A structure among the ovens of the abandoned Inland Steel blast furnaces.

The side of the ruined Falstaff brewery (Thanks to Dan Kreppein and others for telling me that this used to be a brewery, and that it said "We brew better beer") . The building adjacent to this one had collapsed. For me, the punctum of this photo is the section of pipe hanging below the second hopper from the right. Who hung it? Why? How did it survive the removal of the pipes connecting to it on both sides? I went back recently (April, 1997), and the section of the brewery with the hoppers was still standing, though the rest had been demolished. The hanging pipe was gone, though.

Another view of the ruined Falstaff brewery. In 1998, the power plant in the background experienced a severe coal-dust explosion.

Looking down the canal from near an abandoned Inland mill towards the LTV works.

Gary and its environs

Sasha and I drove to FOCS '95 in Milwaukee. On the way there, we were struck by Gary's ordered chaos and beautiful gloom. We were also tired of being in the car and antsy to get to Chicago, so we kept on going. On the way back, though, we stopped to take pictures. At the bottom of the page, there are a few more pictures, from when Alma and I visited Chicago in April of '97. They still didn't let us behind any fences, but we found some better vantage points.

I must emphasize that these pictures are of the Gary area---some of the actual sites are in surrounding cities or even Chicago proper.

The Gary area is beautiful. The refinery towers, the ruined factories, and the hulking mills are impressive. They exist in wholly inhuman scale that even spindly skyscrapers, with their person-sized floor divisions, cannot match. The sprays of pipes, stacks, and cables speak of a private world that is complex enough to be interesting, yet ordered enough to be mostly controlled. And the remains of defunct plants are tangible monuments of a sort that is less often produced these days. Contrast a blast furnace with the office furniture left behind when a software company goes bust.

To some, this is missing the point, and maybe even rejoicing in their pain: I may like steel mills, but for many, they're more a job source or a pollution source than a source of beauty. David Plowden, who has been behind a camera in front of industrial settings for far longer than I, addresses this contradiction in several of his books. In his photodocumentary of Gary, Hammond, and South Chicago, Industrial Landscape, Plowden quotes Thomas Bell's novel Out of This Furnace:

It is a terrible and beautiful thing to make iron

I think I took these first few pictures, but I'm not totally sure---we were passing Sasha's camera back and forth quite a bit.