The stench of “toasted garbage” once incensed East Enders

Sometimes even the best (and worst) laid plans run afoul of circumstances. For instance, U.S. President Donald Trump really wanted a bright blue Reflecting Pool in time for the nation’s 250 th anniversary celebration July 4. Instead, he got peeling paint and lots of green algae .  Back in the 1930s, Pittsburgh needed a new trash incinerator. What the city ended up with was an expensive new garbage toaster that couldn’t handle all of the growing city’s refuse.  City leaders compounded their problems by loading the half-baked garbage into trucks and driving it from Lawrenceville to a Morningside ravine, where they dumped it behind some of the city’s wealthiest families’ homes. “Of course no community wants a garbage dump in its midst,” wrote the Pittsburgh Press in 1941. “Garbage smells. And the ‘ash’ from the municipal incinerator is not ash, it is toasted garbage.” What’s now the Pittsburgh Zoo & Aquarium parking lot was once a stream bed and later a troublesome garbage dump. Credit: Amanda Waltz Pungent Pittsburgh Industrial cities like Pittsburgh were smoky and smelly. Most historians have focused their efforts on the heroic measures municipal leaders took to abate the smoke that turned afternoon skies and city buildings black. It’s almost as if historians have turned up their noses at the noxious smells associated with the glue factories, candle makers, rendering plants, and tanneries that made Pittsburgh pungent.  “The air at and near … the dwellings of those residing in the neighborhood has been tainted and impregnated with noxious, hurtful and offensive stinks, smells, stenches and gasses,” residents along Saw Mill Run in the North Side said about Augustus Hoeveler’s glue factory in 1868. Bad smells originating in the East Liberty stockyards, which opened in 1864, spurred similar complaints. “The smells arising from them were so exceedingly offensive that we were obliged to close the