Erected 1887

Solvent pumping buildings, designed to explode upwards rather than outwards in an emergency, are forgotten near the milkweed.

The view from the larry, looking out at the overgrowing coke oven top. Papers listed the order of the charges for each oven, noting the sticky doors and persistent leaks. Emergency respirators and rescue gear was stored close, as long exposure to emissions from the rusty hatches could make worker pass out on the top of the ovens.

Before developers saw to cut and cut the flour mills inside Pillsbury, they stood at the ready beside various purposeful chutes the traversed the floors of between sorters. These machines were belt-driven by the power of Pillsbury’s Mississippi headraces and turbines, the force of which notoriously shook the building’s foundations themselves. The wheels would change the grade of the flour, or the size of the dust produced from crushing the kernels.

A walk-up service window on the side of an administration building of some sort. I have a feeling the buildings were color coded.

One of the former sanitorium common rooms. Its interior is at the end of one of the wards and is lined with glass brick.

Ladders crawl the back of the signs. Graffiti writers’ right of passage.

Global Trading remarked the building in the mid-60s, but far above the door is the old ‘Detroit Shipbuilding’ paint, though it’s faint nowadays.

Part of the unremodeled hospital, above the Service Building, where employees would stay sometimes.

When ‘men’ meant ‘worker’.