New Haven Industrial Heritage Trails

Format: 16-panel accordion-fold zine. See individual pages below or download entire spread here.

New Haven’s most iconic industrial ruin, English Station, sits silently upon its own artificial island at the mouth of the Mill River. Ball Island is laced with coal-related contaminants that are presently the subject of remediation efforts. This project traces the extraction, transport, processing, and transformation of coal into useful and harmful byproducts that were eventually deposited into the riparian landscape. It focuses on the major coal stockpilers who turned coal into other forms of fuel or energy, namely electricity, gas, and coke. It traces the coal back to its sedimentary source in the anthracite coalbeds of Pennsylvania and bituminous coalfields of West Virginia, following it as it was relayed by various modes of land and sea before finally arriving in New Haven where it was transformed through factory processes, and incrementally deposited back into the landscape.

Long before English Station started to burn coal in 1929 the riverbed was laced with the byproducts of coal gas. Various incarnations of the New Haven Gas Light Company had been producing gas from coal at the Mill River site since 1861, depositing tar and other contaminants into the watershed. Ball Island was bulkheaded and extended several times in the early 20th century, first to host Station B, then English Station, and later its additions. The fill that made up the island was dredged from the bottom of the river. Core sampling in the early 2000s determined that the island was a heterogeneous mixture of coal-related particles, most found too deep to have come from English Station itself, though it is certainly responsible for much of the present environmental damage. Remediation efforts are aimed at sealing in what is too deep to retrieve while excavating the most contaminated surface soil, transporting and depositing it in yet another landscape.

Maynard, Preston, and Marjorie B. Noyes. Carriages and clocks, corsets and locks . 2004.

Parker, WJ Lewis. The great coal schooners of New England, 1870-1909 . Vol. 2, no. 6. Marine Historical Association, 1948.

Stout, Scott A., and Timothy N. Wasielewski. "Historical and chemical assessment of the sources of PAHs in soils at a former coal-burning power plant, New Haven, Connecticut." Environmental Forensics 5, no. 4 (2004): 195-211.