THE CITY DESTRUCTOR. A Smoke and Paper Distributor.

Free Lance, Volume III, Issue 152, 30 May 1903, Page 8

THE CITY DESTRUCTOR. A Smoke and Paper Distributor.

THERE is a section of the city bylaw s providing that no factory or other chimney shall be used which has not a gauze cover over the top to pi event the escape of dangeirous sparks. This leads us to wonder what sort of a gauge the gauze has that is used for thei top of the Corporation's* destructor chimney. Any person who io interested m kite flying should step round to that magnificent brick pile when the furnace is in full blast, and watch the big pieces of filthy paper being blown, wholesale around the town bj the premier nuisance of this city. * * # The chimney is 1 in such a position that life in an otherwise pleasant residential neighbourhood is almost unbearable, for when a volume of smoke, thick enough to chop an axe, is descending on Kent Terrace, life is not worth living. The back-yards are liable to be visited any moment by the inspector of nuisances, who may get you fined for failing to collect the debris deposited by the "Destructor." Pieces of brown paper, odds and ends of stray calico, and other articles of commerce, are common objects of the seashore, and the time is now ripe for the bounties of the big chimney to cease. * •*■ * It is necessary, of course, to burn the accumulation of rubbish scavenged by the Council in the city, but it is not a bit necessary to blow it up a big chimney, and redistribute it to people who have no use for it. Maybe, the particles are. purified on the way up, but quite a lot of people regard them as likely to breed disease, and, as the Council exists only to please the people, and do their bidding, it should pander to a little fad of theirs — and make the mesh smaller. * * We are hardly modern enough to be able to afford a smoke consuming apparatus, but, if any of Wellington's rich men felt like helping the town along they might write to Carnegie that should he threaten us with a library to make it a smoke-consuming apparatus instead. Seriously, considering the merits of the perambulating, horsefrightening traction engines and the Destructor chimney as rival abominations, y e are inclined to give the blue ribbon to the latter. Should an earthquake at any tune shake it down, we trust that the Council won't have enough money in hand to erect it in the same place for quite a while, so that the surrounding inhabitants may take their ozone with less paper and smoke in it.