Neighbors have long blamed it for high levels of benzene, an element of coke oven gas.

WSJ: NY coke plant, manager convicted in pollution case

Kamholz was accused of instructing an employee, prior to a 2009 inspection by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, to conceal the fact that an unreported pressure relief emitted coke oven gas directly in the air, a violation of its operating permit.

WSJ: NY coke plant, manager convicted in pollution case

He also described the trip as the first time he and his wife had been out of the house "since our gas oven exploded".

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Scott Wiener, 30, who runs New York pizza tours, credits the commercial gas oven with giving birth to the modern slice as a unit of sale.

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Nicholas Hughes, whose mother asphyxiated herself in 1963 by putting her head in a gas oven at her London home while her two children slept in the next room, hanged himself at his home in Alaska, his sister Frieda told The Times newspaper.

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