Digital Ink'd

The news arrived as it so often does: mundanely, in a Google Alert buried between spam and a newsletter. Eight days ago, the demolition of the former Warnaco Clothing Factory in Bridgeport began. For most people, this was a long-overdue end to a local eyesore. For me, it was a missed appointment, and I felt that familiar, frustrating pinch of an explorer beaten by the clock. I was supposed to go back. I had even bookmarked a YouTube video that allegedly revealed a secluded entrance into the main, larger building. My chance was gone. My first and only visit had been a tense reconnaissance. The place was a beautiful monster. I remember the floors feeling less like a structure and more like a damp suggestion. They were soft, spongy with rot, and every step was a careful calculation. Openings in the floorboards gaped wide enough to swallow a car, let alone a person. The air was thick with that specific perfume of urban decay: damp wood, swirling dust, and dark corners. There was a rumor th...

    The climb to the old Dart Stone Mill wasn't for the faint of heart. My friend J and I huffed our way up that punishing incline, shirts clinging to our backs, calves screaming in protest. But we'd made this trek before, drawn back time and again to this crumbling monument perched high above Vernon, Connecticut. There's something about abandoned mills that gets under your skin, and this one had its hooks in us deep. When Albert Dart built this place back in 1868, he picked the most dramatic real estate in all of Rockville. The mill sits on a rock ledge at the second millseat below Snipsic Lake, clinging to the cliff face like it grew there naturally. And in a way, it may have. The lake fed water to nearly 39 mills as it descended through the valley, dropping ten inches in elevation along the way. That's a lot of industrial muscle powered by gravity alone. Dart built his mill for spinning silk and producing shoddy, a recycled wool material that was big business back th...