Within that area also lies a crematorium, a truck to barge garbage transfer station, a six lane highway, most of Manhattan s municipal bus stations, an exposed high speed rail line, and a defective sewage treatment plant through which roughly half of Manhattan's sewage flows. The City of New York has begun expanding a street to a high speed drive by downsizing an adjacent park. The site chosen, however, was atop the sewage treatment plant, an area where, since the facility was placed on line in 1986, the community residents have been complaining of unbearable odors, headaches, asthma, and other respiratory problems. Just south of Harlem is Manhattan's mostly white, middle to upper class Upper West side, which was the first proposed site for the sewage treatment plant, formally known as the North River Water Pollution Control Plant. This is a clear-cut example of racism, specifically environmental racism, which is exemplified in the concentration of environmentally destructive facilities in communities of color.
Environmental racism has a long, disturbing history in the United States.
When these workers attempted to leave the mines because they were feeling ill from dust, they were beaten back into the mines by company overseers. Within two years, almost 500 workers died and 1,500 were injured by a disease similar to black lung. Many such incidents have been uncovered by community activists and there are plenty more examples today that indicate the need for an environmental justice movement. An example is a community called Greenpoint-Williamsburg, a Latino and Hasidic community, that has a combined hazardous and nuclear storage facility, a huge underground oil spill, the largest sewage treatment plant on the East Coast, twice as many toxic storage sites as any other community board district, and that now faces the prospect of an incinerator. The manifestations of environmental racism in New York State do not stop at sewage treatment plants, incinerators, or toxic dumps.