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I’d noticed the mobile cell transmitters (pumping out electro-smog and giving us all instant brain tumours) on the top of this chimney in the Martinsstrasse, but it took a look at the Historical Monument plaque to get the whole story.

The explosion of the powder magazine in 1857 in one of the forts in the defensive wall pretty much flattened everything within sight. (To give you an idea of the force of the explosion: a significant chunk of the parapet – weighing over 1000kg – ended up 500 metres away. Smaller bits ended up in the Rhine…)

No point in rebuilding (rebuilding WHAT exactly – most of it’s halfway to Wiesbaden…) so the city fathers started from scratch including that Shiny New Invention (tada…) – drains.

Duly dug, but what to do with the pong?

Build chimneys, shove the odours up into the lower stratossphere and let them drift about a bit and dilute.

And if anyone complains, you could always say “Wasn’t me, it was from that chimney over there….”

Or – as the Romans used to say – “Is ut nidor is paciscor is”

29 Apr This entry was published on 29 April, 2011 at 11:00. It’s filed under Mainz and tagged Architecture, History. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.