Located next to the convention center, the stadium would have doubled the mass and length of the huge bunker against the river already established by that "lump of black coal" -- as essayist Phillip Lopate described its dark bulk in his literary trip around the edges of Manhattan -- cutting off views and access with nearly a mile of hulking wall.

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Originally they were derived from coal-tar, the black viscous waste product left over from distilling coal for gas.

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Martin McGuinn, who took over as chief executive two years ago, is a lawyer by training and oblivious to banker's hours: He's gazing over Pittsburgh from his top-floor office by 5:30 every morning, when the three sprawling rivers below are still black as the coal buried deep in the surrounding hills.

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The stream now carries black sediment of waste coal which eventually flows into Lake Kariba.

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While the US has turned to shale gas, Europeans have once again embraced the black stuff, as the cost of coal has plummeted.

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He called in at Gee's Bend, a poor black corner of Alabama, and Inez, a tiny Kentucky coal town where Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty (a third of Inez's residents remain below the poverty line).

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Coal exporters are downcast, as they also face low global prices for the black stuff.

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Right now, when you fly into a typical American city, you see miles of black roofs (mostly tarpaper shingles, made with a byproduct from burning coal), flanked by green lawns.

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Two summers ago, a truckload of Beijing municipal workers turned up in my neighborhood and began unspooling heavy-duty black power lines, which they attached to our houses, in preparation for a campaign to replace coal-burning furnaces with electric radiators.

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