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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Abandoned NYC Train Substation







Today I tried to access this old abandoned substation on a quiet residential block. Previously, I've been here before to scout out access and potential foot traffic of local neighbors. It is quite easy to access if you don't mind jumping the fence but the tall windows are a problem without any type of supporting ladder or fellow explorer shoulder.  Inside holds old machinery that once powered the local train line before the municipality agency for some reason left it to rot next to an adjacent substation that is also under maintenance and repair. A substation's function is to convert high-voltage AC to DC in order to power trains along the transit line. In New York City, there are many old and new substations across the five boroughs that can be found next to subway stations. This particular one still has the vintage equipment from other sources I've seen during my research. There is also one in another borough I almost got to explore before coming across a security guard wondering why am I entering the property. A look of bewilderment and confusion usually smooths things over but that is for another post if I ever access that particular substation.


















🏙️ Related NYC Industrial & Urban Exploration

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