Carl and I did our presentation on coal chutes this past week. It turned out to be an interesting project. While Carl focused on the future of coal chutes, I focused on the past history of them. Although somewhat difficult to find a lot of written material on the subject, we were lucky enough to find someone who had some insight for us. Mike was his name, he is the head engineer at the Electric Tower downtown. He was nice enough to take into the basement of the building as well as outside to show us where the coal entered the building and how it was moved to the furnaces. With his help we were then able to distinguish between manhole covers and old coal chute covers to many downtown buildings.
Once armed with this new knowledge, Carl and I were able to scout around the city where we found many coal chutes. Some of these we were able to open and see into the coal bins where they would store the coal. No coal though. Most of these underground chutes and bins were devoid of coal, but some did have plenty of debris and even walls that blocked in the bins from the rest of the basement.
All in all, I thought this was a cool project. To look into the history and future of all of these objects that we see and use daily without really thinking about them. Since, I have definitely been noticing more coal chute covers as well as manholes and other things like stretcher bonds and flemmish bonds.
No comments:
Post a Comment