Digital Ink'd

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...

Photo courtesy of Loop.net The One That Got Away: A Lumber Mill, Some Idiots, and a Call I Don't Regret Some stories don't have a satisfying ending. This is one of them. And I've been carrying it around long enough that I just need to put it down somewhere. J and I drove out to Torrington on what should have been a straightforward documentation run in 2023. The target was the former Hotchkiss Brothers Lumber Mill on Water Street, sitting on the east bank of the Naugatuck River. We scoped it on the way in, circled the block, found our parking spot, and liked what we saw. Entry looked manageable. The building looked intact enough to be worth the effort. We were ready. We crossed through the Stop & Shop parking lot in the full summer heat, shoppers drifting past us with their carts, completely indifferent. We clambered over a wall, pushed through branches that swatted us in the face, and followed the sound of the Naugatuck moving over rocks somewhere below. The grass...

Ghosts of the Wire Industry: Inside Trenton's Roebling Complex The first fence I found, I didn't jump. I had parked at the edge of the old industrial park and started walking the block, looking for a seam. That's the work. You circle the property, you read the edges, you find the spot where the chain link has been peeled back, or the post has gone loose. I found one almost immediately, a low fence, nothing to it. Then I noticed the man across the street watching me. So I kept moving, hands in my pockets, just a guy who'd taken a wrong turn. A few doors down, a commotion. Two people arguing in the middle of the street, loud enough that I slowed without meaning to. It ended the way those things usually end, with nothing settled. The man stepped back onto the sidewalk and then disappeared into the side of the building. Not through a door. Through a gap in the fence I couldn't see from where I stood. That told me two things. There was another way in. And I wasn...