Concrete

Fluid Dynamics 201

After the furniture factory, a few of us split off from the UR group at Nate's suggestion to check out this place in Niagara Falls he found. Once the power plant for the massive (and demolished) Union Carbide plant, at the time Niagara's biggest employer, this was the largest Tesla AC (54 volt) facility ever constructed. Union Carbide eventually failed massively, in part due to bad public relations after the Bhopal incident, and most of the compound met its demise. This part still remains, surrounded by active machine shops, but completely open for the past few decades. Other than the…

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Furniture Factory

What we think is a furniture factory, on Sycamore street in Buffalo. I came here once in 2009, it's changed a bit since then, less building more nature. Things haven't been going as planned for a while so I figured I'd let anyone from my group go with the UR UrbEx club. The result was mostly weird: Nate and Amy, firmly rooted in the "other" school of urbex, came in with stealthy looks and respirator masks, and generally way out of place. It will be interesting having them around for the rest of the year... Nate sees something on the…

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I Came As A Cat

I woke up this afternoon sprawled out in the entrance of Kendrick Hall. Something was still going off in my head: "got to get to the stadium. it's all happening at the zoo. you're on the moon, things are different here." The stadium didn't help me one bit, the bouncing basketball an Angry Bird, the crowd cheering somehow a turgid taste. Head pounding, espresso resounding a search for saturated fat. Someone in the commons recognizes me, and puzzle pieces started falling back together. A winter morning glowing brownishly blue, infinitely late that night, it even SOUNDED cold. You couldn't hear…

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Air Force 763

A relic from the age of missiles, AFRS (Air Force Radio Station) Cambria was the command center for the Niagara region's rocket program. While not a launch site itself, Cambria was still the largest of the bases, with barracks for the entire 763rd who served around Niagara county, a school, a gym and drill building, a computer center, and a (very) hardened bunker, the only building on base we couldn't get in. Inexplicably, the main road through the base is a Unicorn Drive; this probably had some military significance at the time, but now it's a weird aside. The Fightin'…

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We Are Concrete

Somehow, on the night of January 17th, we found ourselves back in the tunnels of Iola, with little else but ambition and a bottle of Jim Beam. (Try it sometime. Ambition and Jim Beam are probably listed as essential ingredients in any anarchist's cookbook, with all it did for us!) Somewhere along the line, the idea came up to make exits at each building, then use the tunnels as a secret passage for some sort of event. Thinking about it, we decided with mostly sarcasm the event had to be a rave. There would be a practice round, and pending…

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