Ghost Town

Human-generated environmental catastrophe and denial are the subjects of Judy Haberl’s Ghost Town, 11 miles away from her childhood home. To experience this installation, the viewer enters a darkened room through an idyllic suburban doorway and beholds a miniature tract-housing development of 100 identical houses. The houses, cast in Hydro-stone® from a Fisher-Price Play Family® toy house, are treated with a phosphorescent pigment which glows an eerie green. In the windows of several tiny houses, tiny video monitors flick on, showing interview excerpts from the film Dark Circle, an Emmy Award winning documentary by Judy Irving and Christopher Beaver on the effects of plutonium contamination at Rocky Flats near Boulder, Colorado. The cycle repeats with the sounds of everyday suburban life, simulating night and day while emphasizing the effects of this invisible threat over time. Ghost Town points to the ubiquity of contaminants in the domestic environment, and to the corruption and ignorance which lead to the suppression of such information. 1991-92

Installation view, "Good-Bye to Apple Pie: Contemporary Artists View the Family in Crisis," curated by Nicholas J. Capasso at deCordova Museum, 1992

Suburban house sculpture 9 х 15.5 х 9.25 inches, Hydrostone®

This project was generously supported by grants from:

L.E.F. FOUNDATION

MASSACHUSETTS CULTURAL COUNCIL

UNITED STATES GYPSUM CORPORATION

View of the Rocky Flats Plant, a United States manufacturing complex near Denver, Colorado, active from 1952 to 1992, where plutonium pits for nuclear weapons were fabricated under the oversight of the Atomic Energy Commission and later the Department of Energy, 2014

The artist above her home, located 11 miles downwind from the former Rocky Flats Plutonium Facility, 2014

"Rocky Flats" handles more plutonium than any other facility in the Western world. It manufactures the uranium and plutonium pits used in the fission triggers of thermonuclear bombs. The pit is the ball of uranium or plutonium inside the bomb's spnere of chemical high explosives. "Rocky Flats" also fabricates beryllium neutron reflectors 10 increase the yield of exploding fission triggers The plant employs 6,000 people. It is 16 miles upwind from Denver and half a mile from the Great Western Reservoir, visible above the plant. This reservoir serves the nearby town of Broomfield (pop. 26,000) - Golden Colorado, July 17, 1983

The Rocky Flats Plant was a U.S. manufacturing complex near Denver, Colorado, that produced nuclear weapons parts. Active from 1952 to 1992, its primary mission was fabricating plutonium pits, a crucial component of nuclear weapons. These parts were shipped to other facilities for assembly into complete weapons.

The facility was operated by private contractors, including Dow Chemical Company and Rockwell, under the oversight of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). In 1977, control transitioned to the Department of Energy (DOE).