Prologue: A DIY Lead Garden and Rogue Data

On a chilly Sunday afternoon in March 2019, our Field Campus group walked through downtown Granite City, Illinois. Located just 6 miles north of St. Louis, the downtown was a markedly post-industrial landscape. Many of the red brick buildings were vacant and showed signs of lasting decay. Weedy patches of open land occasionally provided views of a large nearby factory. It was hard to tell if coffee and sandwich shops were closed forever.

The factory, a U.S. Steel Corps manufacturing plant called Granite City Works was founded by two German immigrants in 1896, along with the city itself. In 2009, the National Air Toxics Assessment (NATA) ranked neighborhoods in Granite City at the second-highest risk for cancer in the country, highlighting the plant’s coke ovens as a likely source (McGuire 2009). Coke oven emissions include benzene, arsenic, and lead (Earthjustice 2019) – that people breathe, and soils absorb.

Another source of toxic air pollution has been the NL Industries/Taracorp lead smelter. Before its closure in 1983, the smelter contaminated over 1,600 households in Granite City and beyond, eventually turning into an EPA superfund cleanup site (Singer n.d.). The U.S. EPA recognized that the highest concentrations of lead in the air are around smelters. Lead in the air means lead in the soil. Granite City is certainly a hot spot.

Fɪɢᴜʀᴇ 1. “Pilot plot” in Granite City under construction. Photo by New American Gardening, n.d.

As we walked through Granite City, we were guided by our local collaborator and artist Chris Carl, whose work with the urban renewal group New American Gardening “explores garden making on vacant lots and post-industrial land.” Chris led us to one plot (Fig. 1 and 2), pointing to several concrete blocks scattered around the ground. One of the blocks featured a warning symbol etched into its top, the other had the letters ‘Pb’ scrawled upon it – which, as he informed us, is the chemical abbreviation for lead. The blocks were Chris’s “DIY version of lead remediation”, an intervention he began after a project by the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences and a visit by EPA officials who confirmed low levels of lead all over the area after conducting the requisite soil testing. The levels on the site we were standing on, however, had proven to be “off the charts.” Notably, both Madison County and the U.S. Steel Trust had provided funding for this pilot plot.

Fɪɢᴜʀᴇ 2. Field campus participants discussing the lead garden. Photo by Tim Schütz, March 2019. 

After our “lead garden” visit, we returned to the Granite City Art and Design District (G-CADD), Carl’s collective studio and exhibition space, where Carl showed us a 1990 EPA report he had downloaded from the official EPA website. Carl knew where to find the report and had saved a copy on his personal hard drive. We were interested in how reports like this – and documentation of the kind of “gardening” Carl had initiated – could be preserved in a more durable way: so that they are accessible and discoverable by diversely positioned social actors (Fig. 3). The idea behind “DIY” lead remediation is sobering. The technical and governing infrastructure needed to do lead remediation “right” is substantial. But if these infrastructures are unavailable, the work is thrown back to local figures like Chris Carl.

Fɪɢᴜʀᴇ 3. Finding a home for a ‘rogue’ EPA report on Disaster STS Network.
Screenshot by Tim Schütz, September 2019. https://disaster-sts-network.org/content/st-louis-gcadd-lead-documentation-taracorp-site.