof, in cases that
connect “environmental” problems to health problems, has been extremely difficult to
make in court historically – even in cases as obvious and egregious as Bhopal. Though it
has become easier in the united states, even the popular narratives of the heros and
heroines of the movement are not always successful ones. However, here the neglect of
the law firm may be simple neglect, or it may be a way of saying “we cannot connect
your evidence and your narrative.” That does not mean that it is not true, simply that it
cannot be connected, that is, proven.9
9
Problems demand solutions through a system that identifies a culprit and punishes him/her or it, in the
case of a corporation. In the film A Civil Action, about the case against Grace Chemical and Beatrice Foods
for contaminating the drinking water in Woburn, Massachusetts where there had been a cluster of deaths to
pediatric cancer, a mother-turned-activist who has lost her son sums up to the hot-shot personal injury
lawyer what it is that she and the other parents who have lost children want from the trial: “We don’t want
money,” she says. “We want someone to knock on our door and say ‘I’m sorry.’” In the film there are
scenes of the deposition of the families who have been made sick by contaminated drinking water: the
lawyers ask each victim questions like “ do you pump your own gas? Do you use an anti-perspiriant
deodorant? Do you eat burned bacon?” The generically carcinogenic nature of the daily environment
serves as a smokescreen for any specific accusation of culpability. Situations that involve the manufacture
rather than the use of a product are generally less ambiguous, because exposures to toxins tend to be more
easily identified physically, and involve a pattern of use, such as disposal or workplace exposure. This was
the case in the disposal case in A Civil Action. Through a legal process like that narrated by A Civil Action
(a book and film which made the real-life heroine mother, Anne Anderson, very angry, because it exploited
a courtroom drama while, just as the courts had, leaving the issue at hand to fester) victims hope to have
their loss explained, to have someone accept responsibility for causing this death, and then to begin the
work of forgiveness (at the end of this particular case the parents received no apology, a paltry settlement,
and no clean-up of the contaminated site).
49
Z had been told that during the first year after opening, “the plantings around the
school & field all died & new top soil was added & new plants were put in to replace the
old.” However, in 1992 Jack Kelly, Cambridge Arborist checked on the vegetation and
trees surrounding Tobin and noted that while several of them were suffering from fungal
infections, they did not show evidence of methane poisoning – the effects of which he
was very familiar with from the city’s efforts at landscaping the other nearby former
landfill, Mayor Thomas Danehy Park. (Tobin-Environmental-Working-Group 1991)
Z developed ideas about evidence and a narrative about the origins of the site as
well as the nature of the contamination. His room, located nearest to what would eventual
become the nexus of the debate, that is, the cracks in the foundation, was probably the
most dangerous location in the school, and it was in part due to his incessant complaints
that an analysis of the air quality in the Tobin was finally carried out.
Testing the Air
The first air quality testing done at the Tobin was an Air Quality Monitoring
report submitted by Haley & Aldrich, Inc. on October 31, 1986. The consultants tested
the air in three crawlspaces in the school, particularly above the cracks in the foundation.
They noted that the crawlspaces had certain visible residues evident and in one case had
some solvents stored in them, and they measured elevated methane levels in all three
crawlspaces.
However, the five-page report concluded that “methane is present in the three
crawl spaces at the Tobin School but not at concentration that would pose health hazards
or unsafe conditions. Closing the separated and settled areas of the floor slabs with the
sealing compounds might assist in eliminating the leaking of methane into the crawl
50
spaces. No other volatile gases were detected in concentrations that would be of concern
to public health.”(Fishman 1986 4) Additionally, they noted that “Closing the separated
and settled areas of the floor slabs with the sealing compounds might assist in eliminating
the leaking of methane into the crawl spaces.” (Fishman 1986 4)
Simultaneously, as per a request from Haley & Aldrich, the 1966/68 boring data
was retrieved from the archives of the Cambridge Department of Public Works (DPW)
and then passed on to James Conry, City Manager. Everett Kennedy of the DPW noted
in a memo: “there is apparently no particular reference to soil material(s) in the
specifications. The boring data is obviously open to interpretation.”(Kennedy 1986)
The subjectivity of the data had as much to do with the shift in the constitution of
its audience as with the changing technologies of measurement. Descriptive categories
such as color, texture and plasticity did not fit into the language of an investigation about
chemical composition rather than structural engineering. This is part of a shift in ideas
about safety – partly due to different stories of environmental contamination such as
Love Canal in Niagara Falls. That is, the progressive plan of the school had not been
able to predict the information that would come to be important ten years ahead. The
linguistic parameters for description used to formulate the information whose substance
was so desired thirty years later, became suddenly and utterly inadequate.
In 1987 Marie Orben, then president of the Cambridge Teacher’s Association
(CTA – the teacher’s union), sympathetic to the cause of what had by then become a
group of grieving Tobin teachers, refunded 11,000, or 70% of the sick days to Tobin
teachers, in addition to 2,700 that had been refunded a few years previous(Landon 1991).
This was a result of two class action suits, that is suits filed by the teachers at the Tobin
51
as a group, on the air quality, and constituted 70% of all sick time that had been given at
the school. (CHEJ, Center for Health). This fact is only mentioned in passing in Z’s
notes, but it is crucial because it constitutes a huge expense for the Cambridge School
Department, and therefore must be viewed as a form of legal settlement.
Part of the antagonism between teacher and parent activism centers around this
sick time deal. Parents concerned about their child’s health viewed the sick day refund as
little more than hush money, purchasing the ensuing silence of the teachers about the
problems with the building.
In the spring of 1991the Cambridge Public Schools commissioned another Air
Quality Status Report, this time from Environmental Health & Engineering, Inc. (EHE)
of Newton, MA constituting thirty-six pages of data, which also covered an analysis of
the HVAC system. All of the UV’s had apparently been overhauled during the summer
of 1990, and received generally good reviews from EHE (positing, of course, that the
units were turned on). The air was tested for
…total volatile organic compounds, speciated volatile organic compounds, respirable
particulate matter, pesticides, formaldehyde, and bioaerosols. Carpet in various locations
was sampled for dust mites and fungi. Carbon dioxide concentrations and air exchange
rates were measure in various rooms of the school to determine the efficiency of the
ventilation systems.(EHE An Assessment of Indoor Air Quality and Ventilation at the
Tobin Elementary School Cambridge, Massachusetts 1991 8)
The samples were collected during the school day, at a height of six feet from the
floor and as far from the walls as possible. Contaminants were found to be within
“accepted indoor air quality guidelines,” in spite of elevated levels of CO2 and poor air
exchange rates. 90% of the classrooms were within accepted ASHRAE (American
Society of Heating, Refrigeration & Air-Conditioning Engineers) guidelines. The report
commented that “although no benzene measurements were greater than 1.0ppb, the
52
World Health Organization’s (WHO) guideline of 0.3 ppb was slightly exceeded in some
cases. It then editorialized
Three points should help place the benzene results in perspective. First, concentrations
measured in these buildings are similar to outdoor ground level concentrations measured
at most locations. Second, these concentrations are similar to those found in other
buildings and residences representative of those across the U.S. Third, benzene is a
ubiquitous compound that is found in many common household and office products. It is
also formed as a by-product of many processes, including combustion of materials such
as tobacco and gasoline. The WHO’s stringent guidelines for benzene reflects the fact
that exposure should be minimized even though the compound is ubiquitous.(EH&E An
Assessment of Indoor Air Quality and Ventilation at the Tobin Elementary School
Cambridge, Massachusetts 1991 8)
EHE presented a certain body of data to the school system. Along with that data,
they presented a certain interpretation of it. The above passage indicates a complicated
logic involved in the analysis of environmental issues like indoor air quality. That is, the
danger was presented by the findings as negligible not because it wasn’t harmful, but
because it was common. The rationale behind this being, if this were so dangerous
wouldn’t everyone be sick? The last sentence, however, betrays the bias – the WHO
limit allows that the compound is both dangerous and ubiquitous.
The possible arguments that go along with this are in fact part of the tension of
this project – that is, why do the students at Tobin deserve better than anyone else? It
was, however, and remains beside the point. It must be hoped, though it cannot be
guaranteed, that the safeties demanded by places like the Tobin can inform discourses
about safeties elsewhere (or, in a negative formulation, sick children at the Tobin make
no one else healthier).
Intuiting Danger
In 1990, Mr. Z transferred and began teaching art at the High school. He later
commented in his notes that the year he left “the parents raised Hell.” Though Z left and
53
the teachers had their sick times, the issue was only beginning to come to the fore.
Though the parents groups would eventually have access to Z’s notes, the chronic or
sudden illnesses of their children were also situated in terms of a growing cultural
understanding of the dangers posed by exposure to chemicals and closed interior spaces.
The parents goals therefore, while scientific, were also narrative.
Stories
circulating the school – assisted by the barren and unusual design – of toxins in the air
were amplified by the real if inexplicable symptoms of their children. But a crucial part
of even conceiving of the building as a threat involved having a story that explained why
it was threatening and what had caused the threat to appear; that is, to begin with, the
“historical commission lore.”
These narratives are so crucial because coming to an awareness of environmental
damage or danger is usually counter-intuitive. We have a necessarily intuitive
relationship to our physical world – every breath and movement being dependent on a set
of preexisting natural and physical laws (and a presumed understanding of the nature of
our relevant environment). It requires a revolutionary thought to understand that
something assumed static and safe, so much so that it is nearly invisible, has become
unstable and possibly dangerous (it becomes possible, as we will see later with the
Bhopal story, because it has happened before). There are cultural, legal and historical
documents and dynamics that contribute to this process.
However, once that story has been intuited then any experience involving a
related set of parameters becomes suspect. It creates a chimera: something has been
destabilized and noticed in a primary instance and subsequently there is no reason to
assume that this world is in order. Allowing a suspicion.
54
The parents think the Tobin School has a serious case of “sick building syndrome” – the
malady that afflicted the high school a few years back. They say unacceptably high
levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs)10 are in the air inside the school, and that
the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system isn’t capable of circulation
adequate levels of fresh air through the building… The debate began about a year ago
when several parents noticed symptoms in their children such a lethargy, typically found
among sick people who spend a lot of time in ‘sick buildings.’ Should the Tobin School
be opened? Bob Rawson, Cambridge Chronicle, 8/22/1991
A building is “sick” basically, when it makes the people in it sick. So sick people
can be loosely connected to a sick building and vice versa. The Tobin might have had
enough trouble, just with its neglected HVAC system, but the persistent idea of the
somehow sick land underneath would not go away. The school was understood as a safe
and progressive zone. But land has memory. Transforming land is often about making it
forget what it has been; sometimes it can forget and sometimes it can’t, and we can’t
always tell the difference.
In spring of1991parents became actively involved in the debate over school
safety. Rates of asthma and other respiratory complaints were high, as well as general
complaints of fatigue, though rates of sickness were not documented precisely. Around
the same time the CTA administered its first health study of the faculty at the school.
The survey asked question about the work environment – such as the temperature, the
UV, the windows – and then about health symptoms and missed work, although the data
generated ended up being difficult to quantify and more difficult to analyze, although it
was clear that many believed that their symptoms were connected to the school
environment.
10
“VOC’s are a class of carbon-based chemicals that volatilize, or evaporate, at room temperature.” – these
include solvents, Organochlorides, including pesticides and PCB’s, phenols – in petroleum compounds,
disinfectants, plastics, cleaners-, benzene, formaldehyde, hydrocarbons such as nalpthalene and chloroform
and a many other categories of chemicals. –Tate, Nicholas. The Sick Building Syndrome, New Horizon
Press, 1994. Pg. 81. VOC’s are carried up in methane, so elevated methane levels can signify VOC’s.
55
In response to EHE’s non-findings, the parents formed the Tobin Environmental
Working Group in early May 1991, as a part of the PTO. They generated a list of “40
points,” demands that they claimed city needed to address in order to make the school
safe. Scrawled minutes taken by CM on 6/18/91demand both a reexamination of the
chemical data, a compilation of health data, and, importantly, that a chain of causal
factors be ascertained. The list goes
< Prior site (H. study from Z.) use determined
< Air retested (basement + ambient outside) properly + immediately (worst case, crawl
space, outside air)
< Epidemiological survey?
< Symptoms compiled and circulated?
< Official notification at city + state level?
< Toxic plume running towards school from gas stations??? Aquifer reversed since
level of Fresh Pond Raised?
* Rumor Prior owner – stipulated that nothing should ever be built on it.
Use for last 100 years.
Owner?/ occupation?/ type of land permits/ died left it to city/
Xeroxes of everything
Charlie Sullivan Hist. Commission
Charlie and his wife run the Cambridge Historical Commission, which is charged
(among other things) with the recording and preserving of the city’s historic buildings.
One of its first projects was the survey project, for which Arthur Krim wrote the NWC
book.
What was the narrative frame within which the Tobin issue was perceived and
how was it constituted? Given statistical reports that confirmed nothing and did so in the
language of science, alongside a set of inexplicable and vague illnesses, how could
connections be drawn in a meaningful way? How could correlations be narrated in order
to draw prove a narrative with the set of available evidence? As Carlo Ginzburg writes,
of “History, rhetoric, proof: in this sequence, the least obvious term today is the last. The
56
widely accepted contiguity between history and rhetoric has pushed aside the one
between history and proof.” (Ginzburg)
You look for a story, built out of evidence and out of other stories, from other
parts of the country and the world. And so I first return again to the Tobin School file at
CHC. The story that the file tells is still suggestive. A marshy tract with a small pond
(indicated on the old maps with lovely, repetitive tufts of swamp grass) becomes,
according to tax records, a roughneck clay pit, which is then passed on to the City of
Cambridge. Cambridge uses it as a dump, and then constructs a playing field, and then
eventually builds an architectural and educational experiment on top of it. Best of all are
the photos from 1933, gritty and ambiguous. Later, a pristinely postmodern design rises
grayishly out of the earth in grayish newspaper clippings and overblown rhetoric.
The beginnings of the story. Then, my mother’s files from that time. There are,
for example, several pamphlets from the Department of Environmental Quality
Engineering (DEQE, which subsequently became the Department of Environmental
Protection (DEP)). Dated April 1989, they detail phases of the “Massachusetts
Contingency Plan” based upon the “Massachusetts Superfund Law” the three pamphlets
advise citizens on “Risk Characterization and Evaluation” of releases of oil or hazardous
materials, “Public Involvement in Disposal Site Cleanups,” and “The Cleanup Phases.”
Public involvement, the pamphlet states, “begins with the referral of a potential disposal
site to DEQE. Any resident can report a location as a potential disposal site” (DEQE
pamphlet p.2).
The pamphlet on risk describes the types of risks that are posed by a disposal site.
57
This illustration depicts a boy (the receptor) play in soil (the medium) at the disposal site
(the exposure point). He may accidentally eat some of the soil (the rout of exposure).
Exposure point concentrations evaluated for risks are those at the disposal site itself in a
single, medium, soil.
… The oil or hazardous materials are also present in the air, which seeps into the house
from the soil below. The receptor remains the same; the migration pathways are the
ground water (which transports the contaminants from the site) and the subsurface soil.
The exposure point is the home, the route of exposure is breathing the air. Exposure
point concentrations are measure from the contaminants in the medium, which is the
indoor air.
Ultimately, the risk that a disposal site presents depends on the types, quantities, and
concentrations of oil or hazardous materials (some materials are more hazardous than
others), the length of time someone may be exposed to the contaminant, the route of
exposure, and the sensitivity of the receptors (e.g., the elderly, pregnant women, and
children are often more sensitive to certain contaminants than other receptors. (DEQE
pamphlet p.4)
In this state pamphlet from 1989, the process of connecting a hazard with its
manifestation is made explicit, drawn and demonstrated. Parables are drawn about the
possible pathways for toxins, although without mentioning or connecting them to
possible symptoms. It traces the cause to the source without attaching it to the effect.11 It
maps spaces as pathways between chemicals and bodies, explicitly training people in
making these kinds of counterintuitive leaps, and constitutes activism as being the
activity of blocking those pathways. It is another piece of the story.
But the DEP map allows the suspicion then requires proof, the means to which is
documentation. The problem is that documentation is only related to proof by means of
analysis, a method that can only approximate infallibility if it can normalize a set of
parameters for an abnormal event or situation (a problem encountered in the EHE report).
It must establish what a normal human response to a particular environment; or, it must
attempt to intuit an abnormal environment from observed human responses, facts
mediated by subjective processes.
11
Also in the file was a copy of a piece of legislation dated February 21 st 1991, the day that Representative
Kennedy put before the house the bill known as “the Indoor Air Quality Act of 1991” which aimed to
create a program to target and regulate indoor air quality on a national basis. The bill eventually passed.
58
Also in the archive were a variety of other narrativizing documents. A sixty-nine
page EPA pamphlet, for example, from October 1990 called “Environmental Hazards in
Your School” and a series of articles on Multiple Chemical Syndrome and Sick Schools.
One article writes
…certain chemicals in high doses can obviously cause death (as in Bhopal, India) [but]
many doctors question whterh small traces of toxic chemicals can acrually make us ill.
“I’m not aware of any solid scientific evidence that normal elvels of toxic chemical
produce any health effects in the body,” says Lance A Wallace, Ph.D, a researcher with
the EPA. “on the other hand,” he adds, “we installed a new carpet in EPA headquarters
about three years aog, and more than a hundred people got sick. About a dozen still can’t
work in the building. If you ask any of them about MCS, they’ll say, ‘I’ve got it.’
Thousands of people really are sick. The question is whether they’re reacting to
chemicals or something else. (Browder, 1992)
This passage brings up a number of issues. One, of course, is that the Tobin is
dealing with minute quantities of substances: another, however, is that these substances
do have manifest effects, though not consistently and therefore not always recognizable.
But what might be the most important point is the last one, which we must read beyond.
In this situation it is not just that it is impossible to know exactly if and how chemicals
cause symptoms – but that simultaneously, in environments with subtle hazards like this
nearly on every corner, as is the case in some of NWC, it can be impossible to know
exactly where this threat comes from.
But we are still looking for the heart of the matter, that is, the examples that make
these types of fears compelling. That is, these narratives need specific “events” in order
for them to be interpreted meaningfully at an emotional level – Tobin needs Bhopal, it
needs Love Canal, it need Legionnaire’s disease (the first big indoor air quality case,
where twenty-nine people died of a pneumonia at a hotel convention), and it needs
Superfund and the types of documentation and pamphlets that EPA and DEP produce, in
order for parents and teachers to be able to put together a story about a toxic dump under
59
a modern school that is harming the health of the people inside; the story of the sick
school.
For example, in another article from my mother’s archive, that is, the activist archive,
from – of all places – the Bangor Daily news of August 17-18, 1991, I find an article
which connects sick buildings to the phenomenon of “thermal tightening.” This is what
Giroux was referring to when he noted that the Tobin had “little intake” of fresh air. It
was the architectural response to the energy crisis. The article writes that
“Sick building syndrome” has becomes increasingly common since the energy crisis has
caused builders to make new construction more air tight allowing contaminants to
concentrate in homes and office buildings. Commercial buildings that once required
ventilation systems that provided 10 cubic feet per minute (cfm) of fresh air per occupant.
1n the 1970s energy crisis that requirement was halved to 5 cfm. (Wood, 1991)
And so to loop – as we must – around again, it is not, of course just highly toxic
materials, but a wide variety of factors in buildings that have been found to have an effect
on students, their health, and their ability to learn the material being presented to them.
In a paper submitted to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on science
in 1999, it was stated that
There is now considerable empirical support for the argument that a variety of sustainable
design characteristics that can have a significant influence on student behavior and
academic achievement as well. Physical and environmental conditions such as fullspectrum and natural lighting, the reduction of noise through proper location and siting of
schools, optimal thermal conditions, sick buildings and indoor air quality, school size and
class size and embedding schools within their communities all may have an impact on
educational outcomes. (Lackney, 1999)
And so here we are, full circle. The progressive vision of the Tobin, that the
space and the imperative were so integral to each other has been verified – though
60
unfortunately through the experiences of places like itself. It suffered, perhaps, from
trying to know too much too soon.
The National Weather Service
Among the parents with sick children was a statistician named H a professor at a
Massachusetts University. His daughter was in Ms. S____’s 4th grade class (one of the
teachers who has passed away and was discussed in conversation with S. at the house
wares store), on the second floor. His daughter has been very sick for many years with
inexplicable exhaustion and nausea since her time at the Tobin. Soon after the EHE
Report became public in May 1991, H set to work dismantling it, compiling a point-bypoint rebuttal to the thirty-six pages of data and summary that the consultants had
provided.
H’s rebuttal calls attention to the subjectivity not just of narrations of history, but
to narrations of data, whose quotients are only meaningful in relation to a matrix of
ambient conditions and a contented body of limits, regulations and effects. As a person
from the city government was quoted anecdotally as saying “our ability to measure toxins
still far outstrips our ability to interpret it.”
Part of what this implies is that meaningful narration of and interpretation of data
and symptoms in a situation like this is crucially everyone’s responsibility. Though we
can follow the DEP maps and try to make the connection between source and exposure,
this will not interpret the poorly understood effects of chemicals on children (or anyone)
for us. It is dangerous, therefore, to allow discourses about the constantly shifting
environments around us to become the propriety territory of experts. Or rather, it is
61
crucial that there be all kinds of experts within every demographic who can provide
different reads on the analytic process.
The narrative about the site that opens the rebuttal, which does not cite references,
is as follows: “The Tobin School building plans are dated 1969. The School was
constructed on land which the City acquired shortly after the turn of the Century. The
site contains undifferentiated waste fill and is in close proximity to industrial sites,
chemical waste dumping areas, a former City dump to which tunnel tills and tailings were
added, high and low volume gasoline stations, a car dealership with a body shop, the City
water purification plant, and one of the city water supplies. The site is topologically
depressed. It sits about 5 meters above sea level and has ground water influenced form
both proximal and distal sources. Major changes in the hydrogeology of the influencing
area have occurred since the School was built.”(H Environmental Quality at the Tobin
School 1991) H. stated that there were “many problems of fact, method, model and
posture” contained in the EH&E report.
This is the narrative about the site that is that frames the analysis to follow. It
situates the school as being in at the center of a vortex of potentially dangerous
influences. It is on top of “undifferentiated waste,” near industry, other dumps, gas
stations, and a car dealership, and it is “topologically depressed” a statement which
implies a vulnerability to all of these things: that is, they will flow downwards, and so, it
seems, towards the Tobin School. While refraining from making the statement that the
location is literally hazardous, this description places the school in a centrally vulnerable
position to a number of other locations whose designations connote danger, thereby
evoking the manifold possibilities for contamination. We all know stories of dumps, gas
62
stations and industries whose ephemera have caused harm, and yet it does not need to be
spelled out for us to understand: there is an unknown at work here. This place is
different.
This document is a scathing twenty-nine pages that re-situates the data from the
slick EHE report. Graphs compare the ambient temperature and humidity outdoors as
reported by EHE for each test date and time to the ambient temperature and humidity for
that day and time as reported by the Weather Services Corporation of Bedford, MA for
the National Weather Service (WSC/NWS) on the days when they measured CO2 and
airflow levels. Every temperature reading reported by EHE was higher than the NWS
data – of the seven readings four were more than twenty degrees Fahrenheit higher than
the EHE data. All but one of the relative humidity reading recorded by EHE erred on the
side of being lower than the NWS data, one, on 1/9/91by 52.5%.
H notes that “these data show a biasing toward deflated relative humidity and
inflated temperatures. The extent, direction and pattern of these errors have the
consequence of invalidating EHE data.” Additionally, EHE, despite numerous requests,
never furnished the temperature and humidity data that they used to calculate the VOC
levels on the days that those tests were conducted. H states that “if similar errors
appeared on the dates of VOC sampling, a great underestimation of VOC levels could
have occurred. Estimation of VOC levels is heavily dependent on humidity, temperature,
appropriate sampling, barometric pressure and so forth.12 (H Environmental Quality at
the Tobin School 1991)
12
If EHE reported a 20 L (liter) sample to the analytic laboratory and that sample were truly 10 L then one
source of substantial error in estimating VOC levels could exist. A conservative interpretation dictates that
EHE found VOC’s above ambient levels, but the exact values of the levels is indeterminate.”
63
The report goes on: for six rooms where airflow was measured, the square footage
of the rooms was underestimated in the EHE report up to 30%. Because of how the
airflow is measured, this underestimation makes the airflow seem greater than it actually
could be. H goes on, based on a particular correlation, to explain “one basis for showing
systematic manipulation of data.”13 (p. 11)
The EHE data points, according to the rebuttal, “extend out of the expected range
of operation for which the HVAC system was designed... an overwhelming majority of
the values indicated air exchanges above the level which the Tobin HVAC system is
capable of producing…. There were above hurricane force winds racing through the
Tobin ventilation system according to these measurements (figure 1in the EHE report).”
The primary point of the EHE report had been that in many rooms the levels of
CO2 feel below ASHRAE minimum standards for dangerous exposure. However, as
referenced, those standards represent a minimum for “typical conditions.”
‘If other internally generated contaminants are present, the minimum ventilation
requirements may not be adequate.’ At the Tobin, there are other contaminants and that
speaks to why our children are getting sick and the staff have filed so many grievances
over the years. (Environmental Quality at the Tobin School p. 13)
Also, if the rooms that had low occupancy when they were tested are adjusted to
the standard occupancy rate, many rooms exceed the “no complaint criterion.” (p.13)
The report goes on, excising error after error from the EHE report. Additionally it notes
that the “measurements in the April 12th report were obtained after major repairs to the
system and testing specialists had adjusted UV functioning for maximum performance.
13
“room volumes were inflated by varying amounts, with the CO2 value linear relationship concept as the
criterion such that a specious SF6 (Sulfur Hexafluoride) – CO2 relationship is suggested where one should
not exist.”(p.11) According to this analysis, EHE had adjusted the data to fall along a line in which the size
of the room correlated to the amount of airflow in a linear pattern. However, every room in the Tobin was
designed to have an airflow of 12.5 CFM/P (cubic feet per minute per person).
64
The representativeness of the measurements to typical functioning must be severely
questioned.” Repairs to the system had begun in 1990.14
Additionally, it is noted that the standards are adult and not pediatric, and that the
measurements were taken six feet above the ground, significantly above where most
children breathe (particularly in a school designed to allow students to make the space
their own by doing things such as lying on the floor, etc). The chemicals being discussed
were also compared in the EHE report to toxicity amounts, calculated by weight, for an
adult weighing 150 lbs – obviously for a student weighing half that, the dose would be
twice as toxic. Therefore the measurements themselves had already been situated within
parameters of a flawed narrative – that is, this is where people breathe, even though it is
not where children breathe.
All of the measurements had also been taken while the UV’s were running, while
it was agreed that many teachers turn them off regularly because of “noise levels” which
were ubiquitously “found to be excessive,” 15(p.20) and the data shows the lowest
humidity on the coldest days was so low as to be “physically as well as educationally
detrimental”(p.22), a comment hearkening back to the mix of factors that the building
was designed to address in its architecture. 16 Extremely arid conditions, he notes, might
14
Regarding the VOC’s H takes issue with the conclusion that there is no risk from the chemicals being
released because they are mostly below danger limits set by the federal government, because they are all
above ambient levels and being released into a nearly closed system. Also he notes (p. 17) that across the
board the levels of VOC’s were ten times greater when measured by Haley & Aldrich in 1986 and when the
recommendation to seal the foundation was made. H notes that this discrepancy is unaccounted for.
The report goes continues, refuting a bulleted list of assertions in the EHE survey, such as cloudy
statements like “the concentration of VOC’s is very low in general.”(p.18) It then goes through the
summary of the EHE report that was presented by the superintendent of schools reiterating and responding
to each point, emphasizing the arbitrary application of the threshold limit standards (TLVs) onto flawed
data in a unique situation.
15
Also, the UV’s were shut down at least 12 hours per day and on weekends, allowing a build-up of CO2
and VOCs.
16
An additional problem was that if the humidity levels in the classrooms measured by EHE were correct,
then 70% of the readings were outside of accepted thermal comfort levels, which leads to the conclusion
65
be “minimally regarded as ‘site preparation’ of the skin and mucous membranes”(p.22)
for penetration by infectants or fungi.
Also, the “symptoms in children as orally described by parents” and the
“symptom descriptions [that] were also provided by teachers in a survey distributed
during the 1990/91 school year,” including “nasal effects, respiratory effects, nausea,
muscle weakness, headache, itching eyes and skin, cutaneous bleeding, taste on the
tongue, fatigue, dizziness, bowel disturbances, motor dis-coordination vision difficulties,
etc.” (p. 23) correspond with the effects of the toxins listed in the appendix of the EHE
report.
There is, H. notes, no discussion of the combined effects of contaminants, and
notes that the table entitled “CURRENTLY ACCEPTABLE VOC LEVELS” is
unacceptable. 17
Russian Roulette
Superintendent McGrath’s summary and the EHE report, are, H charges, based on
a nomothetic model. A nomothetic model would ask, assuming homogenous effects, “if
conditions are so bad, why aren’t all of the building occupants showing like signs of sore
throats, headaches or intestinal distress?’’(p. 28) However
There is a sufficient basis, for instance in NIOSH Criteria for Standards publications, to
know that symptoms of exposures to chemicals like benzene will not show, in the short
run, in everyone who is affected. Another way to say this is that there is a low correlation
between symptoms and disease. The disease may be there none-the-less. (p.29)
that “either the HVAC system is continually and dangerously draining humidity in the heating mode or the
data in the April 12th report are not valid.”(p.22)
17
There was new research at the time, which he also discusses, that “low level, long term exposures [of
benzene] may be far more harmful than would ever be indicated from extrapolation of data in high
concentration studies.”(p.25) Gas is also, he reminds us, extremely volatile and ‘Henry’s Law’ applies
(insert graph) and illustrates that “sampling is most likely to result in low concentration values. While the
high concentrations are less likely to be found or to occur, they occur.”(p.27)
66
“One might” he concludes “liken what is happening to our children at Tobin to
playing Russian roulette with gas bubbles rather than bullets.”(p.29)
What is to be made of the vastly different ways that data of this kind can be
interpreted? It is clearly not simply access to data, but access to a statistician that
constitutes power in this situation. The ability to wield the information powerfully is
linked to the ability to resituate it within not only a narrative but also a scientific
framework. H’s report was for this reason catalytic.
On August 22 1991, after the report was delivered to the city, Superintendent
McGrath declared a “health and safety emergency with respect to air quality and
environmental conditions at the Tobin School.”18 (Memo to Robert Healy, 8/22/91)
McGrath also submitted in to EHE for their comments. The official re-mapping of Tobin
as a “problem” site had begun.
On August 27 EHE submitted a four-page response to the report entitled
Environmental Quality at the Tobin School. Jim Rafferty, the chair of the school
committee’s buildings and ground subcommittee, commented to the Cambridge
Chronicle that “’EHE was somewhat red-faced; they conceded they made some errors.’”
{Rawson, 8/12/1991} The response acknowledged that errors were made in the ambient
temperature measurements but attributed them to a faulty new device that the teams had
18
On August 13, 1991, the day after H’s Environmental Quality at the Tobin School report was completed,
David L. Agler of Stimpson, Gumperz & Heger wrote a memo to James Conry informing him that he had
met with James Rita of Conry’s office, as well as PTO members about their concerns (per Conry’s request)
and that he would be pleased to serve as the new consultant in the “Air Quality and Concrete Slab
Investigation, Tobin School, Cambridge, MA.” By August 20 th they had submitted a bid to seal the
foundation. In a confidential memo dated 8/23/91, McCarthy of EHE provided Conry with the results of
Radon tests, to the effect that “Radon is found in the east and west crawlspaces at concentrations above the
U.S. EPA’s Action level of 4 pCi/L.” However “concentrations were below the limit of detection in the
occupied spaces of the school. This indicates that no transfer of material from the crawlspaces into the
sampled rooms was occurring at the time of sampling.” He commented that since there is not much
“human occupancy” of the crawlspace no remediation was necessary, but that a “side benefit” of the
proposed ventilation work that would happen in conjunction with the sealing of the foundation was that it
might “aid in controlling the potential transfer of radon into the occupied areas of the school.”
67
been using. It disputed the claim that any maintenance work more than “normal” had
been done previous to the sampling of the school in April 1991.
It then went point by point through a series of the reports’ claims, such as: “It was
stated many times that ‘The School Department has the responsibility to eliminate all
contamination above ambient levels.’ This statement is made without any basis as to
why this should be carried out. In our professional experience as well as many other’s
including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, it has been found that concentration
of many of the measured compounds are much higher indoors than outdoors.”(p.3)
Additionally they commented that “The statement that ‘there is no safe or acceptable
level, especially above ambient levels’ is the reviewers’ opinions and have not been
suitably substantiate”19 (which is not to say that they can prove otherwise).
They concluded
We are not saying that the Tobin School is like other schools. We know that it was built on a
landfill of questionable origin, we know that there are many cracks small and large in the
foundation slabs, we know that there are elevated concentration of methane in the
crawlspaces and possibly in room 128, and we know that the north crawlspace was used for
the storage of many solvents. These are only some of the points that make the Tobin School
different from other schools. We also know that concentrations of VOCs that were measured
were higher indoors than out of doors. This point does not separate the Tobin School from
other buildings. The concentrations that were measured are relatively low when compared to
other commercial and school buildings. (p.4)
The truth of the matter was that a truth was not going to be agreed upon. But the
rewriting of the data had had its effect and the further rebuttal of the analysis would not
constitute the same kind of “event” that was so catalytic. The only thing that came to
matter, the only thing that could be agreed on, was the first line: “We are not saying that
the Tobin School is like other schools.”
19
They continued, to note that it is “inappropriate” to compare the EHE and Haley & Aldrich data, since
they are years apart and used different methodologies.
68
The August 12 report had set a number of gears in motion that caused the city to
jump to, making at least the temporary recommended repairs. Those repairs, primarily to
seal the foundation and to vent the gases from the foundation up to the roof where they
could disperse, were begun immediately . The city floated a $1.2 million dollar bond to
finance the project and delayed the opening of school in September 1991 in order to
substantially complete the repairs.
As evidence that the school was safe the superintendent submitted a letter to the
school committee from Dr. Melvin Chalfen, commissioner of health and hospitals for the
city of Cambridge (and therefore, importantly, a city employee). According to his letter,
dated August, 29 1991, he had assembled a group of “professionals in the areas of air
quality, industrial hygiene engineering, environmental medicine, pediatrics and
epidemiology, etc.” to discuss the topic, and had reviewed the existing studies. He stated:
“My opinion is that the Tobin School is safe for occupancy,” and that among his panel of
experts, “the unanimous conclusion is that there is no threat to the health of the children,”
now that the foundation was temporarily sealed and the HVAC system had been repaired.
Control of the narrative was beginning to shift again, this time to “experts” in
health, who felt that they could state with certainty that a situation was safe. That is, they
could generalize that it was a generally safe environment (although as we have
established, this type of danger is often not general – it is particular).
In her memo of October, 1 1991, the superintendent additionally promised to
make sure that a permanent crawlspace barrier was designed by November 15th 1991, and
that an HVAC system replacement proposal be generated by January 2, 1991. The school
also retained Occuhealth, Inc. on September 13, 1991 to do periodic checks of the air
69
quality on a long-term basis. By October 23 methane tests were returning nearly ambient
levels throughout the school, and tests of the seal barrier on November 23 ascertained
that it was functioning as hoped, while methane alarms were installed and monitored
regularly.
Although the HVAC system was subsequently revamped, it was the crawlspace
that garnered the most attention and that became the pivot of the controversy. The city,
having chewed itself deep into the ground for a century and a half of explosive growth,
could no longer ignore the fact that the air, breathing up through the foundations, was
beyond their control, just as the “fringe” growth had been in the previous century. There
was finally no recourse but to seal it away; to seal the past back into the ground at a
gigantic cost – greatest, of course, for those who had been affected (whether they knew it
or not) by this air while it was still seeping out of the ground.
In October 1991, the Mobil Gas station just past the Armory on the same block
was placed on the DEP’s list of “priority hazardous waste sites.” This move, however,
was not the result of new evidence as to the toxicity of the site, which posed no more
threat of spill than any other gas station, but because of a new state law which required
that “all potential hazardous waste sites located within 500 feet of schools be placed on
the priority list” to be inspected to verify that they do not pose a threat to “the
environment in general or the grounds of the Tobin School in particular.”(Rawson 1991)
The highway and “semi-factory” structures that had contributed to the egalitarian charm
of the building when it was designed, now located it at a threatening nexus of chemicals
and the invisible build ups of the past. That is to say, in a place that could have arbitrary
effects.
70
Additionally, air quality testing was carried out by EHE of 445 Concord Ave., a
superfund site directly across the street from the Tobin playground. While dangerous
substances were found, it was nothing that was apt to waft across the road.
According to the EPA and an organization entitled the Center for Health,
Environment and Justice (CHEJ), any school that is sited within half a mile of a federal
Superfund site pose a risk to students. CHEJ’s website maps school and Superfund sites
for several states Massachusetts among them. Massachusetts has 818 schools sited in that
proximity to superfund sites. In Section 4 (of four) of Middlesex County where the
Tobin School is located, as noted before, there are 25 schools in that proximity, the Tobin
being the closest, nearly on top of a superfund site. The report writes that
Public schools built on or near contaminated land are one potential source of chemical
exposure. Children are especially vulnerable to exposure to toxic chemicals. During a
critical period of their growth and development, children spend a large part of their day at
school. To needlessly place them in settings that heighten their risk of disease or
hyperactivity or lower IQ is therefore irresponsible, especially in light of recent health
statistics that document increased incidence of childhood cancer and disease. While laws
compel children to attend school, there are—astoundingly—no guidelines or laws in
place that compel school districts to locate school buildings on property that will protect
the school population from environmental health and safety risks.
(CHEJ (Center for Health 2002)
This report was written in 2002, but it was already being narrated ten and twenty
years before in places like the Tobin school. What they arrive at in the end of the passage
is the question of responsibility. What regulates school districts in their placement of
schools?
There are seven sites listed on the online EPA roster for the zip code 02138,
which is west Cambridge, Massachusetts. They are the Bristol Arms Apartments (on a
portion of the NEBCo. Site) , the Jefferson Park Apartments, the Walden Square
Apartments, the Old City Landfill, St. Peter’s Field, the Tobin School and Belmont Oil.
71
All but Belmont Oil are former clay pits from the brick industry. Similarly, in north
Cambridge proper there are three listed sites, the Rindge Tower Apartments, the Fresh
Pond Shopping Center20 and the WR Grace Chemical Corporation. Rindge Towers is
built on a clay site as well, and the WR Grace Corp., while sitting on land heavily
contaminated by their processes as well as those of their predecessor on the site , Dewey
& Almey, Co. (that developed synthetic rubber), also have incorporated portions of
former clay sites into their land (particularly Gerry’s Pit which was once used as a
filtering pond).
Massachusetts has the highest number of students in schools near superfund sites
of any state that has been studied (and probably in the nation): over 400,000 students go
to class near some type of hazardous materials. (CHEJ)
In a letter to the Cambridge Chronicle dated 12/12/91, David L. wrote “At least
five years ago, the school department was informed that methane and other volatile
organic compounds were entering the Tobin School. … Why was the Haley & Aldrich
recommendation not implemented? Why was there a five-year delay in the installation of
a temporary barrier to lessen the intrusion of soil gases into the school? Why is there
presently a reluctance to seal the entire first floor of the Tobin School? … Remediation is
necessary in the management system which has failed to protect the basic health and
20
The Fresh Pond Shopping Center was built in 1965 (Krim, 1977; 143). Max Wasserman, a local
developer, developed the entire area, including the Rindge Tower Apartments. Previous to its current fame
as a strip mall, the site on Fresh Pond Parkway had been home to the Prest-O-Lite Corporation, which
produced ( what was it again?) and for that purpose had a factory surrounded by a large, milky-white
chemical sea of liquid, used somehow in their production (the spatial organization of the site is still nearly
identical – the white liquid having been replaced by grey concrete). Separating the sites are two sets of
railroad tracks and backed by an abandoned garage. One of the tracks is the Purple line Metropolitan
Boston Transit Association (MBTA) Commuter rail, and beyond the other tracks, now abandoned and
littered with trash, spray-cans and the plastic ephemera of drug use, is Mayor Thomas Danehy Park, the
former City Dump. In 1981, Danehy Park was a ramshackle former dump, receiving, along the defunct
rail, the dirt unearthed in the process of constructing the MBTA Red line subway extension – Porter
Square, Davis Square and Alewife.
72
safety of our students and teachers by its inaction.”(Landrigan Health was not protected
at Tobin 1991)
This letter calls attention to the institutional resistance that had manifested in an
unwillingness to rethink the space and safeties of the Tobin site. It charges that “the
management system has failed to protect the basic health and safety of our students and
teachers.” But is that the same as saying that the “management system” is guilty of
neglect, or that they understood and purposefully ignored the problem? I don’t know.
What is clear, however, is that in situations like this conflicts arise in the way that spaces
are perceived and experienced, seen and understood. They arise in ideas about how the
body functions and what constitutes “disease.”
The building, mapped from City Hall as a progressive environmental masterpiece,
was experienced as a confusing, sometimes suffocating reality. Dominant western
medical ideologies, poorly equipped to evaluate problems that could not be pathologized
as a particular disease, or treated as a particular symptom, similarly conspire to map the
body that experiences a poorly understood chemical exposure differently from the way it
maps one that does not.
Occuhealth finished its first report in December of 1991. They found high levels
of VOCs and methane underneath the foundation barrier, but not in the school itself or in
the crawlspaces. After reviewing their report, the DEP concluded on December 17 that
“an ‘imminent hazard’, as defined in the Massachusetts Contingency Plan, does not
presently exist within the school building.”(Johnson 1991 1) The parents and experts had
it out in the paper with grandiose statements about safety. Parents refuse to send their
children to the school, explaining their actions in long, serious letters to the editor of the
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Cambridge Chronicle. By January of 1992 the push was on to hire for the facilities
manager position, the job that had been budgeted for, but never advertised for, since
1980.
’We’ve been proceeding to repair cracks in the crawlspace under the building,’ (the
School Department Spokesman) said, ‘and solvents stored in the building are being
removed,’ The cracks were filled to keep organic gasses in the ground from entering the
school. A polyethylene sheet also will be put over the crawlspace to keep gases from
seeping in.” – A breath of fresh air? Team studies air quality at Tobin School, Bill
Premo, Cambridge Chronicle, 8/27/1991
Through 1991 and 1992 articles, surveys of health and maintenance, meetings,
reports, and memorandums multiplied. The city of Cambridge ended up spending several
million dollars – eventually calming the parents in the process. Occuhealth continued to
monitor the building regularly, and much of the carpeting was eventually torn up and
replaced with tile, which did not help the noise problem, but did help the air quality –
particularly the presence of allergens.
Hot Spots
In January 1997 the City of Cambridge received a letter from the Department of
Environmental protection. It notified them that if a “Phase I Limited Subsurface
Investigation” of the Tobin Elementary School site was not conducted to “assess the
extent of contamination from former landfills” then the Tobin site would be listed as a
“Tier I Disposal Site for Failure to Take Action”(C.D.&M 1997 2-3)
The city contracted a firm to do the analysis work, which was completed in July,
1997. At least two ‘hot spots’ at surface level on the playing field were discovered, one
contaminated with lead and the other with PAH. Between August 25-September 9 1998
these two sites were excavated, the first down to a depth of 5 ft below ground, and the
second to 3 ft bgs. 688.15 tons of earth was removed from the site and “transported to
74
the GCR, Inc. landfill in Peabody, Massachusetts for use as daily cover.”(Hamilton 1999
2-1)
In February 1999, the DEP certified another report detailing an “Activity and Use
Limitation Opinion,” the fundamental message of which being that the site was now
suitable for everything but “a) Use of the residence as a residence and/or activities
consistent with residential use,”(AULDEP 2002) or b) anything that involves disturbing
the land more than 3 feet below ground without the supervision of an outside analyst.
The report concluded that
The only way to ensure removal of all potentially contaminated media would be to
excavate all materials within the former clay pit. The soil removal process would be
elaborate, of long duration (at least several months), would require shut down of the
school, and would be very expensive – soil disposal alone would cost at least 6 million
dollars. Other technical complications would include the lack of space for soil
stockpiling on site and the need to carefully work around or remove all existing
underground utilities. Thus, the attainment of background conditions in the deeper soils
and groundwater on site was deemed technically infeasible.(C.D.&M. 1999)
In other words, the only way to fix this, is to move it.
The teachers became aware of the AUL only through a mandatory notice in the
Cambridge Chronicle and later demanded documentation of such. To this day there has
been no permanent barrier erected to replace the temporary seal of the foundation. The
issue for them is anything but dead – there is currently a class action suit pending against
the CTA (teachers union) for continuing health complaint. Several continuing health
surveys, though no health studies, have been conducted of the staff at the Tobin. They all
confirm symptoms; but can they confirm a link to the school? So far, again, only to the
tune of sick days.
Today the city doesn’t want to talk about it, although the teachers seem
enduringly concerned. The space itself has become frozen in time – it cannot be
75
disturbed. And yet, as mentioned earlier, the school age population in Cambridge is
declining – which school will take the axe? Perhaps it should be Tobin… but then, what
to be done with Cofran’s pit?
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CHANGING PLACES
Play Grounds
Cities are “created ecosystems,” according to Harvey, and though it can be
argued that all ecosystems are created, cities are quintessentially so. Therefore
“environmental issues that have emerged [in cities] are wholly specific to the ecologies
our urbanizing activities have created.” (Harvey 1996 186) No ecosystem, and
particularly not a city, can be “returned” to a “natural” state; it can only be further
developed – whether that further development means building a factory or creating a
wetland. “We must recognize” he says, “that the distinction between environment as
commonly understood and the built, social, and political-economic environment is
artificial and that the urban and everything that goes into it is as much of a solution as it
is a contributing factor to ecological difficulties.”(Harvey, 1996 435) And if an industrial
site is further developed into a grassy park, it is important that that site is understood as a
constructed city site with grass on it, rather than an “undisturbed” and “natural”
landscape.
Sites that have undergone rapid and extreme changes in land use, particularly
urbanizing changes – as the whole of NWC has for the past two hundred years – need to
be understood as environments that continue to be created even as they appear to be
static. They are therefore unknown places which should not be assumed to be inherently
safe simply because they are designed to be recreational, or designated so. However, it is
also important because transformation is essential to urban environments, and so the fact
that land has been transformed should not lead one to assume that it is inherently
dangerous. If this were the case, the we could have little hope for the city or for the
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future of the millions of sites around the world that have been rendered at some point
“inhospitable” to humans. Transformation is a negotiation.
We trust them because we are told we can. Signs, laws, maps and daily usage
dictate our behaviors in particular locations, as well as our assumptions. This is at least
in part because of the map.
A map gives a place a name, describing its use, its borders. The situation before
the map is purely physical, linear and violent – each person must negotiate his or her own
singular relationship to the ground. In the map, this becomes the “…land of geometry, in
which the line is the graphy of a map, with a universalized scale, with a unified economy
– bodiless, abstract and arbitrary in its ordering units. Such land is associated in legal
though with Hermann Kelsens’s legal positives, with empty normatism and spaceless
norms. Withdrawn from the originary ground, it is referred to as mere paper.” {Vissman
} p. 48 And then more than paper. Because once the space is drawn on to the map, then
the map is drawn in reverse, back onto the space in the form of signage, roads, and the
regulated, categorized spaces that are familiar to us.
The mapping proscribes a set of parameters structuring its safeties and dangers. It
traces the past, freezes the present, and guides the future, exercising both constructive and
destructive power in the simple gesture of measurement. A park is a play space where it
is sufficient to watch one’s child because dangers are visible; a flying ball, asphalt,
coming down the slide too fast; the mean kid from down the street. But the map is never
neutral; “mapping is a discursive activity that incorporates power. The power to map the
world in one way rather than another is a crucial tool in political struggles. Power
struggles over mapping (again, no matter whether these are maps of so-called ‘real’ or
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metaphorical spaces) are therefore fundamental moments in the production of discourses”
(Harvey 1996 111)
The spaces on which we build are similarly remapped, through the use of zones.
Zoning regulations are those that reinscribe the most permanent usages. A zone is a legal
unit of governed by a set of spatial laws distinct from those of the spaces around them. In
the civil context, and in the context of urban planning (which is its primary application in
this paper) this primarily concerns the type of occupancy allowed.
But to what degree do zones and legal norms shape how land is used or
experienced? What are the implications of changing the public understanding of a site?
In her article on the Concept of Order in No-man’s land, Cornelia Vissman comments
that
The economical imperative, which agriculture as well as law seems to be subjected to,
produces a particularly different writing depending on whether it is the eye or the hand
that dictates the drawing of lines. The order of body and soil refers to a law before any
positive law, before any uniform writing or orthography, and before any homogenized
space. The phantasm of such a primordial wiring initiates what one would call, though a
bit spectacular, the terror of the terrain that the texts of the law unfold…
The imprints that bodies leave in the soil mark the unique, the authentic, according to the
discourse that considers agriculture as a physical and even spatial inscription of the
owned in the soil… Briefly: the ground becomes a battleground for a jus terrendi versus
a jus scriptum. (Vissman 1997 43)
Vissman, in investigating what constitutes “land” or “space,” challenges the order
of ownership, as one that delicately walks the tightrope between the line in the sand and
the stroke of the pen. Later in her paper, she develops the notion of the zone, the space
between lines in warfare, one that is minutely mapped, over-determined in an explicit
geography of power. Although the physical markers that determined the original
organization of and designations of the space (such as embankments built behind what
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had once been a screen of trees) are eventually annihilated, it still, in the mind of the
general, retains an internal logic based on its original form.
The discourses on the Tobin, for example, were frozen in the originary vision of a
complete and completing educational and physical vision, which functioned to disallow
other versions of the space, even as it ceased to resemble, beyond the immovable forms,
the concepts that had framed it. Similarly the field behind it has had to be re-written as
an immovable zone, only safe to a depth of a few feet. These are the types of revisions,
the challenges to the map, that must be constantly posed from the ground, from the land.
Because a place is called a park and is zoned for recreation (and the zoning code
being both descriptive and proscriptive) there is not, embedded in this understanding of a
certain zone, a worry about the dangers in the dirt that a child might play in, or that might
get kicked into the air. However, without trusting the name of a place, without trusting
the map, there is no recourse to certainty about any location in particular. So a site is
judged by its title and its appearance, by its “mapped space” if not by the map itself
because we must use the arbitrary common markers of these places to orient ourselves in
the world.
Open Spaces
But what of the other spaces? With city planning code, a municipality takes an
active instead of passive role in morphological development. Their task is a negotiation
between past and future. Understandably, but still somewhat oddly, the rhetoric of city
planning is relentlessly and re-cast in progressive language. For example, the OSD:
Open Space District was created to safeguard the interests of Cambridge residents with
respect to public open space. It is applicable to certain municipal open spaces, which
could be encroached upon for other purposes. Public parks, playgrounds, and public
recreation buildings are the only uses permitted as-of-right in open space districts.
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Maximum floor area ratio is .25 and maximum building height is 35 feet. Fresh Pond
Reservation, Russell Field and Danehy Park are now included with the Open Space
District.(Cambridge Zoning Guide)
In fact, with the exception of the tract of land on the banks of the Alewife Brook,
every single OSD in NWC contains at least one former clay pit. One interesting aspect of
this is that NWC, in addition to still having the largest commercial and industrial zoned
district of any neighborhood in the city, also has a greater density and volume of OSD’s.
Additionally, NWC now has 6 of the 14 city community gardens, along with 15 of city’s
24 Superfund sites – two of which are within a block of the Tobin School. NC also has
the city’s only bike path, the Minuteman trail, which crosses Somerville and then
stretches up northward through Arlington and beyond. The trail runs directly next to the
W.R. Grace plant.
What these places, charged with “safeguarding the interests of Cambridge
residents” is that they occupy land that for the most part could not be otherwise zoned.
Paradoxically, what caused this area to be the least attractive and most exploited area in
the city, now makes it, at least to the eye, one of the most attractive areas, within
regulation such as Tobin’s AUL of limited use.
Again, as Harvey notes “The contemporary battleground over words like ‘nature’
and ‘environment’ is a leading edge of political conflict, precisely because of the
‘incompletely explicit assumptions, or more or less unconscious mental habits,’ which
surround them.”(Harvey 1996 119) But when those assumptions or certainties dissolve,
people will put all of their resources towards generating the knowledge that can once
again create zones of certainty, of a natural condition. That is, strangely, the condition
that has known laws and dangers, one that is natural to the user because it is normal to
them. Because a state of uncertainty is intolerable. A state of ignorance is intolerable.
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Safety Zones
Parks and schools must be particularly sensitive to this type of reasoning, because
while it is adults who determine the safety levels of certain environments for children, it
is not they who experience them (meaning both that they are not as exposed to them, and
also that they do not have the type of contact with them that might allow them to change
their assessment of a locations’ safety based on a first-hand experience of it). As well, for
exactly this reason, projects that are executed for the benefit of children are the most
progressive and idealistic of civic projects because they concern the welfare of
dependents that cannot vote.
Children are powerless against many dangers in school and out, and they look to adults
for protection. However, decisions that adults make on a daily basis frequently imperil
our nation’s children. New schools are being built on or near chemically-contaminated
and or near industrial facilities with toxic emissions that contaminate children’s air,
water, land, and food supply. (CHEJ (Center for Health 2002)
Projects of this type in Cambridge have admitted to differing types of awareness
of the fluctuating nature of these types of spaces, perhaps correlating to their visibility.
While there is no acknowledgement of the potentially unknown nature of the
environment of the Tobin School, or of St. Peter’s Field which has lead hot spots from
Grace Chemical next door and was also a clay pit, the literature that was distributed as
Danehy Park was opened treats the issue as one that is safe but present, by, for example,
presenting public information on methane and methane alarms (CHC, Danehy File). I
don’t know how the housing projects have dealt with this issue.21
21
It was written in Z’s notes that in one of the childhood cancer cases the Walden Square housing project
was suspected as a possible causal factor.
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While many types of measurement and data can be generated about these
transformed spaces, we often know very little about what the dynamics and effects of
these newly transformed environments will be. That is, data does not generate
understanding, interpretation does, and so ideas about sites have most to do with how
they are interpreted and how they are written. As we have seen, even if, as was the case
with Tobin, a space is designed specifically with the intention to control ahead of time all
of the variables of an indoor experience, that is often not the case. It in fact becomes
possible that the greater degree of control is proposed to be exercised over an
environment, the less one has. The more control taken over an environment, the more
variables there are to control, and the better they must be understood beforehand.
When Belluchi designed the HVAC system of the Tobin school as a closed
system, he was assuming an understanding of the composition of the air that would be
entering the school, the likelihood of the foundations settling over the mixed fill creating
cracks, and that the School department would do all of the required maintenance work
required to sustain the safety of his building. These were unknowables.
But then, precision would have been impossible; that is to say, I do not think that
the experiment was inherently irresponsible. The plan had to intuit its path across the
mappings of the past: mappings that were symbolic, literal, anecdotal, or as-yet unthought. This intricate and expanding matrix of present and past maps lead the project
forward. That is why executors of progressive projects are utterly confident about their
creation, even though they can have no knowledge of what effects their actualization with
have. Even though the best plan, is still only a plan; the best map, is still only a map.
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This type of projection is necessary. To refrain from actively transforming a
landscape is only to be resigned to its passive transformation, which is no more or less
correct. Similarly, to refrain from building a school that actively shapes a learning
environment is only to be resigned to one that does so passively. As Lackney reported,
environmental conditions not only affect health, but they affect the ability to learn:
…all the physical factors I have mentioned - full-spectrum and natural lighting, the
reduction and control of noise, the location and siting of schools, optimal thermal
conditions, and school size and class size, as well as building condition -- can have a
mediating effect on a variety of variables known to have a link to student achievement:
time-on-task, student-teacher interactions, classroom interruptions and student
participation (Lackney, 1999)
Therefore, as a result of situations like the Tobin, it has come to be understood
that the exact conditions that were not taken into account in the progressive plan, have
come to be the ones that most affect the “educational environment,” that is, things like
“full-spectrum and natural lighting, the reduction and control of noise, the location and
siting of schools, optimal thermal conditions, and school size and class size, as well as
building condition,” all of which (except class size) have been problematic at the Tobin.
The link between this educated projection and this education project is important
because it brings us back to question of evidence, and to the quite elementary conclusion
that I draw from this, which is that since everyone’s environment is what is relevant to
them, and is a created environment, then citizen power is imbedded in the ability to
interpret and mediate between data and maps generated about a place, and the “facts on
the ground” (that is, the physical realities that develop in defiance of legally and
topographically defined spaces) with a narrative that can encompass both.
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Waste Lands
Krim constituted NWC as a “fringe,” in the purely geographical sense. However ,
metaphorically it is a gorgeously logical term as well – the fringe is at the edges of things.
It is where industry is, it is where dumps are, and it is where poor people go. It is the
proverbial land of exile, the outer border of civilization… and then the center expands,
the New World shrinks, and the fringe (whether or not it ever had any lunatic elements to
it) becomes a nicely developed patchwork square on the obsessively monitored pattern of
the grid.
There are many ways in which the divisions, distinctions and barriers between
spaces and places are constituted. There are the landmasses themselves, and then there
are the topological considerations – hills and valleys, mountains and rivers, which Krim
takes to be “inherent.” Later, there come to be the divisions of the map. Fringe is a term
that is used in historical geography to talk about how areas of “unwanted” activities or
industries tend to develop in patterns – in, for example, a pattern of expanding rings
around a city. Similarly, the zone is the logical manifestation of the map, and its
expression the fringe, because once the fringe exists, it must be maintained.
This process allows the divide of the map, the jus scriptum versus the jus terrendi
to widen, until it is difficult to determine what “order of knowledge,” as Foucault would
say, constitutes a given space, and crucially builds the future on an intellectual as well as
a physical foundation.
While NWC is no longer “fringe” in most respects, it has retained a designation
for “fringe activities,” such as “chemical plants, refuse dumps, housing projects and
athletic fields.” The only former clay pit that has never been filled in is Gerry’s Pit (then
85
called Gerry’s Landing) a pond made by Bay State Brick that still contains water and old
shopping carts, among other things.22
There was, thanks to NEBCo. a municipal dump in Cambridge up until 1975,
although it could be argued that this was because they had to do something with that
gigantic hole in the ground. But since that year, when the largest clay-pit in town was
stuffed to the level with garbage, we have exported. Because we can afford to.
Cambridge sends its waste into the resigned arms of the places that remain, or have
become “fringe”, places that have space and need money and so won’t refuse refuse –
towns like Rochester, NH, or Saugus, Chicopee, Millbury, Gardener and Fitchburg, MA,
by way of a transfer station in Somerville, MA. There is always a fringe – it simply
moves.
But if I have a dump truck full of stuff, the only place in Cambridge where I can
still dump it is a transfer station in a strange far west Cambridge neighborhood that the
real estate agents refer to as “not Cambridge, not Belmont.” The Cambridge Highlands is
half-industrial and half-residential (a hidden suburban island in the city).23 Among the
deteriorating factory buildings, near the brand-spanking-new biotech firms, and squarely
within unlimited height zoning, Chuck Mabardi got a permit in the late seventies to build
a waste transfer station. There are those from the residential neighborhood who claim
22
Bought by Dewey & Almey Co. (the company that invented synthetic rubber, virtually winning WWII)
for use as a cooling pond for their nearby factory, it was also the local beach through the 1950’s, complete
with a beach house and lifeguards. The most obvious hazard of the pit was that you were always in danger
of cutting your feet up on various sharp objects that had been dropped down to the bottom, although the
chemical composition was also suspect. It was finally fenced off when the city built two swimming pools
directly next to the pit, and across from Jefferson Park and Rindge Towers.
23
There is also, on the border between the industrial and the residential zone, a private (check) Hospital
called Sancta Maria. Back when quarantine for the disease was mandatory, this building functioned as a
tuberculosis sanatorium. However, in the present time frame, this hospital has wanted to build an addition
to the back of the building for years, but hasn’t. According to a neighborhood source, they can’t.
Supposedly, years back, the TB hospital buried contaminated instruments and materials in the dirt, and so
the land below the parking lot can never be disturbed without losing the virus into the air, water and
neighborhood.
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that the business originated as a front for a Hell’s Angel’s clubhouse. Whether or not that
is so, like so many baby boomer enterprises that were begun as fronts for youthful
ideologies, Mabardi’s has degenerated into a legitimate business.24 The fringe becomes a
layer of the past – it has both moved and not moved. It is both elsewhere and always
under the surface. Mabardi’s, of course, is partly successful because it is the last of its
kind. It is the only place to dump, and this has allowed its prosperity. As with the
brickyards and Harvard Yard, the fringe and the center are always paradoxically mutually
sustaining. The question we will return to is, what does this imply about risk?
The Highlands is on the Belmont border, with poor access to Cambridge and no
access to the Belmont bedroom community’s well-funded school system. You can live
your whole life in Cambridge and Belmont and never see this place on the edge that’s not
here and not there, but you can still bring your garbage there. It is what remains of
NWC’s fringe.
Hazardous Waste collection in Cambridge happens four times a year. On those
four dates, you bring your hazardous wastes to the Armory next door to the Tobin
School. A company called Care Environmental, who sells the waste to various
processing stations, mostly located in the Midwest, many in Arkansas, picks them up.25
What does it mean to be a place that no longer has dumps, that was, felt the
effects of being, and no longer really is, a fringe? What does it mean to be able to make
your city relatively safe from these things? The power of these narratives and maps and
24
It is, they say, political connections that keep the transfer station and the landscaping companies in the
industrial half, that have kept it from becoming a well-groomed business district. And it is the ‘3 foot state
park’ bordering the residential zone, created by Cambridge Highlands resident and city council member,
Mr. GS, that keeps the residential area from being “ruined,” as Mrs. GS. says, by an artery through the
neighborhood. State law says that you can’t build roads across state parks.
25
In Bhopal, trash is swept by hand from the streets every morning, and set afire to burn on every block.
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reinterpretations are profound. Education, regulatory bodies such as EPA and Superfund
that help to generate and re-generate discourses around safety, and access to information
about the developing and deteriorating ecosystems in other places in the world (plus, of
course, money), creates activism that can relatively effectively seal, so to speak, these
problems into the ground.
But where do they go? Harvey quotes a phrase adapted from Frederick Engels:
“The bourgeoisie has only one solution to its pollution problems: it moves them around.”
(Harvey, 1996 366)
Exporting Toxins
Cambridge, therefore, deals with their past waste by sealing into the ground,
transforming it, and trying to forget it. This is an inconsistently successful tactic. But it
has also gotten ahead of itself; what about places in the world that are still fringe? Where
these are present issues? How does that manifest? It is this question that we must
address before we can think about how to begin “transforming” those spaces. What does
it mean to be an environmentalist if the label is shared by a parent at the Tobin School
and a mother in Bhopal?
In the beginning of his chapter on “The Environment of Justice,” David Harvey
quotes several paragraphs from a leaked World Bank internal memo dated December 12,
1991. The memo, written by Lawrence Summers, then chief economist of the World
Bank, makes a Swiftian argument for the economic logic inherent in exporting pollution
to the “less-developed countries (LDC’s). Summers wrote:
Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of
the dirty industries to the LDC’s? I can think of three reasons:
1. The measurement of the costs of health-impairing pollution depends on the foregone
earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given
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amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest
cost, which would be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic
behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and
we should face up to that.
2. The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution
probably have very low cost. I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in
Africa are vastly under-polluted; their [air pollution] is probably vastly inefficiently
low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable fact that so much
pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and
that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfareenhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
3. The demand for a clean environment for esthetic and health reason is likely to have a
very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million
change in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a
country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where the
under-5 mortality rate is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over
industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility of particulates. These discharges
may have little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody esthetic
pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the
consumption of pretty air is non-tradable. The Economist (September, 8, 1992) (Cited
in Harvey, 1996 366)
While Brazil’s Secretary of the environment described the arguments as
“perfectly logical but totally insane”(Harvey,1996 367), The Economist “editorialized
that his economic logic was indeed ‘impeccable’”(Harvey, 1996 367). Summers appears
to endorse what Harvey calls “toxic colonialism.” By assigning a monetary value to
health and thus to unhealthful situations, it is able to make the charge that distributing
toxins to those who are most economically disadvantaged is in fact “welfare enhancing”
to all, including those to whom it is distributed. It does this by presuming that “one way
to raise incomes of the poor is to pay them to absorb toxins (largely generated on behalf
of the rich)” (Harvey, 1996@ 367).
As Harvey goes on to discuss, this logic, though economically air-tight, is
incapable of comprehending people as having anything but monetary value. For
example, the fact that those health impacts that countries with “under 5 mortality of 200
per thousand” then absorb will be absorbed by people who are the least equipped to deal
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with them. Indeed the only logical end to this, it seems to me, is that their declining
health will then make them an even more efficient target for the distribution of
contaminants, until they are virtually constituted by them – drowning in a wealth of
toxins for which they pay with their lives. This is illustrated for example in Bhopal,
where those who were affected by the gas disaster mostly made their living through hard
manual labor. Had they been office workers their ability to work and earn money to feed
their families would not have been impaired, but as it was, the victims were sick and
additionally unemployed and hungry because of their gas-related symptoms, such as
shortness of breath.
Also, this type of discourse does not question the “how and why” of waste
production to begin with – prevention, that is (Harvey, 1996 368). However, he writes
“it unfortunately approximates as a description of what usually happens.”(Harvey, 1996
368). That is, poorer communities are both more likely to be targeted as potential
dumping sites, and more likely to accept that waste into their community for the revenue
that it might generate.
The logic of Summers’ memo has already been at work for many years internally
to the United States, as well as internationally. Dangerous industry is exported to places
where poor, often minority groups live. These groups absorb more than their share of
toxins, and “the patent inequity of many of these has been the source of powerful
conflicts. These are the focus of struggle in the environmental justice movement and
within a polyglot group of movements known as ‘the environmentalism of the poor.’”
(Harvey, 1996 137)
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Out of the many movements that constitute the “militant particularism” of the
environmental movement, the “environmental justice” movement has done the best job of
making environmentalism a universal issue while still making sure that it emphasizes the
daily struggles of people in each particular situation (versus, for example, many
mainstream environmental organizations who often prioritize the welfare of, say, a
national park, above that of a poor person who is living under hazardous or demeaning
conditions.
This movement has tended to unite women in particular across many boundaries.
It is a women’s group that is the primary activist group in Bhopal (many have taken off
their traditional Muslim veils and left the house for the first time to pursue this activism).
Harvey writes that in the environmental justice movement, “the marginalized,
disempowered, and racially marked positions of many of those most affected, together
with the strong involvement of women as dominant caregivers for the children who have
suffered most form for example, the consequences of lead-paint poisoning or leukemia,
have forced otherwise disempowered individual to see empowerment outside of
prevailing institutions.” (Harvey, 1996 386).
The environmental justice movement seeks to understand how human needs are
mapped into environmentalism – housing, a living wage, safe water and protection from
hazardous materials. And how to do so in a way that is more than just moving things
around.
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THE RIGHT TO KNOW
“Bhopal’s Babies”
How do these narratives circulate globally and what does it mean to exploit the
discourses that they generate? What does it mean, for example, to plumb small risks and
sensitivities such as the Tobin (though again, relevance helplessly seems to cause
relativity) in the face of gigantic exposures and injustices that are unresolved?
The Bhopal disaster woke people to the news that ‘better living through chemistry’ could
be a deadly affair. They also learned that environmental risk is constituted within
transnational processes that link together people and issues once considered separate.
Residents of Middleport, New York – linked to residents of Bhopal. Indian progressives,
dressed in the rumpled khadi of Gandhian alternatives – linked to slick corporate
consultants claiming allegiance to the world, rather than to nation. Human rights issues
– linked to environmental issues. (Fortun, 2001 139)
The story of Bhopal is that a methyl isocyanate (MIC) storage tank at a neglected
Union Carbide pesticide factory in the town of Bhopal, India began to leak at 12:40 am
on December 3, 1984. MIC is the active ingredient in the pesticide Sevin. The factory
was never very profitable, at the time of the accident it was not producing and was up for
sale. The pesticide market had been simultaneously declining and becoming more
competitive (Shrivastava 1987). The plant was operating without sufficient safety
procedures, without enforcement of the ones that did exist. The danger siren didn’t warn
the residents of Bhopal, whose knowledge of the factory was mostly limited to the fact
that it produced “plant medicine,” (Lapierre and Moro 2002) until an hour after the leak
began.
The estimates of people who died on the spot, or running away from the factory,
range from 2,000 to 10,000 – and of those exposed and surviving, 200,000 – 500,000.
The legacy of the accident has been a horrifying catalogue of birth defects, secondary
symptoms, and neglect.
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After Bhopal, people in the U.S. sat up and took stock of the dangers of hazardous
chemicals in their backyard, or at least their nation. An influential article called We All
Live in Bhopal, first printed in the leftist Detroit journal The Fifth Estate in 1985, issued a
call to action as follows:
There are 50,000 toxic waste dumps in the U.S. The EPA admits that 90% of the 90
billion pounds of toxic waste produced annually by U.S. industry (70 % of it by chemical
companies) is disposed of "improperly" (although we wonder what they would consider
"proper" disposal). These deadly products of industrial civilization - arsenic, mercury,
dioxin, cyanide, and many others - are simply dumped, "legally" and "illegally" wherever
is convenient to industry. Some 66,000 different compounds are used in Industry. Nearly
a billion tons of pesticides and herbicides comprising 225 different chemicals were
produced in the U.S. last year (1984), and an additional 79 million pounds were imported.
Some 2% of chemical compounds have been tested for side effects. There are 15,000
chemical plants in the U.S., daily manufacturing mass death.(Bradford 1985)
This article writes a narrative that is heard across the United States. In it the data
about the waste that is here toxic is written in a way that attaches it inherently to Bhopal.
This waste is not simply made: it “manufactures mass death” in exactly the same way as
it did in Bhopal.
Another piece of literature, published early in 1986, was entitled The Bhopal
Tragedy: What Really Happened and What It Means for American Workers and
Communities at Risk, which explicitly set the Bhopal disaster out as an example to
America. One of the reasons for writing of the book was an “increasing uneasiness that
Bhopal, even though a historic event, might slip into the obscure recesses of history with
scarcely more than a ripple unless a determined effort were made to change the way in
which we deal with hazardous industries and substances. Such industries and substances
are fast becoming a ubiquitous feature of modern industrial society, and the time has long
since come for us to develop more effective methods for dealing with them and to see
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that the risks they pose are more equitably distributed.” (Morehouse, Subramaniam et al.
1986 ix)
Morehouse’s vision has both come true and not come true. It has not come true in
the United States. Bhopal, frozen between systems of justice, helped to constitute
environmentalism as an international issue. In the United States it spawned “a family of
environmental regulations sometimes referred to as ‘Bhopal’s Babies’ that has
transformed the chemical industry…”(Fortun 2001 63) In 1986, two year after the
Bhopal disaster, a law called the “Emergency Planning & Community Right to Know
Act”(EPCRA) went into effect.
Beyond the general awakening to the commonplace nature of industrial
contamination, EPCRA was drafted in response to the particularly terrifying realization
that factories very similar to the Bhopal factory, particularly its sister factory in Institute,
West Virginia, that also produced MIC, existed in the United States. Bhopal mapped the
existence of hazardous chemicals onto the consciousness of the American people. The
new fear became of “a Bhopal.” If the “marginalized” neighborhood where the gas
disaster occurred is conceived of as “fringe,” then the dynamic that we witness here is
instructive. In the reverse flow of the logic of Summers’ memo, the fringe, having
absorbed the toxins, returns the story of how it happened to the center so that they can use
it to more effectively “seal” themselves off from it. Toxins are exported: knowledge is
imported. Inequity is reified.
Though Union Carbide assured the world after Bhopal that their Institute plant
was completely safe, they shut the plant down in 1985 to complete $500 million worth of
repairs to their MIC unit, reopening it on May 4. However, shortly after, on August 11,
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1985, 500 gallons of toxic aldchiloxin and MIC leaked from the recently renovated plant.
One hundred and thirty-four people were treated for exposure, though there were no
casualties.(EPCRA Project)
This accident spurred the controversial “Superfund Amendments and
Reauthorization Act” (SARA) through congress, along with EPCRA.26 SARA was a
reauthorization of the “Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and
Liability Act”(CERCLA), otherwise known as Superfund. Superfund was designed to
provide money to clean up “uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous-waste sites as well as
accidents, spills, and other emergency releases of pollutants and contaminants into the
environment.”(EPA page on CERCLA), and gave the EPA the authority to “assure the
cooperation” of those parties responsible – or to do it for them if they are “uncooperative.
Essentially, Superfund charges the EPA with a policing duty against any and all
toxic offenders in the United States. The Superfund reauthorization, coming on the heels
of Bhopal and Bradford’s article, expanded and honed the ambitious legislation,
encouraging an adherence to standards, increasing state involvement, providing
additional enforcement tools, demanding a focus on the human effects of toxic exposure,
and increasing the size of the trust fund to $8.5 billion.
The goal of EPCRA, more precisely, was “to increase public knowledge of and
access to information on the presence of toxic chemicals in communities, releases of
toxic chemicals into the environment, and waste management activities involving toxic
chemicals; and to encourage and support planning for responding to environmental
26
EPCRA also had a program internal to it, the Total Release Index (TRI), which mandates that any
releases of over 1340 different hazardous substances be reported to the EPA, either annually or
immediately, depending on the substance. Failure to do so means that the guilty party can be subject to a
fine of up to $25,000 per day per substance unreported.
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emergencies.” (EPCRA Summary by EPA Region 8 Website) The key provision being
access to information. EPCRA not only gave access to existing information, but also
created entirely new forms of monitoring and data collection for the purpose of giving to
both the government and the citizenry at least a partial picture of actual and potential
dangers. All of this information is now available on the internet. It guides the
categorization of waste in places like Cambridge. Care Environmental takes the
“hazardous waste” that is brought to the Armory (built, remember, on the other half of
Cofran’s pit) and divides it up into different categories, based on EPA guidelines, and
disposes of it carefully to different companies who neutralize it in ways defined by the
same guidelines. We can access and learn about it on the computer, which I learned how
to use in school, thanks to places like to Tobin.
The map of toxic disposal then, becomes a series of arrow moving from the
“center” towards the “fringe,” along not only economic but also along informational
pathways. It illustrates the crudest stereotype of the citizen environmentalist; the
NIMBY-ist. Not In My Backyard.
Primarily, EPCRA charges its committees, the Local Emergency Planning
Committees (LEPC’s), and the State Emergency Response Commissions (SERCs), with
creating contingency plans for chemical accidents (so-called, “worst case scenario”
plans), warning and evacuation procedures, acting as information sources to citizens and
governments about chemical releases, and preparing reports on annual disposal of
hazardous substances(EPCRA Project). Fortun writes that while “right-to-know laws are
an imperfect response to the Bhopal disaster” the “effects of right-to-know laws have
nonetheless been enormous - sparking environmental initiatives within corporations, in
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the communities where hazardous production facilities are located, and by national and
international environmental groups.” (Fortun, 2001 74)
But what of Morehouse’s concern? Has it not in fact come true in the United
States that we have allowed Bhopal to “slip into the obscure recesses of history”? We
have not forgotten the dangerous cautionary tale of Bhopal, but we have forgotten the
place that was and is Bhopal. But Bhopal does not go away: the people of Bhopal are
angry, and they are suffering. We must be careful with the knowledge that we use: we
must know where it comes from.
An “Event” Occurs
…[Business historian Andrew Hoffman explains how] events operate as catalysts for
institutional change. Bhopal is on his list of significant events, as are Silent Spring, the
Santa Barbara oil spill, fire on Ohio’s Cuyahoga River, the first Earth Day, the formation
of EPA, Sevesco, termination of Ann Burford Gorsuch, the ozone hole, Chernobyl, the
Mobro 4000 garbage barge, medical waste on East Coast Beaches, and Exxon Valdez.
These events, in Hoffman’s analysis, catalyzed public concern about environmental
risk…(Fortun 2001 78)
However, events become catalysts, as Hoffman explains, not simply because of
their scale, but also because of their timing and context. Disasters and leaks happen all
over the world, but the list of terms that have become bywords for particular types of
disaster, or have elicited a response on scale, remains relatively short.
Fortun illustrates the distinction between “incidents” and “events,” with the story
of a leak of the same gas that leaked in India merely a month before in Middleport, NY.
It had entered the ventilation system of an elementary school, exposing 500 students to
the gas that left nine of them in the hospital. The residents were not, in fact, notified
what the gas that leaked (by an FMC plant used to produce the pesticide Furadan) was
until after it became infamous during the Bhopal disaster. Fortun writes that:
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Incidents like the one in Middleport happen, but don’t count as “events.” And it takes
“events” for things to change-even though “events” don’t often happen in western New
York, or in Charleston, West Virginia- unless it’s Love Canal. Hugh Kaufman, the EPA
official who helped expose the Love Canal story, provides a blunt explanation: “Love
Canal was a catastrophe, but it wasn’t the worst catastrophe in the country, or in New
York state, or even in Niagara County.” But “it was Love Canal, Hooker Chemical and
Niagara Falls, honeymoon capital of the world. Editors all over the country had orgasms.
So Love Canal became catastrophic, not any of the other 10,000 hazardous dump sites
across America.” (Fortun 2001 77, citing Hoffman, 1997)
This reading suggests that certain moments cause shifts in the social imaginary. It
becomes possible to imagine what was not possible before. But it does not do so just
because it happens – it does so precisely because it captures the imagination. Bhopal
captured the imagination of America: it was a story that gave us chills. But it gave us
chills for the same reason that a good novel can give us chills – that is, because we can
imagine it happening to ourselves. The concept of NWC as a fringe and of Cofran’s Pit,
has some of the same allure. They allow us to think about Love Canal and about Bhopal
and say, “what if?”
Harvey’s comment on Love Canal below emphasizes additionally how a collusion
of factors created an environment in which it was possible to draw a direct and irrefutable
causal connection; how it was possible to point a finger and say there.
In the case of Love Canal, there was an identifiable enemy (a negligent corporation), a
direct and unmistakable effect (nasty liquids in the basement, sick children, and worried
suburban mothers), a clear threat to public trust in government (the board of Education
was clearly negligent), a legal capacity to demand personal compensation, an indefinable
fear of the unknown, and an excellent opportunity for dramatization that the media could
and did use with relish. (Harvey, 1996 388)
Harvey, however, compares this to the case of ozone concentration, in which
…the enemy is everyone who drives, governments have very little mandate to
intervening people’s driving habits, the effects are diffuse, demands for compensation
hard to mount, and the capacity for dramatization limited making for very little media
coverage. (Harvey, 1996 388)
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In a certain way, the goal of my project is to call attention to this fact. We are all
implicated; but not just in the problems that we talk about. We are equally implicated in
the problems that we choose not to talk about, though they occur nonetheless.
None of this is presented in order to imply that the Middleport leak in fact had the
same scale as the Bhopal leak and thus should be given the same “event” status, or that
nothing should be done about Love Canal until we have solved our transportation
problems. It may, however, be to note that the leak in Middleport gains significance and
a narrative only after the “event” at Bhopal. It may also be to note that Love Canal
occurred in a zone of interest to many people, and thus was capable of remapping the
suburbs’ relationship to the ground.
However, being an “event” did not do very much for Bhopal, and most
importantly, for the Bhopalis who were affected by it. The “event” that caused the
rewriting of narratives of disaster and contamination around the world, the actual disaster,
the suffering of the actual victims, indeed slipped “into the obscure recesses of history
with scarcely more than a ripple.” International regulatory bodies have not developed
more “effective methods for dealing with [environmental hazards] and to see that the
risks they pose are more equitably distributed” since 1986. In fact, as the people who
have more access to information about contaminants can more effectively bar them from
their cities and homes, inevitably becomes less equitably distributed. Thus more
knowledge about where the risks are located and how dangerous they are actually appear
to contribute to a less equitable distribution of risk.
But then, how can you ever call risk fair? It seems that while the heart of, for
example, the Bhopal story has had wide appeal, what is necessary for attention to be
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called to particular suffering is preexisting economic and educational capital. The
suffering of the poor is often not relevant to the rich, except in the problematic relation of
charity. In an ever increasingly international world, it is indeed possible that not only
Arkansas and Saugus, but even Bhopal have become fringes of Cambridge, and so risk
becomes everyone’s responsibility.
Remember Bhopal
Union Carbide (UC), which is now a subsidiary of Dow Chemical, has never
taken responsibility for the accident in Bhopal, or even divulged the exact contents of the
gas that leaked.27 The civil case against UC was settled in 1987 for $470 million in the
India courts – an amount that gave the survivors an average of $940 each.28 However, no
actor in this tragedy has every been brought to trial or punished in the pending criminal
suits. No officer from UC in America, no officer of the subsidiary Union Carbide India
Limited (UCIL).29
Although the evidence in the Bhopal case has been collected, and written and
rewritten, the threads that trace back to negligent behavior of an American corporation
continue to be excluded from the official narrative, and are only unofficially mapped.
The Bhopal case has been repeatedly thrown out of American courts in spite of the fact
27
Afterwards the liable company maintained that the accident had been a result of sabotage by an
employee, however there has never been any evidence produced to this effect.
28
This amount is often compared to the Exxon Valdez settlement, which allowed and immediate allowance
of $40,000 per sea otter. Additionally, the contaminated site in Bhopal was left there to rot, causing,
among other things, the contamination of the local water -supply.
29
The former CEO, Warren Anderson, jumped bail in India in 1984, and never returned to face the charge
of culpable homicide levied against him in the Bhopal court. He lives in the Hamptons with his wife
Lillian. In August 2002 a suit by the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation to reduce the charges against
Anderson to non-extraditable ones was defeated. His extradition order was finally delivered to the United
States by the Indian government in spring of 2003, but has yet to receive any response.
It seems that UC sees Bhopal as a depthless, ungracious social project. In their eyes, taking any sort of
literal responsibility, would be tantamount to taking responsibility for the entire third world; to embarking
on a project that might contribute to making the already poor (and now additionally ill and decimated) a bit
less poor.
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that the central actor belongs to this country. The legal process that Z wanted, the one of
coalescing evidence and narrative into proof and responsibility has never occurred.
As we saw also (though very differently) with the Tobin many sites of
environmental contamination have a paradoxical relationship to innovation or idealism.
Almost any revolution in technology involves the manipulation of elements and ideas that
are not fully understood.
In terms of establishing criminal liability and forcing parties to take responsibility
for their actions, citizens who are able to exploit the information that an organization
such as EPA provides can take legal steps. But American courts have refused to try the
Bhopal case.
“Bhopal is history now”(Fortun 2001 103), said Robert Kennedy, former CEO of
Union Carbide – while acknowledging in a shareholder meeting that “the tragedy of
Bhopal has been politicized and so little has been done for the victims and that in fact is
the second tragedy of Bhopal.”(Fortun 2001 108) That Carbide’s CEO can make this
statement while still maintaining that the company is not liable for the disaster highlights
an in important contradiction: even the corporation has knowledge of how disastrous the
situation on the ground in Bhopal is to this day – yet they take no responsibility because
they have not been forced to; they have not been convicted. The “history” that Kennedy
talks about implies a closed book, and a fixed, finished narrative, free to float about
informing other questions. And as in the logic of Summers’ memo, misfortune begets
misfortune unless there is a way to rewrite the map, making it relevant to those who have
the power to do something about it. Activists in Bhopal understand this, attempting to
“’mobilize victims to fight for their basic needs; to create alternative data to counter the
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governmental efforts at erasure; to present, in some areas, “people’s plans” as
alternatives to government programs” (Rajan cited in Fortun, 2001189).
Bhopal is an inverse story to the Tobin, one in which the details of the event,
cause and victims are known and precise, while the follow-up has been scattered, thin,
flawed and hampered by a disjuncture between the types of documentation needed and
those available, opposed to one in which the cause and victims are indistinct, though the
response has been surgical.
Bhopal has generated a huge amount of documents, but they have not been
powerful in their effort to advocate for the victims. What kinds of documents do possess
power in that situation and how are they used? Why has there been a need for activists to
generate “alternative data” and why has it been mainly ineffective? The answers are
complex, but return to the preexisting conditions of inequality, that have been further
compounded by state secrecy (not allowing the victims to partake in the subjective
analysis of the data that does exist, and therefore forcing the production of “alternative
data”), and Bhopal’s literal singularity. That is, the combination of factors that made
Bhopal an “event” and helped to prevent “other Bhopals” only captured the attention of
“particularist” rather than global politics.
Yet internationally, Bhopal has remained singular and pre-legal. It is therefore the
difference in geography not the difference in stories that proves to be most crucial in any
discussion of environmentalism, and that is why a universalized discourse is so
dangerous. Every experience of an environment that is off balance is situated in and
constituted by these “socio-ecological and political-economic processes.” The question
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at hand then, being, does this universality function in aggregate to emphasize or
deemphasize the distributive injustices of chemical and environmental hazards?
It Was Not Possible
Reference to Bhopal has become a way to comment on many things. (Fortun, 2001 139)
Rajikumar Keswani predicted the Bhopal disaster. For two years before the tragic
night of December 2, he wrote article after article in the local papers. He drafted
proposals for regulation and sent them to the supreme court of India. He joined the
workers union at Carbide and advocated for plant safety from within, and participating in
worker protests about the plant conditions.
Keswani was not an engineer: he was a journalist; a self-described “layman.” He
knew nothing about the composition of chemicals or their behavior. His conviction that
the Bhopal plant was headed for disaster grew out of two small pieces of information that
he happened to read independently. One was in a Union Carbide report that mentioned in
passing that several of the gasses that MIC broke down into, such as phosgene, were
“heavier than air.” Reference to phosgene then caught his eye once again while reading
an article on WWII; it had been one of the chemicals used in the German gas chambers.
With these two incidental pieces of information, Keswani launched an
investigation that convinced him that Bhopal was on the road to certain tragedy. He
brought his hypothesis that the gas, if it leaked, would travel along the ground as a
moving execution chamber, to a science professor at the local University, who told him
that it wasn’t true. The professor maintained that the gas would “disperse.” Stubbornly,
he remained convinced, but in spite of the shrillness of his warnings, no one paid him any
mind. Even his friends thought he was crazy. Bhopal was not yet an “event” and thus
could not yet catalyze change.
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After the disaster, Keswani became a celebrity. He was interviewed on radio and
television shows, as he was the only journalist who knew anything about the plant. He
was called a “Cassandra” and a “lone voice in the wilderness” (Lapierre and Moro, 2003)
He became the youngest person ever to receive the prestigious Indian PTI Award for
Excellence in Journalism. In his acceptance speech he noted that he might also be the
first to receive the award for such a spectacular journalistic failure – had he succeed at his
task no one would have ever taken note. Almost twenty years later he could comment
“everyone – businesses, governments, lawyers, filmmakers, photographers, doctors,
hospitals, Union Carbide and journalists like myself – have benefited from the disaster.
Everyone except the victims.” (Interview with Keswani, Bhopal 2003)
Keswani’s became the story of the narrator who could have been a hero, but who
no one would listen to. Not only had the disaster benefited those who could apply it to
their own lives and dangers, it had benefited those whose business it was to share it
internationally, in the media and elsewhere.
We All Live in Bhopal
The title of the 1984 article from the Fifth Estate (the article that was later reused
for a 1990 Bhopal activist’s pamphlet) reads “We All Live In Bhopal.” The below
message was heard clearly all across the USA.
A powerful image: industrial civilization as one vast, stinking extermination camp. We
all live in Bhopal, some closer to the gas chambers and to the mass graves, but all of us
close enough to be victims…". (Bradford 1985)
But what exactly does this phrase mean? We don’t all live in Bhopal. It is meant
to signify that we all potentially live in Bhopal, or that Bhopal is as far away as the
factory down the road, or the air we breathe at night. But when does it suggest we live in
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Bhopal? Crucially, the phrase “We all live in Bhopal” seems to set us down in the city in
that pause before the leak; we all live in Bhopal on December 2, 1984. Or perhaps even
in 1981, before the factory began to be neglected; or perhaps even in 1975, in time to
prevent it from having ever been built in our backyards to begin with. While the
apparent universality of the “environmental” movement allows us to feel that we can
identify with a Bhopali survivor, because We All Live In Bhopal, it is not the postapocalyptic Bhopal of today that we inhabit, and by claiming it we tragically
misunderstand this geography, wherein the power to use information proactively to write
the dangers of our own lives has been purchased by the geography of difference.
And so, too, we most certainly Do Not All Live In Bhopal. Take, for example,
the fact that while thousands and thousands, many at some distance from the plant, died,
not a single Union Carbide employee lost their life that night. One reason for that is
because they knew that covering your mouth and nose with a wet piece of cloth, closing
your eyes, and minimizing any movement that might force deep inhalation, the damage
resulting from exposure to MIC can be effectively limited to tolerable levels.30
It was therefore the lack of warning, the lack of a basic concern or thought for the
safety of people living in the plant’s vicinity, and the utter lack of information that made
a terrible disaster into a horrifying mass disaster. UC’s representatives had told the
citizens and the government of Bhopal that the plant was “as harmless as a chocolate
factory.” Piled on top of the already extraordinary poverty of those hundreds of thousands
30
This is why some of the very elderly, too frail to get up off their beds and run away, survived. This is
why an ascetic, trained through meditation to breathe only once every three or four minutes, survived
(Lapierre and Moro). And this is why Keswani, the only person outside of Carbide who understood the
nature of the factory’s danger, wrapped scarves around his families mouths, put on goggles, and drove
everyone to relative safety on the family’s two scooters.
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who bore the brunt of the gas exposure was a poverty of information that cost them their
lives.
It is a timeworn fact that calamity strikes the poor more often and with greater
violence than it does the rich. But calamity generates its own capital: a wealth of
information, a cache of understanding of that which was previously unthinkable. As
Keswani said, when asked why no one believed him before December 3, 1984, “they said
it could not happen because it had never happened before.”(Interview with Rajkumar
Keswani 2003) However, once Bhopal had happened, one could say that We All Live In
Bhopal.
However, the chain of small, disastrous actions and accidents that caused the gas
release in Bhopal would not have caused the same reaction in the plant in Institute
because the safety systems in the two factories were designed differently.31 Whether this
was a case of consciously valuing safety less in India than in the US is up for debate.
However the fact that the plant was less safe is not. So again, We Do Not All Live In
Bhopal. Because legislation in India has not changed; because lives that were valued at
less before the opening of the plant than they would have been valued at in the USA, are
still valued at less.
Safety in Knowledge
Neither the government hospitals nor the Trust hospital set up by Union Carbide
with the funds the generated by liquidating their Indian site and their assets in India (and
31
That they were different is agreed upon. The Bhopal plant did not have a constant built-in monitoring
system for the MIC tank and the pipelines that led to it. More of the monitoring systems were manual, and
the tank in Bhopal stored more of the highly reactive MIC than anywhere else in the world. This was partly
because the Bhopal plant produced Sevin in batches, rather than continuously, and therefore needed to store
MIC because it would not necessarily be used immediately. The Bhopal plant did not produce
continuously because the market was in the process of being invented; it was built on a grand gamble that a
huge market could be created in India for the pesticide Sevin, a market that never materialized.
106
conveniently making themselves untouchable in that country) have put together any
comprehensive research on the symptoms of the victims or the development of their
illnesses.32 What began as a poverty of power and information endures as a wretched
scientific drought.
Union Carbide’s factory in Bhopal was built next to what grew into the bustees,
or shantytowns. The inhabitants of these slums were predominantly squatters. Very few
of them possessed a deed to the square of land on which they had built their dwelling.
Since the plots do not have legality, they cannot be mapped. And since many of the
residents do not have the paper ephemera of legitimate citizenship – that is,
documentation of birth, marriage, address etc., neither they nor their homes exist in the
symbolic sphere of the map, or in the legal sphere at all. This is a form of non-existence
that is mostly destructive.
In the occasional and recurrent efforts to ‘clean up’ the area, government officials
will arrive with bulldozers, announcing that the land is going to be “cleaned up,” within
an hour, to mimic the emptiness of the map.33 This disenfranchisement became
32
MIC is an extremely unstable gas, and very little is known about it, much less about its effects on people.
When MIC is released slowly into the air it breaks down mainly into CO2 (according to Kamal Pareek).
However, when it breaks down under pressure, as it did in the tank in Bhopal – reacting with water, and
probably some metal filings – it becomes a powerful storm of extremely dangerous compounds. However,
it is only Union Carbide that knows the exact or probable composition of that maelstrom. They have thus
far chosen not to reveal it. It is possible, for example, that the clouds of gas that set and blew across Bhopal
were composed of different things at different locations. It is likely that one of those components was
hydrogen cyanide.
33
In order to receive compensation under the 1987 settlement agreement with Union Carbide (paltry
though it was), the claimants needed to be able to prove their address, their identity, their injuries (and that
such had not been a preexisting condition) and the existence and demise of any relative that they had lost.
Indeed, some entire families were wiped out that will never be counted because there was no one to
remember and re-present them. This disenfranchisement is different from but related to the current
political situation in Guantanamo Bay, in which the United States Government is exploiting the fact that it
has the non-location of its illegal naval base on the Island of Cuba, with which it does not even have
diplomatic relations, as an excuse to hold prisoners of the “War on Terror” there without having to give
them the benefits of any law in particular – US, international, or for that matter Cuban. (Judith Butler talk
on Indefinite Detention, 2002)
107
particularly brutal and problematic in the aftermath of the Bhopal disaster, because a
group that had been almost entirely undocumented, was suddenly, during the claims and
settlement process, required to prove not only their handicaps, but their very existence,
and, most problematically, the existence of those family members who died and were
buried or cremated the night of the accident without having generated a death
certificate.34
However, this is not to say that the Bhopal disaster has not produced
documentation. Conversely, “Bhopal has become a city of paper. Faded, watermarked
forms are tickets to any possibility of compensation. Gas victims carry these papers with
them, laced together with string, clutched to their chest as they board crowded buses,
moving between the Collectorate, the hospital, the claims courts, their homes. Traffic in
hope”(Fortun, 2001 166). Documents are dutifully created, presented, procured and
represented. But there is a caveat to all of this documentation; a divide that keeps the
victims from entering into the discourse as an activist project of its own. In addition to
the manifest culture of secrecy and legendary bureaucracy of the Indian government in
this matter, most of the victims are illiterate. “’ Read this to me.’ Perhaps the most
repeated phrase in Bhopal, a response to a rehabilitation scheme that has traded hard copy
for cash compensation, banking on literacy as a scarce resource.” (Fortun, 2001 167)
It is therefore not documents per say that constitute power, but the power to
manipulate and challenge them, and being allowed to participate in official discourses.
34
Meanwhile, an article in the Times of India from 1994 (reported in Fortun 2001, 259) tells of
“competitive bidding between two public-sector computer and electronic firms for a 40 million rupee
(somewhat over $1 million) contract for a fingerprint technology system to be used in Bhopal to minimize
the chances of impersonation by fake claimants.”
108
CONCLUSION
Relevant Differences
This is a story about transformation and about circulation. I began with a story, and with
a suspicion. I guess that is what most investigations begin with. It can be dressed up: a
handsome hypothesis. Or it can be a naked idea searching for a context. It gives us a
pattern for the interpretation of what we find. Except that facts and stories are so
interdependent. You begin with suspicion and you are supposed to end with certainty.
Only sometimes you end only with suspicion, and what you’ve seen along the way.
The story of the Tobin draws on many sources: Tobin itself has had many resources to
draw on. Today the Tobin school continues to wrestle with itself, and teachers continue
to fight with the union for resolution of continuing health claims.
It was possible to “think” the “School of the Future” because Cambridge perceived of
itself as a space capable of transforming the way that learning was structured. So its
failures must now help us to structure the ways that transformation is learned and
allowed, and to ask how it can be enacted without conceding to politics that treat
geographic and economic differences like Krim’s physical landscape, that is, as though
they are inherent. That does not forget that the fringe does not disappear, it only moves.
Mappings of spaces are powerful, and as such they must be made and remade in
both official and unofficial ways. What, for me, shines most powerfully from these
documents is the individual’s will to rethink static and authoritative discourses about
space. Though all things are not equal, it remains that the most powerful tools we can
share are interpretive ones, and the alternative spaces within which they can be spoken.
And that we must share them.
109
I still want an answer. I still want to point and say, there, and I know that I’m not
alone. So I will keep looking, and trying to support those others who are looking too,
fighting for safe spaces for their children, and the children that I might one day have.
Only not forgetting, having said there, but to ask immediately, again, but where?
110
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APPENDIX
ASHRAE
American Society of Heating, Refrigerating & Air-Conditioning Engineers
AUL
Activity and Use Limitation
BGS
Below Ground Surface
CERCLA
Comprehensive Environmental Reauthorization Act
CFM
Cubic Feet per Minute
CHC
Cambridge Historical Commission
CHEJ
Center for Health, Environment and Justice
CO2
Carbon Dioxide
CTA
Cambridge Teachers Association
DEP
Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection
DEQE
Department of Environmental Quality Engineers (DEP)
DPW
Department of Public Works
EHE
Environmental Health and Engineering Company
EPA
Environmental Protection Agency
EPCRA
Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act
GIS
Geographical Information Systems
HVAC
Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning
LEPC
Local Emergency Planning Committee
MBTA
Metropolitan Boston Transit Authority
MC
Mid Cambridge
MCS
Multiple Chemical Sensitivity
MIC
Methyl Isocynate
MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
NEBCo.
New England Brick Company
NIMBY
Not In My BackYard
NWC
Northwest Cambridge
OC
Old Cambridge
OSD
Open Space District
PTO
Parent Teacher Organization
SARA
Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act
115
SERC
State Emergency Response Commission
TRI
Total Release Index
UC
Union Carbide Corporation
UCIL
Union Carbide India Limited
UV
Unit Ventilator
VOC
Volatile Organic Compound
WHO
World Health Organization
116