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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Brooklyn's Secret Cove


 




One of Brooklyn's best-kept secrets or shall I say the most underdeveloped park in Brooklyn. Herein lies a small hidden cove home to an abandoned boat that has been permanently moored in this cove as far back as 2012. Will Ellis, AbandonedNYC's, writer and explorer, checked out this small waterfront way back in the day in 2014. In addition, Atlas Obscura also wrote a small undated piece on this abandoned vessel.

A couple months ago, a generous low tide allowed me to get up close and personal with this wet bucket of metal, plastic, and seaweed. I've always had it on my ever-long and expanding list of locations to visit since I viewed it on Will Ellis' website years ago when I was giddy with excitement when I first started exploring as a hobby and now as a serious life endeavor. I can see why it can be considered a "secret cove" since it is pretty much off the beaten path. You wouldn't know it was there if you didn't trudge through the grass and low and behold see the ruined vessel sitting on its side amongst the slippery mucky rocks.

According to Ellis' article, this waterfront was made possible by the nearby Verazzano Bridge construction debris which to this day stands quite mountainous from the shores of Brooklyn. If you would like to see dated photos from its construction, check out Dave Frieder's wonderful article here.

Status: Still within secluded cove...may have moved a bit or submerged again.

Sources:

1. Ellis, Will, "Brooklyn Wild: Gravesend's Accidental Park", February 2, 2014, AbandonedNYC
2. Frieder, Dave, "Bridge in the Back Yard: Construction of the Verrazano-Narrows", August 17, 2003, Forgotten New York
3. Kadinsky, Sergey, "Calvert Vaux Park, Brooklyn", January 22, 2017, Hidden Waters Blog






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