Author: Control@ltvsquad.com
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Double I military base
This one was a walk in the park… an old military building left exposed to the elements. The windows have all been blown out, the paint peeling and the wood floors beginning to rot. Typical favor of abandoned building in the middle of nowhere.
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S&S Factory Day Raid
History
This building was originally constructed as the Lewis Steel Products factory in the late 1930s. After Lewis Steel moved out, it became the S & S Corrugated Box Machine factory. S & S made “Machinery for making corrugated paper, paper boxes, and machinery for combining, treating, fabricating, cutting and slotting” of all varieties of such paper. S & S also had a sordid history with the neighborhood, and after they went out of business, this factory building became artist studios and a lampshade outlet.In 2007 plans were made to convert it into high priced loft apartments. The building would be rebranded as the ‘Steelworks Lofts”. From 2007 to 2011 ownership of this building changed hands several times, with each group of owners having slightly different plans for it. As of this writing (June, 2013) the building is actively being converted into apartments again.
Adventure
After raiding this building overnight, I was up early and itching to get back inside during daylight hours.The streets of many parts of NYC are dead on Sunday mornings. I parked right outside of the door and walked in, just as we had a few hours before. Today I was flying solo though. It’s hard to keep up with me when I get this obsessed with a building.
Inside a found a very deserted first floor. At the rear of the building was a very long hallway running east and west through the entire length of the building. I later found that this was a railroad siding connecting to the nearby BEDT terminal. It is unclear if Lewis Steel or S & S ever received or shipped rail cars from here – though it seems likely that Lewis did at some point.
Upstairs was a lounge – perhaps an illegal bar? as well as various artist studio spaces. I had to stop and goof off a little at the one photographers studio that was left behind.
After an hour or three of shooting I simply walked out the front door again. The few people on the street at the time had no idea that I had no business being in there. if you look like you belong, no one thinks twice.
Buildings like these are just too rare in NYC anymore. it is a pathetic shame that our industrial history is not better saved and documented. Hopefully when it is redeveloped they’ll at least put a plaque on the outside or in the lobby explaining it’s significance. I kinda doubt it they will though. The building is being rebranded as the ‘Steelworks lofts’ – no mention of S & S and what they did to the neighborhood.
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S&S Factory
So me & S are bored to death and decide to go for a ride around town and see what’s been changing on the street landscape. It seems like every time I drive around anywhere with her looking to break into something we get lucky. Tonight would be no different.
By chance we drive down an industrial street checking on an abandonment/development site we did last year. Directly across the street sits another large factory building that has no lights on. A closer look reveals a few windows broken out, and the roll down gates on the truck bays are not looking too healthy. Sure enough there’s a way in, and in we go.
For the size and scale of this place, much of it was empty. The first floors were all factory, the top seemed to have artist lofts with eviction notices still on the doors. These were huge lofts. Whoever lived here surely lost out when they were kicked out.
Curiosity satisfied, we depart. Fixated though, I decide to check this place again in the morning.
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Bx Ferry Terminal
Here lays the remains of a ferry terminal that was once used to service some of NYC’s abandoned islands. With the islands closed to official uses, the ferry terminal also has become an obsolete waste.
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Cangros Transmission
Cangros was a transmission shop in the heart of an industrial neighborhood. It was in an old school building with large apartments located above the shop.
The neighborhood, of course, has changed, the business has gone under, and the building, it too will soon likely be gone. Interesting from the outside yet totally empty on the inside, building is a metaphor for what has become of this area: A soul-less shadow of its former self.
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PUMP
The keys to the kingdom open odd underground doors such as those to rooms like this one: a Pump Room located under Manhattan. This room contains water pumping equipment which is used in case of underground flooding in a nearby tunnel. The water gets sucked out of gratings and pumped into the cities sewer system.
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Get Your Box On – Gotham Container Corp’s old location
Original Writeup:
This building, formerly the home of Gotham container corp, is basically just another quick example of the shit going down in northwest Brooklyn. Any and all small one story industrial buildings are being smashed. Crushed and redeveloped, this location will no doubt soon contain a poorly constructed, overpriced and very ugly building of ‘oh-so-hip apartments for rent or sale. You know, just in time for the housing market downturn spreading across this country.And what of the small business that once occupied this building? They’ve been forced out or gone out of business, their jobs either gone or relocated. What was once a building contributing jobs to the area is now only going to be lining the pockets of of greedy developer.
Getting inside this place was super easy. The construction fence was wide open. Inside though, little was left over. The entire building was being ripped apart and readied for its date with the bulldozer.
Update, April 2013
It turns out ‘Gotham container corp‘ seems to have moved their business over to New Jersey. Their old building was completely bulldozed and replaced with a combination condo building and hotel (sort of like a combination pizza hut and taco bell, only slightly different. This intermixing of living accommodations even received a writeup in the NY Times.While whatever jobs associated with Gotham have moved across the river, new jobs at the hotel have come into play – so at least in that regard the new buildings are not just housing. I would imagine workers for either make more or less the same cash. A real win here would have been a building that delivered better paying gigs, but what can you do… I’ll take jobs still in the economy over none.
Assuming this is a well designed, constructed and cared for building, the result here are positive, and my original curmudgeon assessment was spot on wrong. Hey, I can admit it.
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SnakeyPoo Bunker
Out and about in the burbs last autumn we happened upon an old military base where a large underground bunker was suspected to be located, so we went on a hike to find said bunker. When we got there it was smaller than expected, but the door handle, well, that grayish looking twiggy thing wasn’t what I expected to find, that’s for sure…
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Track Work Season
Sometimes you just have to engage in a little bit of freelance track inspection.
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K R U L E W I T C H
J.G. was just an average guy. He made his living selling hats and made his death in a mausoleum at krulewitch cemetery. There his body lay in rest until the 76th anniversary of his death in 1997, when an unknown person or persons broke into his crypt and burned his coffin and remains to oblivion.
2 police officers spotted the smoke that night and their presence apparently scared off whoever committed this crude devilish act, but in many ways it was already decades too late.
Home to more than 30,000 bodies, Krulewitch is a place that was doomed from the onset. The majority of those interned here were either poor or of average means. Few were able to pay for continuance contracts for their plots to be maintained. As the space filled, cutting off the revenue from new burials, the cash to maintain the cemetery dropped. The congregation which owns this cemetery has shrank over the decades. Few attend their services which take place in a building far from the cemetery. Some probably don’t even know the cemetery exists. With no space for new burials and no cash from continuance, the cemetery slowly fell into disrepair. Vines grew over the ground, trees sprouted. Decades of neglect created this jungle of the damned. Nature has taken back the land, with lush tress and vines covering just about everything.
It did not help that the area this cemetery is in also slid into decline. We were greeted upon arrival here to the not too distant sound of mid-day gunfire. Such a dangerous area surely has not helped in bringing visitors to this forgotten place.
The conditions here are just plain disturbing. Iron fences are rusted through and knocked over. Headstones, too, have been toppled. Beer cans grow like weeds in some corners, next to a stack of trash bags containing god only knows what. The thick trees and vast land area make it a dangerous place for police to patrol by foot when they dare to enter it at all. A place like this is ripe for crime. Ripe for evil. This place of rest has indeed become the devils playground, and no one has the millions of dollars it would take to restore it to remotely resemble what a cemetery should look like.
This fact doesn’t seem to be lost on the dead though. Entire bodies have disappeared. Their mausoleums doors smashed in, the coffins ripped open. It is as if the even the dead are so appalled by this place of sin that they have up and left.