I was supposed to be in the Catskills this weekend, exploring all the resorts, including at least six I hadn’t been to, if the hurricane didn’t hit. All week Irene was tracking up the coast toward New York, and Nate defiantly kept the trip on. By last night, the storm made landfall and 17 was flooded, and he still wanted to go, saying the weather would help with not getting caught. Not wanting to be stranded in the flood zone, I pushed to cancel the trip. Of course, even with all the roads closed, and my having a few ideas for a backup plan, I still got blamed for the whole mess, and Nate, in a huff, canceled the lot of it, making sure (or so he thought), I’d go nowhere. I still managed to meet up with Roger at least for the backup trip… although I still would rather have had more borscht.
Unlike many explorers, I have actually come to enjoy revisiting the same place repeatedly — every time, something at least changes, sometimes for the better, with a new area to access, more beautiful decay, or better weather and light for photography, and sometimes for the worse, ranging from minor annoyances like a few new boards, to catastrophic ones like the entire location being gone. So far, it seems like the Flintkote factory fits firmly in the first category: nature is going along so well in the process of reclaiming it, that every re-greening helps the place out.
I think I did something to my lens. From this picture on through the rest of the day the left side is blurry. Is this worth fixing or headed for the trash?
And here it is in action again, another shot ruined…
Next up in Lockport was the motorcycle warehouse, which fit the second category perfectly. The notable, and incredible, thing about this place was all the rusted-out bikes from decades of hoarding and repair work. Somebody bought the bikes this summer for $8,000, hoping to sell them to collectors and restorers for a quarter million or more, which sounds ridiculous for such rustbuckets until you realize they managed to salvage over a thousand carcasses from world war 1 to the the 80s. This was what was left, for being either too dangerous to retrieve, or just too mangled to restore.
The floors aren’t the best in this place. These collapses though were about the only place left with bikes.
They were nice enough to leave one as a rem(a)inder of what this warehouse once meant.
Our time here ended abruptly with a call from Nate: Bethlehem Steel was open and he was on his way!