Gas Tank, East 20th Street, 1945
From 1842 to 1945, the blocks between 20th and 22nd Streets, First Avenue and
the East River, contained large gas plants that burned coal to produce gas that
was stored in large tanks. These often emitted a foul smell that pervaded the
surrounding neighborhood referred to as the “Gashouse District,” which was considered
for much of its history to be a slum. The writer Thomas Wolfe described the
Gashouse District as a neighborhood of "
...powerful ugliness and devastation...with
its wasteland rusts and rubbish, slum-like streets of rickety tenement and shabby
brick, its vast raw thrust of tank, glazed glass and factory building...lifted
by a powerful rude exultancy of light and sky and sweep and water such is found
only in America."
