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 Mystery Hotel



A curious case of no found history.

Today I present the 'Mystery Hotel' because the only relevant real estate information that could be found for this property all points to the category listed as hotels and classed as a miscellaneous hotel for land use pertaining to commercial & office buildings. Nothing could be found either in the Department of Buildings database using two known addresses for this property. I searched and searched for property records pertaining to the past uses and occupants of this commercial building but came up empty. Hopefully, in the future when development comes to this property I can write up a new update. But for now, enjoy these exterior shots I shot a few weeks ago.

Former Hotel Entrance

Cross Street View

Now just used to store local school buses.

About a month ago, there was a visible entrance inside the driveway. Someone had broken through the cinder blocked doorway and made their way inside probably to scrap for metal. Upon my return, it was sewn up again with no other entrances possible but the third-story window in front of a busy one-way avenue. Currently, the land is used to park and store school buses for the surrounding schools of this distinct residential neighborhood.



Update:


As of 4/10/2022, the building was demolished earlier this year for a proposed residential building.


Comments

  1. JohnApril 13, 2017 at 7:18 AM

    This building is very similar to Ostermoor in Bridgeport. Both are in residential neighborhoods and have the entrances sealed with cinder blocks. The scrapper must have used a sledgehammer to gain access.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Kareem KingApril 13, 2017 at 9:05 AM

      The owner definitely does not want anyone inside. Definitely scrapper invasion.

      Delete

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