Winsted's Union Pin Company: Highland Lake and Pins Still in the Soil

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Photo courtesy of the Winchester Tax Office Pins in the Brook: The Last Ruins of the Union Pin Company J and I came at it through the trees. No path, just tall standing trees and the kind of undergrowth that swats at your shins and grabs your laces, until the canopy thinned and we found what was left. A turbine, tall and rusted, rising out of the woods beside a brook in Winsted, Connecticut. A small generator sat on top of it, also rusted, also still. Beside that, set back from the tree line and facing the residential houses across Lake Street, a sealed and boarded building held its ground. It was August 2019, midday, the kind of heat that slows everything down. We photographed the turbine carefully, then picked our way downstream along the slippery rocks of the brook that fed toward the Mad River past Boyd Street. What J never mentioned, and what I never thought to look for, was the hydropower outlet tucked behind the thick trees just off the path we'd taken. And neither of us eve...
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Brooklyn Graffiti Skull Mural






No pirate treasure here but I did find some rope to hang myself.


This remnant of a much larger complex that burned in 2006 was once home to American Manufacturing Company. It was built in 1890 and manufactured 10 million pounds of oakum used in caulking wooden ship seams. Employing over 2,000 workers who lived nearby in Greenpoint Brooklyn. Mainly female Polish and Lithuanian immigrant workers. American Manufacturing Company started off as a two-story jute mill quickly expanding from one block to six. In 1920, it became the largest hemp and jute factory in the manufacture of 400,000 pounds of cotton bagging and ties daily.









Later known as the forgotten Greenpoint Terminal Market. The historic warehouses burned in 2006 as it was revealed they were being referred to by The Municipal Art Society as historical landmarks to the Landmarks Preservation Commission. The Greenpoint fire was responded to by a large force of 350 firefighters on the day it burned. Now, a few remaining buildings that survived and were part of the complex have turned into residential buildings, and one outlier building is situated on the river. That building was all that remains until graffiti artist Greg Suits (Suitswon) placed that building on the map. Intrepid photographer Raphael Gonzalez saw it and his pictures went viral across news sites. Researching more about the building, the location was used in a Netflix series.


To learn more about the storied history of Greenpoint Terminal Market, you can read a well-written and in-depth piece by Bedford and Bowery, here.



To see the last vestiges of the market check out Nathan Kensinger's Flickr set.





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