Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Hunters Point no longer stinks

What you’d never know while strolling through Hunters Point today is that in the late 19th century, the city was seized by the “Hunter’s Point Stenches,” horrible odors caused by “bone boiling,” “offal rendering,” manure boats, and oil refining—all part of the many not-so-pleasant industries that called this part of Queens home at the time.

The “Hunters Point Stenches”

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I remember (maybe 30 years back)
the stench from a fat rendering plant that would drift as far as Flushing
if the wind blew just right.

It was a sour sickly smell.

This has been replaced with the stench of developers eager to rape
the Hunters point neighborhood while rendering some enormous profits!

Anonymous said...

I think the young families are getting a bit nervous with all that talk about living about a toxic soup that resembles Love Canal and that supposedly 'buried' report slamming that land as virtually uninhabitable with all that gunk in the ground.

I suspect we will see a number of puff pieces like this.

Lipstick on a pig folks, lipstick on a pig.

Anonymous said...

"This has been replaced with the stench of developers eager to rape
the Hunters point neighborhood while rendering some enormous profits!"

So are you saying you would rather have the bone boiling and fat rendering plants back that will leave a fowl odor and MORE pollution blowing around the city?

Call me crazy, but I prefer the developers to the nasty smells of boiling bones and fat rendering plants. At least with new developments, I wont mind walking outside of my house to go to the supermarket or to work.

Anonymous said...

Call me crazy, but I prefer the developers to the nasty smells of boiling bones and fat rendering plants. At least with new developments, I wont mind walking outside of my house to go to the supermarket or to work.
--------

What supermarket? Hunters Point has a supermarket?

Anonymous said...

"Call me crazy, but I prefer the developers to the nasty smells of boiling bones and fat rendering plants. At least with new developments, I wont mind walking outside of my house to go to the supermarket or to work."

Actually, as bad as that smells, its mostly harmless organic compounds. The really cool stuff are all the complex hydrocarbons from the varnish, paint, turpentine, and petroleum refineries.

Dirt poisoned by those smelters with the heavy metals (like Phelps Dodge) are just the right thing for your kids to be around.

Unless you are thinking of entombing it with several feet of concrete everywhere you are kidding yourselves with your kids as guinea pigs.

So I ask you - are you willing to gamble with them because of what some real estate tout said to you.

Find out where he lives and where he raises his kids before you believe anything they say to you.