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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T Uniform



🔥 Update: May 3, 2026

The former Temco Uniforms facility—anonymized as "T Uniform" in this early exploration—was destroyed by fire on May 3, 2026. These photos are now part of the historical record of a site that no longer exists.

📖 Read the full historical write-up and environmental investigation here.


Not much I can say about this little gem nestled next to a bridge other than it is heavily polluted. A nice little fun exploration. The boiler and electrical rooms were neat little surprises. Sometimes you find various equipment from all over and even in some cases defunct factories or mills where you have already explored products right up in your face. I nearly went in through an open window but decided against it since I saw an opening while walking up the bridge surveying the property for any viable entrances.

A full historical writeup when I reveal its true name.

Enjoy!


















vacant open space business warehouse



large silver pacific steel boiler



dirty maintenance boiler room










📖 Full History: This location is the former Temco Uniforms Company facility. Read the complete historical write-up and environmental investigation here.

🧥 Did You Work at Temco Uniforms?

Were you employed at the Temco Uniform Company in Rockland County before its 2002 closure? Or at Modern Filters before 1985? Do you have photos from when the factory was operational, uniform samples, or memories of this Samsondale Avenue facility? With the building now lost to fire, your firsthand accounts are more important than ever.

Drop a comment below or contact me directly. Full credit given to all contributors.

📸 More New York Industrial History

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