Friday, March 6, 2015

Abandoned Icy Industrial Park in PA

On yet another freezing Saturday, I met up with friends to travel up to PA where we were going to explore an abandoned industrial park. Loaded with plenty of spare batteries and hand warmers, three layers of clothing and plenty of dollar bills for the tolls, I was excited to finally try out the Sony and my new camera bag on an urbexing trip.
We had heard reports that there had been a fire on the property so wasn't sure what to expect, but once we arrived we saw that it would only have been contained in one building since they were all spaced out so much. We walked around the park finding that most of the units were sealed tightly shut or the ones that were open were empty and dark inside. but despite this we found plenty of stuff to focus our cameras on and the added nearby nuclear plant emitting huge plumes of white steam against an azure sky was a plus.
Hardly what I'd call a romantic proposal, but I hope the intended recipient appreciated it.
We knew part of the industrial park was used for packaging and distributing alcohol and here we found some of the caps on the ground scattered amid broken glass. The 192 acres was also used to package and distribute antifreeze and ammonia based cleaners. The site needs a chemical cleanup before it can be used again. It shut down in 1986 but no definite plans have been laid for its future use.
I liked these stairwells and kept finding myself drawn to them. The Sony picked up the light through the broken glass far better than my Canons.
We made it up on to one of the roofs and were rewarded with a cool graffiti comment and the reactor coughing up large plumes in the distance.
The last building we explored held the old bottling machinery. It had been trashed pretty badly inside by vandals and I wasn't keen to spend too much time in there, but the machinery drew me in and soon I was concentrating on my shots.
There were a lot of what looked like rolls of wallpaper stacked and thrown about the floor. I liked the 'yellow brick road' effect and wondered if that had been the intention when the vandal threw this particular roll.
In one area of the warehouse bottle tops covered the floor up to knee height. I waded in amongst them to get close ups and commented on how this was the adult version of the the ball pits you see in kids' fast food restaurants.
After a few hours we were done. Cold and hungry we decided to leave and visit victory brewery on the way home. I'd really enjoyed using the Sony and the waist bag had worked out really well, so easy to access spare batteries and my flashlight. A lot of money well spent. The only problem now is that my weekends just don't come round fast enough!

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