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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Hidden Gems #4: The $1.9 Million Shack




Drove by this unsuspecting gem traveling home. Immediately got out and snapped away.

Come to find out this piece of property was built all the way back in 1899 (119 years old). You can't see from the street but there is a house located behind this small building. Surprisingly, with all the huge money pouring into this neighborhood, the current owners have not sold out with the rising New York City real estate prices. This property currently has an estimated land value of $1.9 million. The house on the property is still inhabited according to sources who have looked into the property. I guess the current landowners are just sitting on it for now to maximize the most land value they can get in this increasingly hot real estate market.

Quite a jarring sight in a hip Brooklyn neighborhood.


July 4, 2018

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