Inside the Abandoned Curtiss-Wright Propeller Test Facility
Some locations earn their reputation before you ever set foot near them. This one came with a viral video, a Weird NJ feature, and a State Trooper parked directly across the street with nothing better to do. The wind tunnel building had been on my list long enough that the anticipation had curdled into serious obsession, and my first two attempts did nothing to help.
The debut was a non-starter before I even reached the building — the road was cordoned off for repairs halfway down, and with local law requiring enforcement nearby for that kind of work, I turned around and went somewhere easier. The second visit was worse in its own way. I pulled up to find a State Trooper sitting in an unmarked car with a clear sightline to both the building and the road. I spent a few minutes convincing myself he was there for speeders — this stretch apparently draws racing traffic — but I wasn't convinced enough to walk past him. I left again.
The third time, I didn't park anywhere near the front. I left the car in a lot that wasn't exactly welcoming of unattended vehicles, picked a completely different approach route, and came at the building from a direction that kept me well out of the trooper's peripheral vision. The steel-holed barriers covering every door on the facade aren't coming off with anything short of a serious tool — but I wasn't going in through the front. What I found instead was an access point that opened onto the interior middle section, and the moment I leaned into the nearest door on my right, the whole reason everyone makes the trip revealed itself: a smooth cylindrical concrete wind tunnel chamber, intact, untouched in any way that mattered, exactly as it looked in every photograph that had been circulating online for years.
My heart rate situation at that point was not ideal. My car was in a prohibited lot, the trooper was nearby, and I was standing in the middle of a piece of WWII aviation infrastructure that had been sealed off precisely because people kept finding their way inside it. I set up the tripod anyway. Some locations demand you commit.
Two Tunnels, One Building, Thirty Years of Graffiti
From the inside, the building reads as two mirrored halves flanking a central room on the ground floor. The leftmost chamber is where most of the remaining hardware sits — a large concrete plinth toward the back that would have anchored the test assembly, with what looks like a mounting cell behind it where the engine and propeller unit would have been fixed in position during a run. The right chamber connects through a doorway. What I was looking at in both cases was a space designed to hold something under enormous stress and measure what happened — functional architecture in the most literal sense, built to absorb force rather than deflect it. Upstairs there are rooms I could identify as observation and record-keeping spaces based on their position above the tunnels, though the roof has been leaking long enough that the upper floor is treacherous — waterlogged, partially collapsed in sections, and dark in a way that discourages lingering. I shot from the doorway and moved on.
Downstairs is a different story. Thirty-plus years of abandonment have covered nearly every surface in graffiti — layers of it, enough to suggest that the steel barriers weren't always as effective as intended. The concrete itself is solid. The cylindrical chambers are structurally intact. Whatever happens to this building, it won't be because the 1943 construction failed.
The Airport Came First and So Did the Company
Before a single wartime building went up in [redacted], Curtiss-Wright already had a footprint on this land. The airfield at [redacted] opened in September 1929 — the same year Curtiss-Wright itself was incorporated — and the company owned and operated it as Curtiss-Wright Airport through the early 1930s. When operations wound down in 1933, the field passed to other operators and eventually became [redacted], though the [redacted] identifier still carries the company's initials today. The plant that would become the wind tunnel facility was built alongside an airfield Curtiss-Wright had been associated with for over a decade.
The wind tunnel building itself dates to 1943, according to Weird NJ, though Library of Congress photographs taken on April 8, 1941 — credited to the Gottscho-Schleisner studio — document the broader Curtiss-Wright plant at Caldwell already standing and operational. Both things are reconcilable: the plant opened in 1941, the wind tunnel structure was a later wartime addition. What the facility produced is not ambiguous. Civil Air Patrol records for the area describe a large factory in the [redacted] vicinity dedicated to producing propellers for aircraft during World War II. Weird NJ is more direct: this building was purpose-built to test airplane propellers for WWII bombers. This was a propeller division plant. The "engine manufacturing facility" framing that circulates in some write-ups on this building is incorrect.
When the war ended, the propeller division's purpose went with it, and the plant closed in 1948. The surrounding buildings came down over time as the land returned to airport use. The wind tunnel building survived on a separate parcel. Engelhard Industries eventually moved in, followed by Vibra Screw, which converted the tunnel chambers into a test facility for their Bin Activator systems and a particle processing lab — a surreal second life for a space designed to push propeller blades to their limits. After Vibra Screw, it became storage, and after storage it became derelict, sometime in the 1990s.
The most unexpected chapter in the building's post-war biography belongs to Weird NJ issue #53, in which writer Wheeler Antabanez documented an interview with pro skateboarder Freddy Gall about skating the full pipe. According to Antabanez, some of the tunnel's internal seams were packed with Bondo, and others smoothed over with concrete to create a rideable surface. Someone took a WWII propeller testing chamber and resurfaced it as a halfpipe. That detail — and I say this as someone who spent time inside those chambers — explains why the interior concrete is considerably smoother than anything built in 1943 has any right to be.
The People Who Couldn't Leave It Alone
The building has attracted a specific kind of attention for as long as it has been empty. In December 2004, the owners called law enforcement after discovering someone had broken in and posted interior photographs online. The trespasser was a 25-year-old male who ran a now-defunct website that I won’t name, which cataloged abandoned buildings across New Jersey that had apparently drawn enough of a following to make his break-in newsworthy. He unfortunately picked up additional charges under other investigations across multiple municipalities in northern New Jersey.
Nearly two decades later, in May 2022, police found a 2005 Nissan parked behind the building that shouldn't have been there. Inside was a female who was arrested for criminal trespass and criminal mischief. She was carrying 21 cans of spray paint. The fresh smell in the air confirmed how the evening had gone.
I left without incident, which required not stepping into the leaf-covered muddy swamp that nearly swallowed me on the way out — easily the most dangerous moment of the whole visit. When I circled back on a later trip, the trees and brush I had used as approach cover had been cleared to the stumps. The building's front now sits more exposed than it has been in years. Whether that's preparation for something or just maintenance, I couldn't tell you. What's happening to the wind tunnel next is a question that doesn't have an answer yet.
The wind tunnel building was part of the Curtiss-Wright propeller plant and later housed Engelhard Industries and Vibra Screw. If you or a family member worked there, or you have photographs, documents or memories of the building, I would like to hear from you. Full credit given to all contributors.
Source(s):
- Man charged with criminal trespass in vacant building. (2004, February 6). New Jersey Hills Media Group. https://www.newjerseyhills.com/man-charged-with-criminal-trespass-in-vacant-building/article_e373f871-9343-5c4d-88ab-6284dedbd3d4.html
- Lostinjersey. (2009, March 5). My visit to Curtis Wright. The Lostinjersey Blog. https://lostinjersey.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/my-visit-to-curtis-wright/
- Manna, A. (2022, May). Elmwood Park teen charged with trespass and criminal mischief [Press release]. Fairfield Police Department. https://www.fairfieldpolicenj.org/post/elmwood-park-teen-charged-with-trespass-and-criminal-mischief
- Vibra Screw Incorporated. (n.d.). Our history. https://www.vibrascrew.com/our-history/
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