This Saturday's Trip: Judith Vollmer Gives Us a Tour of Lost, Ruined, and Reclaimed Spaces

This Saturday, we'll be with Judith Vollmer, whose book Reactor has given you a preview of the kinds of spaces we'll be inhabiting on this trip. Please be sure you've read Reactor and have questions ready.

Also, be sure to wear warm clothes and boots. We'll be spending time in nature. I'll bring hot chocolate!

Our trip will feature these highlights, per Professor Vollmer's description:

"We will do a tour of the reclamation project of Brush Creek (aka Sulphur Creek) on the border between Level Green and Monroeville. It serves as an apt metaphorical site for damaged places that look, to the naked eye, otherwise innocuous, unlike the Sulfur Creek of the past.

"Interestingly, while children were swimming in Sulphur/Sulfur Creek, very high-level white-collar experiments in nuclear testing were being conducted at Monroeville Research and Development (my dad's later years w/Westinghouse). I'll talk about water
reclamation at Sulfur (now called Brush Creek and part of the Turtle Creek Watershed, an interesting contract to, say, the Sewickley Creek Watershed, the much cleaner water source that runs through UPG's Slate Run, for example).

"We will also visit the site of the Trafford plant, since both it and Sulfur Creek have been definitively linked to mesothelioma. I'll talk about low-level and high-level nuclear waste from there, with comments about how Pgh. area workers traveled around the country and into Western Europe to do refuel and repair, based on their experiences at places like Yukon. Those workers, because many of them were children of slaves of the coalfields, were considered to be fearless, I've come to conclude, the way our grandparents from Eastern Europe were sent into the mines because they too were fearless, would work for low wages, etc."

You might be able to link some of what we cover on this trip with what you saw in the Vanka murals.

Time-permitting, we will follow this trip with a visit to Mr. DiRinaldo, one of the last master shoemakers in the country, and stop by Sherm Edwards, a family-run chocolate shop and the birthplace of the chocolate-covered pickle.