page_title: 1966 New York City smog
section_title: Urban life and smog
hierarchical_section_title: 1966 New York City smog / Impact / Urban life and smog
context_page_description: The 1966 New York City smog was a major air-pollution episode, during which the city's air became filled with damaging levels of several toxic pollutants. Smog covered the city and its surrounding area from November 23 to 26, coinciding with that year's Thanksgiving holiday weekend. It was the third major smog in New York City, following events of similar scale in 1953 and 1963.
  On November 23, a large mass of stagnant air over the East Coast trapped pollutants in the city's air. For three days, New York City was engulfed in dangerously high levels of carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, smoke, and haze. Pockets of air pollution pervaded the greater New York metropolitan area, including parts of New Jersey and Connecticut. By November 25, the smog became severe enough that regional leaders announced a "first-stage alert". During the alert, leaders of local and state governments asked residents and industry to take voluntary steps to minimize emissions. Health officials advised people with respiratory or heart conditions to remain indoors. The city shut off garbage incinerators, requiring massive hauling of garbage to landfills.
context_section_description: Circumstantial factors helped to offset the smog's potential strength and health damage. The event began over the long Thanksgiving weekend, not the workweek, meaning that many factories were closed and far fewer people were in traffic than normally would be. The warm weather meant the demand for central heating was also lower than usual. On November 25, the high of 64 °F (18 °C) broke the previous record high for that date, leading the reporter Homer Bigart to describe the apartment-heating restrictions as "no problem." Because of these factors, pollution—and the death toll—were likely lower than they could have been otherwise.
  The smog brought into focus the complexity and interdependency of environmental problems and other issues of urban life. Attempts by city government to react to the smog had unintended negative side effects of their own; as Mayor Lindsay reflected in his 1969 book The City, "[e]very time you shut down an incinerator, you increase the amount of garbage on city streets." Efforts to address a given environmental problem can cause undesired side effects, sometimes unforeseeable, which are often related to a city's limited resources.
  Environmental harms in general are linked to urban decay and social inequality. After the 1966 smog, the task of eliminating or reducing air pollution became an essential part of the goal to make "the city attractive again to the middle class and acceptable to all its residents." Such harms—but especially those that create obvious and unpleasant effects, as smog does—were among the factors that, historically, motivated and exacerbated white flight from American cities, including New York City, in the mid-20th century. The mass migration of affluent residents, whether individually motivated by unpleasant environmental factors like smog in whole or in part, drained the city's tax base and resulted in a loss of human resources for the city's economy. Residents who remained in the city often had no choice whether to stay or to leave because they lacked the resources that would enable them to move. Those residents then saw the burdens of pollution—including the direct effects of pollution itself, indirect effects of city reactions to pollution (for example, uncollected garbage in the streets), and other problems stemming from lack of municipal resources after white flight—as "emblems of larger governmental neglect and social inequality".
caption: The incinerator plant at Gravesend Bay in Brooklyn, 1973. The 1966 smog demonstrated the interconnected nature of seemingly disparate problems of urban life, such as waste management and pollution.
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