35 vintage photos taken by the EPA reveal what American cities looked like before pollution was regulated
By James Pasley
8 June 2023
(Insider) – Don’t let the soft, sepia tones fool you. The United States used to be dangerously polluted.
Before President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, the environment and its well-being was not a federal priority.
In the early 1970s, the EPA launched the “The Documerica Project,” which leveraged 100 freelance photographers to document what the US looked like. By 1974, they had taken 81,000 photos. The National Archives digitized nearly 16,000 and made them available online.
Many of the photos were taken before water and air pollution were fully regulated. The Clean Air Act was passed in 1970, and the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972.
Baltimore, Birmingham, Cleveland, Delaware, Denver, Kansas, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New Jersey, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco all feature here, in shots filled with smoke, smog, acid, oil, rubbish, and sewage.
None of the 35 photos we’ve selected are pretty (other than the film-photo haze), but it’s worth remembering what US cities used to be like before we cared what we put into the air, soil, and water. […]
Though it might not be clear, this is the George Washington Bridge going over the Hudson River, covered in thick smog. In 1965, a study by New York City Council found breathing New York’s air had the same effect as smoking two packets of cigarettes a day.
In Washington D.C., raw sewage flows out into the Potomac river. In 1970, a hot summer resulted in a “stomach-turning” smell coming from the Potomac, due to the mixing of sewage and algae. The pollution was blamed on a “hundred years of under-estimates, bad decisions, and outright mistakes,” a director of the Federal Water Quality Administration told The New York Times. His description can be applied to a lot of the US before the EPA.
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