So tomorrow, I'm giving a paper on Joseph Pennell's images of industrial smoke from the perspective of environmental justice - starting and ending with his watercolour of the Bethlehem Steel Works, painted in May 1881. So I thought I'd better go and have a look at the steel works themselves, on the bank of the Lehigh River.
They pretty much stopped working in the early 1980s; went bankrupt in 2001; and now are the site of an arts/entertainment complex (not that you'd know that from the other side of the river). Clearly, in Pennell's time, there was much pollution - of air, and of water. Today, a huge conservation and reclamation project means that the river looks pretty clean - and on a sunny early fall day like this, idyllic (especially when one takes very picturesque-conventional photos of it).
But what I hadn't been expecting was quite how impressive the steel plant is - of course, it's a rusted ruin rather than a working enterprise - but it is huge, and it is magnificent. And yes - of course it was responsible (or its owners were) for spewing out masses and masses of soot particles and carbon dioxide. However, even in its ruined state, it does partake of all the qualities of the sublime (in the most conventional sense of the word): it awes, it makes one feel small, it's like a huge Alp. Pennell was none too good at drawing the Alps, by the way, once he saw them: this, for him was the modern sublime. Today, I could understand that, which was rather a disconcerting feeling.
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