The Clipper was one of the most popular Packards, but its production was cut short by WWII. Had they produced the car instead of Rolls Royce plane engines I imagine there would might be driving a Packard today, rather than a Ford.
history under ground
clouds
The screen and mineral stained window cross-processed the sky.
Frontenac’s shaft house is well preserved, compared to all other around it. Leica/Summilux 35/Ektar 100
The first time I saw Buffalo Central Terminal was from a westbound Empire Builder. In the foreground you can see the rows of platforms.
Looking at the huge and modern Cargill B2 from the circa-1919 Lake Superior “I”. This is a rather unique perspective of Enger Tower and Skyline.
Where the trees are sprouting–below the skyways and criss-crossing pipes–are two sets of railroad tracks that turned through this narrow alleyway through the middle of the production line to drop off raw materials and pick up finished product.
Looking through Workhouse A from the top of a silo.
Winter skies over Allouez Bay. From a distance, it looks almost fragile.
Van Dyke Cab Company and Yellow Cab served the terminal in lieu of a streetcar loop downtown, which was planned but never built.
Sunrise over Mill Hell, and all of Kurth’s various skyways. The elevators in the foreground date to the mid-1920s, Electric Steel is behind and is a little earlier than that.
For a short time, CN mounted flood lights atop the abandoned dock.
A multi-family home with an attic bedroom. The staircase was unstable, to say the least.
Near the old slag dump there are the remains of the pouring buckets that received the molten steel from the US Steel blast furnaces, filled to the brim with pig iron. They must be incredibly heavy!
Reflections of graffiti during spring melt.
The flour mill (rear) and its elevators. The taller elevator was moved here in 1955, when the Harrisons bought it from Federal, who declared it surplus. The smaller elevator replaced an earlier smaller warehouse in 1926. Taken shortly after dawn. This one picture made the drive worth it, for me. Medium Format.
One thing I like to do at Gopher is imagine the shape of the planned buildings based on the partial structures.
If you look carefully along the side of the slip alongside this image of Cargill B-2, you will see the remains of the crane stops when this was a Hannah coal dock.
A facade that tells the story of demolition and neglect. The sign on the garage door indicates that if one finds themselves there, that they enter the buildings at their own risk. If only property owners in the US took this philosophy!
SWP4-A on the left and Viterra C on the right in a 90-degree panorama.
Taken several years before the tornado story when the weather, and the condition of the buildings, were nice.
A switch for the yard engines, now on the edge of the property where nobody will find it.
Unloading boats had the option to take on fuel at Taconite Harbor. This building, among other things, pumped fuel to the dock.
During the Cold War, the Air Force used the radar station to train bombardiers in radar-guided ordinance.
It seems like this pipe was made to return dust to the collector in the main workhouse from the annex.
Taken from atop a grain train at the end of Cargill B-2, looking toward Lake Superior “I”, now part of the sample complex. This area used to have another slip, but Cargill filled it on when it built the elevator on the right.
National Mine and its rockhouse (?) as seen from Mammoth Hill. From this angle, I am fairly certain this was a crushing and sorting house. The bottom looks like it has two aerial tram doors as well.
Some of the ruins are way off the beaten path… foundations of tank stands and pillars of buildings that never had walls or roofs.
Looking out of the brewhouse toward the river.
Shadows of distant power lines are carried to the concrete by street lights.
“Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian writer and historian.
The BOMARC launch buildings are spaced on a large concrete pad that looks like a parking lot. Out of view are underground pipes for fueling and cooling the rocket motors.
This tree caught my eye. Note the bench swing near it. Portra 160.
On top of the light hoop, 160-feet up, a ship comes into port, ready to load-up. If you look really close, you can see my shadow cast on the dock below, courtesy of the full moon.
A US Army Corps of Engineers tug, tied at the end of the pier before the American Victory was parked here.
The front of the mill reads “Montana Flour Mills Company”
This battlement-like tower is the first thing one sees coming to Old Taylor from Frankfort.
Looking out across the elevator row from Portland Huron’s roof. Don’t you love the color of the sky?
You first.
Looking at the concrete headframe from street level. Acros 100 in Pentax 67
Before Portland-Huron Cement’s Duluth Plant was (mostly) demolished and (partly) turned into a hotel, the top of its silos gave a cinematic view of elevator row.
This building was 99 years old when it was demolished for the coal mine.
The copula stacks were fitted with scrubbers. Making metal is a very polluting activity.
Looking from abandoned to active. The end of Dock 6 often has a crane and some shacks on it, as the chutes aren’t used anymore. Instead, conveyors are installed on the land-side of the dock that fill docked vessels, making the end of the dock little more than a breakwater and a place to park repair and recovery equipment.
Demolition about 50% complete.
Soft rain on Vulcan’s ashy pyre… Both of these peaks are dead volcanos, too hard to be totally washed away by storms. As a result, they seem to rise dramatically from the flat valley.
The Osborn Block (front) and the Twohy (rear) at sunset. In the distance, you can almost make out Globe Elevators. One of my favorite photos of 2013.
From the bottom of the skyway I looked back, my eyes tracing the vines from the marsh up the smokestacks to the perfect Midwestern sky.
Daisy Mill could accept shipments from water, rail, and truck at one time. Now everything comes and goes by rail.
A nice view of the aurora borealis (“Northern Lights”) strong enough to outshine the industrial lighting at the power plant. The lights in the foreground direct ships discharging coal for the station.
A bridge crosses the main street of the village; one that goes nowhere. Ambiguity intended.
This big rusty sphere hides behind the incomplete 5-stack.
Grain is taken from the bottom of the silos through a conveyor in a tunnel. These blowers keep the air in the tunnel fresh.
Identical warehouses seem a little newer than the rest of the plant. I suspect these were added in the mid-1950s for the Korean War, during which about 200 buildings were added to the complex.
A taste of Superior culture.
The hike to the village is steep. This is looking into the valley from the halfway point.
The Big Dipper brought its friends into view, and the best seat is 80-feet up.
The top of Dock 4 was too dangerous to explore, but this panorama gives you an idea of the view (and how rotten the wood was).
A damaged roof channeled rain onto the adobe walls, cutting them in half. In the distance, a preserved house and the ruins of the Colmor School.
A tower above Minneapolis that few people see.
A storm passes over BOMARC’s center row of launch buildings. You can clearly see the tracks on which the roof would retract for launch.
Looking out upon Mill City through the lens of FLOUR, highlighted in pink and low clouds. This sign has recently been converted into LED lighting.
Not a wisp of smoke can be seen today.
An abandoned ranch on the east side of the tracks. This was not the Colmor Cutoff they were waiting for.
On my second or third trip, the cross had broken in the wind.
The pitch of the roof is more typical for areas with lots of snow—not the border of Ohio and Kentucky. So, I assume this roofline accommodated some equipment inside for trains—note the tracks.
A gate large enough to accommodate a missile, next to the ruins of the guard shack. Wyoming is the intersection of lonely and beautiful.
Looking out from what little remains of the second floor at the poor house, which was in terrible condition. No roof and no floors. Soon to be ruins.
One of the covered rail loading docks. All of them were overgrown and rust-clad.
King Elevator sits in the corner of a more recently-defunct lumber mill: Great Western Timber. Perhaps in the future I will write the history of it. Arista 100 in 120.
A long exposure under the trestle-like approach to the dock, under which trains still pass regularly.
I believe this is the push car, meaning it would push the charge in the oven out the opposite side into the train car.
From Main Street, looking straight up at the A Mill, only the silence makes one think that nobody’s still inside, grinding grain into Pillsbury’s Best.
Counter-weighted ore cars alternately filled and emptied to feed Furnace 7. Honestly, though, the corner-mounted cranes are sexier in my opinion. Note the trees growing from the stacks.
This photo illustrates how vertical the complex is.
A dead work truck rusts near an outbuilding. Everything is marked with a code. Modernity.
35mm Film, Expired. An abandoned swath of NAD is landlocked by soybean fields.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve been getting reports that several Yellow Helicopters have been seen hovering above town. We are all aware of the Black Helicopters, which are World Government, and Blue Helicopters, which are Secret Police, and the Helicopters with Detailed Murals of Diving Birds of Prey, which are the helicopters that took all the children in Night Vale away a few months ago (we still don’t know what those helicopters are but they did bring all the children back unharmed, and much more well-behaved than before, so they are deemed just as safe as the other helicopters) but these new Yellow Helicopters, no one quite knows.” – Welcome to Night Vale, Ep. 32
The command building and a coolant tank. In the distance, rain and hail pound Wyoming dirt.
The parking lot is in better condition than most of the complex. The left building is the lab.
A morning breeze pushes the last ice from the lake against Wisconsin Point.
The truck scale is closed at Lena, MB.
Peering at Stelco’s abandoned steel rod rolling mill, not demolished. The rectangular on the right in between is the boiler house that heated Stelco.
One of the old cooperage buildings is largely unchanged from when it was built. The raised section of the building houses a crane.
Even with a hundred people parked in front of the lakeside relic, it was invisible.
The top three floors were removed from the top of the Temple Opera Block (right). If you have a sharp eye, you can see the outlines of some of the old floors on the shared wall of the Orpheum (left). For a time, the front of the building held a bus stop.
On the dark side of the workhouse at sunset, you can almost see where the walls used to be. Kodak Portra 160/Mamiya 6.
The laundry building, where many of the tunnels came to an end. It looks very East Coast industrial to me.
As the Barker steamed past the dock and island, the sunset casts the shadow of the Taconite Harbor receiving trestle on the boat. Through the fog, you can see some of the islands that were joined into a breakwater.
The back of the castle is barely visible through the trees that have grown thick around the walls, making it look so much older.
The Harrison flour mill, completed in 1897 and expanded in 1901 and 1902. The tunnel that I am standing on probably transported grain from the elevator to the mill. Medium Format.
A huge steel tank, one of several left over, left over from either the Ashland Oil or Allied Chemical periods.
Looking across the catwalk attache to the elevated control room, in charge of the train dumping part of the operation.
The four buildings seen here comprise almost all of the notable remaining structures.
The roof was in bad shape, but too beautiful to avoid. This is the spot were I used to study medieval Latin.
Looking from the rail shipping building through pigeon-proofing chicken wire at another manufacturing building in high Fall.
Looking at the Broadway from across Broadway, a beautiful Buffalo day. Note the glazed terra cotta facade–and the signs of fire damage from the first floor.
Much of the circa-1950s buildings remain with few alterations, such as these long boring sheet metal ruststicks.
When block glass shatters, it looks like ice.
Near the base of the mesa is a modern house, which seems to be a ranch of some sort. What a fantastic spot to live, but for the fact every rainstorm floods the arryos, muddy ditches at the bottom of gullies, making it impossible to travel.
Don’t you love the shape of the house on the right?
The main street of the ghost town is also the maintenance road for the BNSF line that bisects Colmor.
I was squatting overnight in one of the buildings and woke up with the sunrise. This is what I woke up to.
Dr. Muchow’s offices stand near his ‘new’ mill, but they show evidence of vandalism.
Coming to an inspirational poster near you… what should it read? ADVENTURE AWAITS? Don’t hang posters. Go outside.
One of the last times I saw the skyway standing. ADM’s Meal Elevator is in the distance.
Looking at the side of 4B from the roof of its car shed.
Some sort of materials handling building, judging by the construction.
The roof had structures bigger than most buildings in South Bend.
The company headquarters. Abandoned last time I drove past it, though it is the classiest building in downtown South Bend.
These concrete blocks were formed to be solid mounts for machinery. All the metal was scrapped in the late 1990s, leaving these modern ruins. Seagulls love them.
The powerplant and its dedicated water tower supplied steam for heating and mechanical work.
Looking out at the town water tower (which I love) from the sugar mill (which I also love).
The moon highlights the contrails over the engine house in the middle of the night. Foreground light painted.
The control room floats above the top of the dock atop a spiral staircase.
Like a grave marker, a single post remembers where Dock 3 stood on the bay.
A wide view of the poor house. Look at the smokestack and elevator shaft, which show the former roofline.
Looking up at the most conspicuous graffiti in the city on ADM #4.
The complex was so big that trains could make deliveries through the middle of it, passing below this striped skyway.
Zachary Taylor’s very own Scottish castle, spring-side in the Kentucky backcountry. Boarded and waiting, but in surprisingly good condition, considering the decades. I especially love the tower on the right side of the frame.
Taken just after the sun set over Duluth. Don’t you love that green glow?
The hospital featured a farm that once helped to sustain it. This is one of the few remaining signs of those years, near the Nurse’s Cottage.
When I first saw Ogilvie’s from the ground, I promised myself to look back when i found my way into this little pitched outcropping which seemed to have the best view of Thunder Bay I could imagine. It turns out, though, that there is no floor in that section; it is just extended machine access! Oh well. Mount McKay in the background in the last light.
Like a railgun pointed at the Rockies… the boom would direct tailings–junk rock–outside of the dredge pond.
Taken as I drove out of Silverton, CO. One of my favorite landscapes of 2015. Want a print? Email me!
Before the clouds broke, I snapped this profile of the dumping control room and its spiral staircase. These are the colors that I dream in.
The elevator tower seems to have been built with expansion of the dock in mind.
There are 700 of these storage bunkers. Their design was to funnel explosions upward, rather than toward other buildings, to minimize secondary explosions.
Looking at the headframe for Shaft 3 from the tower for Shaft 1. Below is the roof of the Dry House. It was hard to remind myself that these building have been abandoned longer than I’ve been alive.
This sign was important when trains ran the length of the elevator.
The crane on Dock 2, as seen from Dock 4 right after sunset. Notice the old light tower is warped.
Giant chunks of cooled slag form an island near Mud Lake.
This old Jetta did more offroading than your average lifted tinted loud-exhaust pickup.
This building was an office and lounge for engineers. It is also demolished.
A side view of the oven pusher from the ground. The tallest coal bunker looks tiny in the distance, though on the scale of the factory it’s practically on top of me as I’m taking the picture.
A single cloud makes its way to Buffington Harbor and Lake Michigan from the quiet backroads of the plant.
Short-stack remains of mounts for rod and ball mills, if I was to bet. The concentrator separated junk rock (tails) from the copper and silver ore, to such a point it could be smelted.
The spectacular, if precarious, view of downtown Minneapolis from the roof of ADM Annex 4. Note the great messages left by various graffiti artists who made it to the spot.
Through a section of the tailings boom where mountain winds tore open the sheet metal around the conveyor, I poked my head out.
One of my favorite night views of Fort Snelling’s so-called Upper Post, taken between snowstorms.
Another perfect Indianan sunset alights like a bird on the tops of the vent houses and tree-packed smokestacks.
It would be a shame if this building is not preserved. Word is (as of 2015) that construction may start on this section soon.
At first glance, I thought the center building was a hoist house because of the shape of the window. Now I think this was built as a warehouse and later used as a laboratory.
The hiking around Central City is beautiful and full of history. Just get a proper topo map!
Knowing that a tornado just passed nearby is less distressing when you’re surrounded by nuclear-attack-hardened buildings.
Looking out at the abandoned neighborhood around the house.
A shot of Longmont from the highway. Fuji 35mm.
Colleen on the roof.
The tailings boom is the first and last thing you see when approaching the mountaintop shipwreck.
Sunrise in SEMI. The shadow of Kurth Malt is cast across ADM-Delmar #1. Clouds behind ADM-Delmar #4 light up. It’s cold and the air smells like train grease.
A broken signal light that would indicate to incoming engineers and brakemen the status of the dock deck. The streetlight-style lighting is a retrofit; originally the top of the dock would be lit by strings of lights suspended by towers on each side of the deck… a poor system according to the workers at Allouez who had the same lights.
The conveyor between the shore and Dock 2. Note the gap in the aerial walkway that used to connect Dock 4 to the rest of the complex.
The purpose of the concentrator was to separate the gold and silver-rich ore from the waste rock. You can tell from the design that the process relies heavily on gravity.
Some of the earlier buildings were dressed up with brick facades.
Tornadic fronts duel over the retired missile launcher.
Looking up the tallest structure left at ACME.
A cloud moves across the attic in front of the window. How? A photographer’s secret.
Minnesota Power’s Taconite Harbor power station, as seen through the ship loading control room windows.
This electric Wellman crane was added to extract coal from ships for the power plant that Erie built beside their dock. Now, with the advent of self-unloading boats, it’s been replaced by a funnel and conveyor belt.
Wagons and horses were kept in the building on the left, separate from the rest of the complex in case of fire. In the distance is the boiler house, separate for the same reason.
The Algosteel crew strikes a pose while heading through Superior Entry toward Allouez
When I see this picture, I imagine that I am an ant exploring a mushroom farm.
No, it’s not your Mac’s desktop, it’s a beautiful Lake Superior night. Taken from near the former Pittsburgh and Reading Anthracite Plant. You can see the frame that used to hold the lifeboat that was auctioned in 2006 to the left of the Pilot House.
These houses were built for the use of the lighthouse keepers in 1913 (left) and 1916 (right). The second house was added when the entry added a fourth light and required a second rotation. Today, there are no unbroken windows in either building.
Rogers Mine is one of the most structurally sound mines in the Iron River area that isn’t part of a museum.
A panoramic view of the sintering plant’s gas plant (?). Everyone who visits must get a picture of these rusty smokestacks!
Boards on the window are like rings on a tree, if you know how to read abandonments.
Gopher Ordnance Works, aka the U-Lands, is a landscape where roots and boughs break apart concrete and steel.
Looking toward the old power house, right below one of its arteries.
The exterior of the factory is unassuming
A gymnasium, if I recall. The last building before the road dead-ends.
The last of four radar domes on the base.
The tallest dock structure is an equipment elevator that connects the many dock levels.
One of the older buildings on the site, this is an old power house that provided electricity to the plant. I spent some time walking around it and believe it was fired with coal gas but had a diesel backup installed later.
The fantastic red elevator that is Pool #61, built 1928.
Looking from the brewhouse at the death of its sister building, across Minnehaha.
Because of the dangers of storing the materials to make explosives as well as the explosives themselves, there were earthen bunkers all across the plant like this.
A panorama of the dock buildings, before the left one was demolished.
Heavy industrial looks good in cotton candy pink.
A windmill marks one corner of GOW.
A sizable crane on the corner of the engine house still swings out.
The rust garden’s brick centerpiece contrasts the muted winter Kentucky palette.
The lower door is where the rocket exhaust would flow into the blast pit during initial launch. The upper doors would vent the rocket so the erector and other equipment in the building would not be (as) damaged.
The porch of the Gustavson House with the southern San Juan range in the background. Bring your own rocking chair…
The approach to the dock is rigidly geometric. I always thought its outline was beautiful against the lake that, by contrast, was always moving.
The perimeter fence still holds strong, 50 years after it was put up.
Looking toward Old Taylor Distillery from the roof of Old Crow.
A buck-fifty shot for a postcard stand. Taken from the Stone Arch Bridge.
A great lakes freighter slowly passes SK Wheat Pool 4 with ‘The Sleeping Giant’ in the background. Arista 100.
The Eureka Mill, historically known as Sunnyside Mill, is now the gateway to Animas Forks.
“Crunch, crunch, crunch,” said the ground. “I know,” I replied.
No matter what environmental disasters industry throws at Mother Earth, she will bounce back.
The modern shaft stands above the north side of Gilman.
Looking out of the Brewery Creek Drain outfall at night, after a storm had pushed piles of rocks up onto the shore.
A cracked sign at dock-level, where loading boats would be tied below the taconite conveyors. All across the surface of the concrete dock were taconite pellets, like slippery little marbles. One wrong step could put a worker in the water, which is a bad, bad place to be.
Sidewalks to a boarded barracks, each making the other obsolete in the night.
Sometime soon, maybe in early 2016, someone will have this view from their office or condo.
It’s a small world… look at it.
Here, the concentrated gold (and silver, and zinc, I would guess) would be loaded into trucks bound for the smelter.
Kate stands on top of the tailings pile that added some usable land to the side of the gulch. Somewhere nearby is the buried Santiago Tunnel.