Nearpara Rubber Company: From Tire Reclaiming to Toxic Brownfield

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The Last Days of Nearpara Rubber I smelled it before I saw anything worth photographing. That warm, faintly sweet bite of old rubber, the kind that hits you somewhere between a tire shop and a summer highway, drifted through the first building the moment I stepped inside. The structure was burned out, charred and broken, rubble underfoot. But the smell was alive. And then I saw the pile. In the corner of the room, faded brown and heaped maybe two feet high, was a mound of baby bottle nipples. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of the small rubber tips, just sitting on the floor of a collapsed industrial building in Trenton, New Jersey. I stood there for a moment, genuinely confused, and then kept moving. Nothing like the smell of warmed-over rubber. Twenty minutes later, I understood even less. Through another door passage, I found the main source of the smell: six open metal trailer containers, still loaded with bagged baby bottle nipples, sitting in open air. Bags of them, mountains of bagged n...
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Forever Young, Forever Lost & Forever Forgotten

Grass Covered Subway Train Tracks
Old Schenectady Avenue Subway line


This old Brooklyn rail line will be lost forever. Tracks of a bygone era when subway trains rolled endless along its track. Man and machine rolling along the steel so effortlessly. Millions of hard working Brooklynites traversing each corner back and forth. Night after night. Day after day. Now all is lost. Service gone no more lumbering along the narrow tracks. Nature has come to take back its rightful place. Eating away tirelessly at its anti-rust core. All nature can do is hide it away from sight until that final day comes when it shall be no more. 

 Lens Info: Super-Takumar 55mm 1:2 @ f/2

 © Digital Ink'D Photography

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