Harding Jones Paper Company operated the Excello Mill between 1865 and 1983. It has changed little since it was built beside the Erie Canal.
SUBSTREET
history under ground
Excello Paper Mill
ACME Coke Plant
Chicago, IL
Little more than scrub brush grows where hot coke used to get doused before being sent into the blast furnaces, but that’s not what I went there to see. Outside Chicago’s most remote ghettoes are the ruins of ACME Coke, now two smokestacks, two three towers and a pile of firebrick. Check out what it used to be.
Allouez Bay
Iron Ore Docks
Superior, WI
I have a unique perspective of the Allouez Ore Docks, and that’s my usual perch on the last light hoop. Find out how the docks sound when the lake freezes. What it’s like to watch a 1,000 foot ore carrier passing by in the fog. Finally, I go in detail to tell the history of this place, where boats and trains danced by the lake.
Arcade-Wright Building
Saint Louis, MO
Empty skyscrapers are always stealthy–they blend in with their busy neighbors with strange ease. Maybe it’s because people in the city are always looking town. Here’s a chance to look up–way up–at one of St. Louis’ longtime abandonments.
Armour Packing
East St. Louis, IL
A ghetto factory could be a factory in the ghetto, or a factory that produces ghettos. This is a little of both, straight from East St. Louis, courtesy of the texture of moldy bricks, the smell of burning tires, and the sound of broken glass being walked on echoing down a long dark hallway.
Atlas & Titan Nuclear Missile Bases
Wyoming & Colorado
In the 1950s, the United States designed and built two competing offensive nuclear missile systems, Atlas and Titan. Here’s what these Cold War relics look like today, inside and out.
Barber-Colman (BARCOL)
Rockford, IL
Rockford, for many reasons has the look and feel of the Indiana rustbelt, an element anchored at a place that used to have a sign reading ‘BARCOL’.
Belchertown State School
Belchertown, MA
Adults had mental hospitals, children had state schools, but an asylum is an asylum. Belchertown served from 1922 until a judge made a surprise visit…
Birtle Indian Residential School
Birtle, MB
Birtle’s Indian Residential School that can be seen today was built in 1930 and managed by the Presbyterian church. It was one of many such structures built as part of Canada’s aggressive assimilation policy, wherein […]
Brach’s Candy Factory
Chicago, IL
In economics, one hand doesn’t wash the other; it chops the other right off. Local politics collides with global economics, draining this mega-factory of its profitability. Doors close, and a middle-class neighborhood built on chocolate confections suddenly gets much leaner.
Brewster Projects
Detroit, MI
Promises of good jobs brought tens of thousands of Black families to Detroit between 1910 and 1940, but redlining blocked them from living anywhere near the industrial districts where they worked. Brewster-Douglass was supposed to be the answer, but by the 1980s it had become a new kind of ghetto.
Buckeye Ordnance Works
South Point, OH
Buckeye Ordnance Works was built in 1943. Between 1946 and the 1990s, various chemical companies have used the plant. Now it is a small wasteland.