Before the EPA

Was the epiphanic lady in the photograph actually the designer to whom the ad writer is speaking? Nah. Not in 1959. No proper, glove and hat wearing lady would be an architect. Apartment building and incinerator design was a man’s job. Just like writing sexist ad copy.

President Richard Nixon signed the Environmental Protection Agency into existence in 1970. When I was a kid, one of my chores was to burn our trash in a steel barrel in the back yard. Every house in town had one. When the barrel filled up with ash, I dumped it in the drainage ditch. An ad we found recently in a 1959 architecture magazine offers a slightly more sophisticated solution for apartment buildings. At least for the burning phase. The ash barrels were probably still emptied in a drainage ditch.

We find incinerators in a lot of old buildings we renovate. In a vacant building with no electricity, they look like something out of a Freddy Krueger movie. Asbestos is usually present somewhere in them. It has to be abated by specialists in moon suits before the whole thing can be cut up and hauled off.

Joseph Goder Incinerator in an abandoned elementary school. The barrels are still filled with ash. No body parts or razor gloves that we could find. Photo by the author, in a cold, dark, vacant boiler room. Frozen in time.

Where there’s an incinerator there’s a chimney. I’m not sure at what point a chimney becomes a smokestack. When it is disengaged from the wall, smokestack seems the presumptive favorite. Historic preservation departments don’t like it when you tear down large chimneys and smokestacks. Even if they are impotent.

We live in dualistic regulatory times.

Photo by the author

Boiler room fire door repurposed as corridor wall decoration. Photo by the author.