Imagine a water body being deemed as "biologically dead." A 2021 USACE report says that was not hyperbole, but in 1969, the Buffalo River was actually given that label after decades of industrial dumping. Adjacent to it, Unity Island was for most of the 20th century the literal garbage dump of the city, and the North Pond was a stagnant, dead-end pool for many years, cut off from the Niagara River by a stone dike. It is one of the less-discussed chapters of American environmental history: the long, unglamorous period of industrial contamination that preceded any cleanup.
Turning sludge into shoreline
