My favorite shot of 2011; a rusty mold for a heart-shaped glass candy dish in its natural environment, so to speak.
history under ground
steel
The Engine House’s boiler, which would have been fired all day all day, virtually from the day the shop opened until the day it closed.
A bright red light blinks on the end of the abandoned dock to ward off passing boats.
A heavy steel rail door to help funnel explosions upward, rather than outward.
One of the many blast doors. Note the plunger to seal off the airflow in the event of an attack or accidental explosion.
Not a part of the Foundry, but the Enclosed Body Building. The rebar welded over the windows and the rust patterns with the lighting makes this geometric photos one of my favorites from the year.
Because painted signs would not hold up in this spot–in between four ovens that were literally hot enough to melt steel inside. Solution: Cut the pipe labels into the sheet metal. Seems to have worked.
The tops of the coke stoves.
On my second or third trip, the cross had broken in the wind.
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!
In what has turned into a kind of industrial courtyard between four ovens some people have posted their tags. X was here.
When the ship loaders were added, a doorway was cut through the metal silo to make a room for the grain handling equipment. Note the dust sensor in the corner of the torch-cut archway.
Looking up the rock house.
“Cutting torch.” The remains of a catwalk now leads to void on the sintering floor, four stories over the next solid footing. Only two staircases led to the top floor, some half dozen others were cut off for scrap.
Looking up to the second floor of the Nitrating House, where cotton would be soaked in nitric acid. These brought cotton into the building.
A little welding art one crosses over near the windlass room.
A sign of where man met machine.
A look straight down into the chutes were taconite pellets would dump into the dock hoppers. Rebar was a safety measure to keep workers from being buried alive, were they to slip into the holes.
In the mid-2000s, Peavey sealed the spaces between their Electric Steel Elevator bins. What they unwittingly created was a graffiti time capsule. “Impeach Bush”.
The dock is still lit at night and it casts shadows over the rust-welded ore doors.
Too big to be scrapped, to simple to be auctioned. It waited for the demo crews and demo cranes to arrive.
The individual ovens are skinny to allow even and fast heating of the whole interior. Numbers are cut into signs because no paint could withstand the heat or corrosive emissions from the coking process.
The end of one of the scrapped turbines. Judging by the aborted attempt at cutting it in half, the scrappers had some trouble with this one.
In the middle of Electric Steel, dust collector vents cross-cross out of sight.
On the Turbine Room floor, one old steam pump still remains, ready to pressurize steam pipes with the hot stuff throughout the car shops and boilers.