Sydney Harbour is shaped like an inverted Y and is one of the best natural harbours in Canada. Victoria Road forms the lone thin artery tying the two together, and it's squeezed tight by the industrial organs of the steel mill on the harbour side and the coke ovens across the road. In 1893, a Bostonian named Henry Melville Whitney banded the small coal-mining operations of the island together to form the Dominion Coal Company. Whitney and his partners then started construction on a new steel mill in 1899. The steel mill became the Dominion Iron and Steel Corporation.
Intense heat is needed to make steel and coke provided the best source of cheap and very hot heat.
To make coke, Whitney built a series of coke ovens across the road from the steel mill. Coke is formed when coal is burned at extremely high temperatures without oxygen. I watched this dumping process many times as a child. When the water hit the coal a cloud of enormous proportions would explode into the air. It was like smoke from a child's drawing, fat and white, and it floated like a balloon over Frederick Street and the other streets of my neighbourhood.