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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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…
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.
Coffin factory funerals are not often so solemn. Read why this famous furniture factory closed after 160 years and see how it looks today.
Daydreaming on the highest catwalk of a decaying, mostly demolished and nationally historical steel mill is… To hear the wind running like lost cats through the burned and rusted metal at sunrise is… A steel age safari–hunting a giant wire deer that haunts a riverside battleground.
It operated for more than a century in various forms, but there’s something timeless about the giant headframe standing silent in a field.