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How Earth Day Changed the Way We View Cities

In 1970, cities epitomized everything that was wrong with the planet. That's changed, partly because of Earth Day.
A Pace College student in a gas mask "smells" a magnolia blossom in City Hall Park on Earth Day, April 22, 1970, in New York.
A Pace College student in a gas mask "smells" a magnolia blossom in City Hall Park on Earth Day, April 22, 1970, in New York.AP Photo
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Not long ago, cities were like a cancer in the environmental imagination. Proposing a national environmental agenda to Congress in January 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin remarked:

Nelson was touching on Americans' growing awareness of the environmental disaster that was urban, industrialized life. In 1965, air pollution in New York City had killed eighty people during a brief weather inversion. The oil-saturated Cuyahoga River between Cleveland and Akron regularly caught fire.