[CPEO-BIF] "The Toxic Secret Underneath the Seaport, " New York City

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

The Toxic Secret Underneath the Seaport
Residents of a historic neighborhood have been trying to preserve its character as major building projects loom. Now the discovery of a 19th-century thermometer factory there has further complicated matters.

By Jane Margolies
New York Times
June 7, 2019

In an area as old as the South Street Seaport, a part of Lower Manhattan that dates to the 17th century, historic remnants are bound to turn up from time to time. A wooden ship was unearthed on Water Street in 1981. A stoneware jug was discovered on Pearl Street where a boardinghouse stood in the early 1800s. 

And on Peck Slip, where assorted small-scale buildings were lined up in the 18th and 19th centuries, clay smoking pipes and pieces of an old chamber pot were found in 2013 and 2014, when a post office was converted into the Peck Slip School. Students there study the artifacts as part of a fifth-grade archaeology unit.

But these days, their parents and other Seaport locals are more concerned about what may lie under the parking lot across the street from the school: elemental mercury, the toxic remains of a thermometer factory active in the 1800s.

…

For the entire article, see
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/nyregion/south-street-seaport-mercury.html

--

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650/961-8918 
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org

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