Digital Ink'd

If you judged Hydeville Mill by its exterior today, you would not call it a historic producer of fine doeskins or cassimere. You would call it a graveyard for heavy machinery. When my exploring partner J and I arrived, the parking lot looked less like a monument to industry and more like a waiting room for rusty backhoes, paratransit vans, and tractors in various stages of decay. We did not linger outside. We slipped inside, expecting empty floors or rotting looms. Instead, we found a vintage red Chevy jacked inexplicably high toward the ceiling. It is a strange phenomenon I have noticed in my travels. Whether I am in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, or Delaware, abandoned mills seem to come with a peculiar side dish. They almost always hide a vintage automobile tucked away in some forgotten corner. It happens so frequently that it has become a running theme in my work, as if these industrial giants simply swallow cars whole. We documented what we could see, but we missed the most fa...

I spotted the club by accident. I was driving back from another location in Hartford’s North End when the building caught my eye. It had that look some places get when their story is almost over. The windows were boarded. The lot was empty save for a few piles of illicit trash dumping. The sign still clung to the facade as if nothing had changed. I pulled over. From the outside, it did not look impossible to enter. I walked the perimeter, hoping for an unlocked door or a broken panel someone had already discovered. No luck. Every entrance was sealed tight, save for an open window in full view of a busy road. I stood there for a moment, camera in hand, feeling that familiar mix of curiosity and frustration. All I left with were a few exterior shots and a quiet promise to myself. I will come back. I never did. Somewhere between 2021 and 2024, the building was demolished. Just like that, it was gone. No farewell. No ceremony. Just another vacant patch of land in a neighborhood that has se...

By the time I noticed, it was already too late. Another loss. Another familiar silhouette scraped from the skyline. Another piece of Brooklyn's industrial memory folded up and tucked away, replaced by something sleeker, faster, and utterly forgettable. It was sometime around 2018 when I first looked at the former grounds of H. Kohnstamm and Company, a name that once meant something in this part of the borough. The property sat in that peculiar state of half-life so common to old industrial sites in the outer boroughs. One side lay in ruin, a crumbling monument to an era when Brooklyn made things. The other half hummed along just fine, a thriving business still operating in the shadow of the decay, its workers going about their routines as if the ghosts next door didn't exist. I remember thinking I should come back. I should document this. I should put a pin in it. I never did. My attention, as it often was in those days, had drifted to Connecticut, New Jersey, and the former Bo...

   Photo courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. At Grand Street in Newburgh, a skeleton made of sandstone stands guard near the south end of the public library. To the casual passerby, it looks like just another victim of time and neglect. But for those who know the history of the Hudson Valley, this shell of a building is a heartbreak. It is the ghost of the City Club, a structure that has survived wrecking balls and urban renewal projects only to be hollowed out by a suspicious fire and left to rot in the open air. The tragedy of this building is not just about old bricks. It is about pedigree. This home was commissioned around 1850 for Dr. William A.M. Culbert, a homeopathic doctor who had married into the wealthy Powell family. To design his residence, Culbert hired two of the most significant names in American design history: Andrew Jackson Downing and Calvert Vaux. This collaboration carries a heavy weight. Downing, a Newburgh n...