Day: July 15, 2026💾

My New York hometown was named after a Belgium chemist, Ernest Solvay. His process for producing soda ash was used by some enterprising Americans to found — with Ernest Solvay's approval — the Solvay Process Company, the cornerstone of the village where I grew up in the 1940s.

Having the Solvay Process Company a short distance from our street was both good news and bad. The factory employed thousands of people, including my father, my grandmother and an uncle who lived next door. The company also provided many services for village residents and in the early years was Solvay's social, medical and educational center.

However, the factory also belched smoke and filled the air with a gritty soot that undoubtedly was hazardous to our health. Waste from the Solvay Process Company, along with sewage from the nearby city of Syracuse, destroyed once-lovely Onondaga Lake. Polluting the lake forever tarnished the reputation of the Solvay Process Company, which in the 1920s became a division of Allied Chemical.

Because it was considered so important to the economic life of the area, the Solvay Process Company had its way on several controversial environmental issues, which is why, despite strong opposition, the factory dumped its waste along the west shore of Onondaga Lake. The company built huge holding areas that were surrounded by tall, concrete dikes. These were the most visible waste depositories, though at least one of the smaller plants operated by Solvay Process openly flowed its waste directly into the lake.

In the early 1940s there were eight large waste beds across the street of the New York State Fairgrounds on State Fair Boulevard, with a ninth waste bed under construction. Those who had opposed the dumping at the turn of the century predicted it was just a matter of time before at least one of the dikes containing the waste would burst. Most of those concerned, obviously, were residents of a section of the Town of Geddes known as Lakeland.