Sublunar Photography

Imagine being a physical newspaper company in the early 2000's. Print journalism had already been on a steady, predictable, decline over the decade prior and now this newfangled thing called "the internet" was capable of spreading the written word instantaneously across the globe. For free, even. Average print circulation was dropping 1% every year and household subscriptions had declined nearly 15%. The writing was on the wall.

Faced with numbers like the above, one brave newspaper made a bold move. At a time when declining subscriptions and ad revenue forced many of their peers into collapse, this newspaper decided to spend roughly one gazillion dollars (nearly $300 Million USD adjusted for inflation) to build this giant 6-story printing press and its supporting infrastructure.

To the surprise of at least a small handful of people, it wasn't long before their financial outlook was, and I quote, "bleak". The time soon came when they could no longer justify keeping this monstrosity running. So now it sits empty... along with their historic 100+ year old former headquarters, which they abandoned when they decided to build this mega-facility. The company does still exist, surprisingly, but now they operate out of smaller offices and must resort to paying to have their papers printed hundreds of miles away and then shipped into town.

If you're equally bad at spotting trends, reading the room, etc, then you'll be delighted to know that this massive newspaper printing facility is currently on the market for about 1/10th the cost to originally build it. But wait. Hold the presses. Contact me right now and I'll give you a much better deal. I accept cash offers. As you can see, it's in mint condition and probably runs great.

"I'll tell you what, though.. Blogs. They aren't going anywhere. People love this shit!" the author insisted as he firmly but affectionately slapped his antique photography blog which caused the thick layer of dust to waft through the air. "This social media craze is just a shiny new thing. It's a trend that will fade out. I couldn't even tell you how many visitors I had to my blog this month". The statcounter plugin stopped working about 10 years ago. "But it was probably several. Several unique visitors." And then he hobbled off back to his peaceful retirement community while bitching to himself about some "dumb kids" on instagram.

I was pretty excited to see this complete Linotype machine here. One of my favorite locations from a decade or two ago (the Wright Arcade) had a newspaper office in it that was full of these, but in much worse condition.

NOTE 1: It's been over a year since this visit occurred and in the meantime they've auctioned off a lot of the more significant items in here. So a lot has changed here and this location has been deemed safe to post here.

NOTE 2: This blog post does not correlate to the "4 part series of loosely related posts" mentioned in the previous two updates. Consider this one a bonus. We will return to the 4-part series on the next post.

This water treatment plant is located in Sauget, Illinois. I can't find any history on this place to indicate when it was constructed or how long it remained in operation but I'd estimate it ran from the mid 1950's to mid 90's. The central piece of machinery found here is the set of Komline Sanderson rotary drum filters.

Check out the video here.

American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) of Taylor Springs Illinois began under a slightly different name at this location in 1912. They were involved in zinc and lead smelting and refining as well as sulfuric acid production in addition to coal mining and storage, primary and secondary slab zinc production and both American and French Process zinc oxide production. Waste products from plant operations were conveniently dumped on-site and coal ash from the plant’s gas producing operations was casually spread on the ground. Slag piles were found to contain lead, arsenic, cadmium and other problematic metals. To what was surely the surprise of everyone involved, these methods of "storage" resulted in the contamination of both surface water and soil. This contamination not only extended onto adjacent residential properties but some waste materials were also used as fill dirt in the neighborhoods near the site. ASARCO LLC purchased the property from American Zinc and Lead in 1971 and they continued zinc smelting and refining activities. They then leased the facility to Midwest Zinc-Hillsboro, which remained in operation until 2004.

EPA superfun site

A 1912 industrial site sounded super fun to me. It was an hour long drive to the best parking spot and a decent hike on top of that before we could even get eyes on the site and learn what, if anything, was still standing. It wasn't until we walked up out of the trees and finally laid eyes on the objective that we knew some, possibly all, of the original buildings still stood. I started to get my hopes up at this point. It looked like we had an office building in the front with some garages/shops in the middle and then the main production site in the rear-complete with a big ass power plant building that had a crazy ventilation fan sticking out of the side of it. It looked like it was going to be awesome. Very excited by this point to head in and see what's left.

The front office building was actually not a disappointment, as far as those things go. There was one of those weird rooms where workers put their belongings in baskets and hoist them up to the ceiling. Some other random stuff like showers, lockers, a sound isolation booth, etc. Much of the usual ephemera was still left where it was discared so it seemed safe to assume we might find vintage industrial goodness the further on we went.

Except.. Everything else was gutted and empty. The power building being the most depressing example was completely devoid of all its former organs except a bunch of lonely catwalks and stuff that would have once allowed access to the upper ends of whatever awesome old equipment had been amputated prior to our arrival. The rafters are home to vultures whose defecations frequently plopped down around us in reddish colored chunks. We were only in there for a few minutes but I had several near misses with the stuff falling close to me. The floor was several inches thick with shit and feathers and over time these things had formed the heavy particulate swirling in the air all around us. There was some weird halfassed crumbling 1980s looking office space built randomly in one side of the room, completely out of place and utterly offensive considering the old industrial jungle gym that should have greeted us as reward for the pilgrimage.

The entirety of the rest of the structures were similarly remediated of 97% of their former contents and the only stairs to the only upper sections of the whole place were cut off and laying on the floor. There were some big empty warehouse docks, a loading bay, several large steel buildings, etc. All empty.

Sure it was still something to do but not really worth the effort since it was gutted. So I can't recommend it partially due to all the above, but also because of the following:

Oh wait. SuperfunD. With a "d".

According to the EPA's Public Health Assessment of this location, there are 4 main contaminants onsite that are cause for concern: Arsenic, Lead, Cadmium and Zinc. Basically, I got the impression that everything except the arsenic is pretty "meh" as far as dangers go. But it sounded like there was enough of a presence of inorganic arsenic that it wasn't something to just shrug off. Highly unpleasant/carinogenic/etc. So I decided to a wear an old and thus disposable set of clothes/boots/etc and change out of them before I got back into my vehicle, tossing them into a trash bag ultimately to be discarded. Also brought a respirator and wore it inside one of the buildings, but that was mostly just because of the vulture shit.

So yeah. Things were looking real good on the approach..

I started getting real excited as we got closer.. only to be inconsolable soon hereafter. If this doesn't look like a slice of heaven to you then I don't know what your damn problem is.

This is what disappointment looks like.