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Beaton & Corbin: The Toxic Southington Factory

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There is a daycare operating now at 318 North Main Street in Southington, Connecticut. Next door is an ice cream shop. Down the row sit a jeweler and a medical office, arranged in a clean commercial plaza that could pass for any small-town strip in New England. What is underneath all of it is a different story. Before the plaza, there was a fire. Before the fire, there was a corporation that dissolved and left its contamination for the town to deal with. Before that, there was a vat of nickel-chrome solution laced with cyanide that cracked and leaked onto the concrete floor, and nobody around to take legal responsibility for the 500 gallons of it spreading across the building. And before any of that, for nearly a century, there was Beaton and Corbin.                              It seems Beaton & Corbin started out manufacturing knives before producing plumbing products. The property on North Main S...
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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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From Excelsior Needle Co. to Timken: The Rise and Fall of Torrington's Standard Plant

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The Standard Plant and a Century of Making Things It was a hot May week in 2023, and J and I were already sweating through our shirts before we even made it to the entrance. We turned into the driveway off North Elm Street and passed a large Caterpillar backhoe holding up the red, white, and blue at the top of the arm. Patriotic machinery. Only in Connecticut. We moved toward the back of the complex with our eyes open, scanning for any sign of people or activity. We found cameras instead. A few of them, well-positioned across one of the buildings and up on an electrical pole, covering angles that made our original entry plan useless. We backed off, found a Plan B, and stepped into a dark room washed in tinted green light, then took the stairs down to ground level. The former Standard Plant sits along North Elm Street at a sunken grade, one story, with another building rising over the roadway to the far right when you're standing in front of it from North Street. It's the kind o...
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Location: 70 North St, Torrington, CT 06790, USA
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Kings Park Psychiatric Center: The Abandoned Long Island Asylum

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Kings Park and the Education of an Explorer Every pursuit has a place where beginners go first. Skateboarders have their parking lots and curbs. Climbers have their local crags. And if you are just finding your way into the world of urban exploration on Long Island, sooner or later someone points you toward Kings Park. The former Kings Park Psychiatric Center has become, over the years, something like a finishing school for people who don't yet know they're enrolled. Getting onto the grounds is straightforward. Finding a way inside the remaining buildings, if you know where to look, is not much harder. Which is exactly why the Parks Police have written thousands of trespassing tickets here in a single calendar year, why security visibly tightens every Halloween, and why local photography groups have been known to show up with large, enthusiastic crowds of people who want to take what they call "creepy" photos of old hospital asylums. The place attracts everyone, which...
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Inside the Abandoned Horsman Doll Factory in Trenton

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  You’ve got to move when the chance is right. That’s something I keep telling myself—but just as often, I forget it. Or ignore it. And then I end up learning the same lesson all over again. It happened on a quiet afternoon when I pulled up to the old Horsman Doll factory. The place has long been abandoned, but it still holds stories—ones I try to capture through my lens. The main gate was slightly ajar. Not wide open, but just enough for me to slip through with my gear. It was one of those rare opportunities. But across the street, half-hidden behind a rundown house, a group of men sat drinking and shouting over each other. The kind of scene you don't want to get caught up in—especially alone, carrying expensive camera equipment. I hesitated. I debated. I bailed. My gut told me to walk away, so I did. I figured I could find another way in. I circled the block, hoping for a back entrance or even a broken window low enough to climb through. I found one window that looked possible—bu...
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The Former Fusion Paperboard Plant (Part 1)

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  148" Trim Inverformer Paper Machine for Multi-Ply Recycled Boxboard ♻️ Former Fusion Paperboard Plant Series 🌿 Exploring the abandoned Fusion Paperboard recycling facility — from towering paper machinery and hydrapulpers to sludge ponds and the wastewater treatment plant that once supported sustainable recycled paperboard production. 🏭 Part 1 — First Exploration & Main Paper Machine ♻️ Part 2 — Hydrapulpers, Recycling & Sludge Systems 🌱 Part 3 — Wastewater Treatment Facility & Final Exploration 📦 Once producing 100% recycled coated paperboard, Fusion Paperboard recycled over 160,000 short tons of material annually before closing in 2014. I’ll never forget the day my friend J and I wandered onto that sprawling ...
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Inside the Abandoned St. Michael and St. Edward Church in Brooklyn

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For weeks, I had been orbiting the perimeter of the impending demolition of the Church of St. Michael and St. Edward, a once revered church in the heart of Fort Greene, like a moth drawn to a flame. The neighborhood, a patchwork of tight project housing, seemed indifferent to the fate of this historic edifice. The intel I had received suggested that entry was as simple as scaling a wooden fence, yet the timing had never felt right. Until one day, it did. With a mission in New Jersey looming, I knew it was now or never. The demolition was advancing at a startling pace, the church's twin steeples already reduced to rubble. The skeletal remains of timber beams and rusted steel frames peeked out from the ruins, a testament to the relentless march of progress. Summoning a surge of courage, I seized a moment of quiet in the bustling housing project and vaulted over the fence. My heart pounded in my chest as I slipped unnoticed into the church grounds. The once grand entrance now stood as...
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Winsted's Union Pin Company: Highland Lake and Pins Still in the Soil

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Photo courtesy of the Winchester Tax Office Pins in the Brook: The Last Ruins of the Union Pin Company J and I came at it through the trees. No path, just tall standing trees and the kind of undergrowth that swats at your shins and grabs your laces, until the canopy thinned and we found what was left. A turbine, tall and rusted, rising out of the woods beside a brook in Winsted, Connecticut. A small generator sat on top of it, also rusted, also still. Beside that, set back from the tree line and facing the residential houses across Lake Street, a sealed and boarded building held its ground. It was August 2019, midday, the kind of heat that slows everything down. We photographed the turbine carefully, then picked our way downstream along the slippery rocks of the brook that fed toward the Mad River past Boyd Street. What J never mentioned, and what I never thought to look for, was the hydropower outlet tucked behind the thick trees just off the path we'd taken. And neither of us eve...
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