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Former Zinc Town Opens Smog Museum

November 9, 2008

The natural world is enhanced with the arrival of tourist attractions — some of them quite innovative and even symbiotic — although the relationship between the two is often strained. In fact, the environment has been used in the past as a reason to eliminate attractions, whether they deserved it or not.

That’s why it’s refreshing to see that abused nature has now spawned an attraction of its own. The Smog Museum has just opened in Donora, Pennsylvania — and although we’re tempted to cheer, an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cautions that “it is not something to celebrate.”

The bad air enshrined in the Smog Museum is not your garden-variety brown haze smog. This was a killer smog, belched out of a nearby U.S. Steel zinc plant, that killed at least 20 local citizens in October 1948.

The museum, which occupies a former Chinese restaurant, joins a monument to the smog that was erected in 1995. T-shirts commemorating the smog’s 60th anniversary are also available, and would make unique holiday fence-mending gifts. Killer Smog and merchandising, together at last.

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