In August 1965 my family went to the Worlds Fair in New York City. A relative of my father — a teacher who lived in Manhattan — was taking her vacation elsewhere, and invited my parents to use her apartment as a pied-à-terre while we visited the fair (had she not done this, we could not have afforded the trip).
It was the first time I had ever set foot in Manhattan. I had recently turned ten, and had only seen Manhattan on TV. The visit was very intense for me, a sensory overload situation unlike anything I had ever experienced before.
One of the vivid memories I retain of that visit was what we saw the morning we set off for the Worlds Fair. We came out of the apartment building out onto the street and started walking east, toward the sunrise. It was probably 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning. It was going to be a sunny, hot day, and as we walked I couldn't believe what I was seeing. The sky, visible from the floor of a canyon of tall buildings, was pure yellow and virtually as bright as an arc light, from the horizon up. I could only see blue sky by looking straight up, and even that looked a hazy and washed-out shade of blue. The sky in front of me was too bright to look at for more than a second or two. I had never seen anything like that before in my life. I couldn't understand why the sky looked like that; it certainly didn't look yellow in the morning where we lived, more than 200 miles to the north-west of Manhattan.
Of course I have a good many memories of the fair, the IBM exhibit, the General Motors exhibit, the Pieta, the Unisphere, the New York State pavilion, still there and rusting away.
But the other big memory I wanted to relate is from the ride home. Instead of going north back the way we came on the Thruway, we went west, through the Holland Tunnel into New Jersey on Route 78. As we drove along the Pulaski Skyway toward Newark, we passed a large electric power plant. It had five smokestacks, and these were belching dark gray smoke into the air at a furious rate. I imagine the power grid was operating at full output because of all the air conditioning load due to the hot August weather. Actually, my memory is that there were two of these five-smokestack power plants visible as we drove west through the most densely-populated part of New Jersey, but I'm not completely sure of that; I am sure there was at least one.
The rate at which this thing was pumping out smoke into the atmosphere had to be seen to be believed. It was coming out of the stacks seemingly under pressure, billowing out laterally at the upward-facing mouth of each chimney stack. At the age of ten, I was already very interested in machines and technology of all types, and I found the sight of this fascinating and amazing, as you can probably tell by the vividness of my memory of it. The idea that I was watching the pollution of the air I was breathing didn't occur to me.
My point in telling this story is that the level of pollution that was tolerated by Americans before the awakening of environmental awareness in the late '60s and through the 1970s is almost impossible to imagine today. Now, all those plants in North Jersey are gone, I believe. Certainly the ones that burn coal or heavy fuel oil are gone, although I think there are some gas-turbine plants that burn natural gas still there. If there are any coal-burning plants still in the region, they have enormous filters on their exhaust streams, in buildings almost as large as the buildings that house the boilers and turbine halls.
I've been in Manhattan in recent years, and nothing like that yellow morning sky can still be seen today. Just a memory, that I feel lucky to have experienced.
Kind of beautiful in a sci-fi sort of way, but horrifying to know that we were soon going to be dropping down into there and having to breathe that air.