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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Cloudy With Chance of City Rain



Headed down to the Brooklyn Bridge Park Pier to cop some night photos of the lower Manhattan buildings and I was not disappointed. Some nice cloud cover was coming in as I was taking photos. That cloud cover began to envelop the World Trade Center building but I could not dip over due to that same cloud cover bringing the rain with it. It looks like some wet days ahead.

Loving the blue touch of the NYPD Coast Guard cruising relentlessly back and forth. 

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