Sunday, August 10, 2008

Katherine's factory of mystery and wonder


Oh, Katherine, must everything be so gloomy here? Must you dwell on the hazards of city life, and injustice, and all those crippling bouts of depression you do nothing about? How about some zany adventures once in a while, you're obviously having a lot of them...how about an excursion to a big ruined factory?

Yes! An abandoned factory. Those are fun places to explore, and available to do so because of deindustrialization...and massive job loss...and the decline of neighborhoods, cities, regions...leaving behind toxic sites...which might get cleaned up eventually...and turned into vacant lots, or strip malls and big-box stores filled with sweatshop-manufactured goods...but for now are great places for people to dump even more toxic stuff...and cover in gang graffiti...and do drugs...and tear apart for scrap to sell...and live in if they have to...and possibly manufacture more drugs...Fun places like that. Here you go!










































About this place: I found it this spring and easily wandered onto the property a few times, but then I became quite certain some legitimate work goes on there on weekdays and maybe Saturdays, so I had to wait a long while till I could get there on a Sunday. I was by myself, late in the afternoon, so I didn't have as long a visit as I'd have liked. I saw one other person on the property (homeless, I'm guessing), but nothing happened. I climbed the set of steps to sit on a tank of something at the end of my visit, and my cell rang, and it was a Flickr contact visiting Chicagoland from Michigan, and we talked a while about cool neighborhoods and streets and signs to photograph. I thought it was a pretty funny place for a first conversation with someone. I got out of the area just before dark. I still don't know the name of this place or what they did. There's an office building with a floor of science labs I hope to see again; perhaps I'll turn up some clues there.

Note: I haven't fixed my photo-rotating problem; the photos taken with this camera (the one I use in lower light situations) upload correctly into iPhoto to begin with.

2 comments:

Eric Allix Rogers said...

I love the staircase shot, the last one in the long run of images. Excellent!

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