Cloud Factory

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The Cloud Factory is an affectionate euphemism for a boiler plant which billows steam from its twin stacks in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, the 1988 debut novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer Michael Chabon. Bellefield Boiler Plant, the actual name of the facility, is located in Junction Hollow behind the Carnegie Institute in the Oakland district of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Built in 1907 to provide steam heat for the Carnegie, it was designed in the Romanesque Revival style by the architectural firm Alden and Harlow. One of the smoke stacks measures 150 feet and the other more than 200 feet. The plant burns both coal and natural gas. Its steam system expanded in the 1930s to service the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning. Today it pumps heat to most of the major buildings in Oakland. It is owned by a consortium made up of the University of Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Carnegie Mellon University, the Carnegie, the City of Pittsburgh, and the Pittsburgh Public Schools.

According to reporting by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, however, the 2007 film of the novel does not use the actual Bellefield Boiler Plant, but a similar facility a few miles south in Rankin, Pennsylvania.

[edit] Source of the phrase

Chabon may have coined the phrase "cloud factory" himself, or heard it first from locals before employing it to great effect in his novel. Or he may have borrowed the phrase from Henry David Thoreau. It appears in Thoreau's essay "Ktaadn and the Maine Woods", which was first published in five serialized installments in Sartain's Union Magazine in 1848. The piece describes a transcendental, "mountain-top" experience Thoreau had in the summer of 1846 while hiking Mount Katahdin in Maine:

"Sometimes it seemed as if the summit would be cleared in a few moments, and smile in sunshine; but what was gained on one side was lost on another. It was like sitting in a chimney and waiting for the smoke to blow away. It was, in fact, a cloud factory [bold emphasis added],—these were the cloud-works, and the wind turned them off done from the cool, bare rocks."