Author: Concrete

This author has written 232 articles

Keep It Simple

Needless to say, after that kind of success in a place like Terrence, it didn't take me long to come back. Christmas must have come early this year, letting me into a building I'd wanted for so many years, and without any chance of getting caught. Even the ceiling fans have given up... The graffiti in here isn't great, but at least they try to be clever. Every level has its own color. Almost as if different psychiatric conditions might benefit from being surrounded by one particular shade for months at a time. Notably absent: institutional green. ...maybe just because…

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White Whale

And just like that, it happened. I'd heard mumblings that there was a way in for a few weeks, but I didn't entirely believe anyone that told me, and besides, it was probably some climb that would leave me re-enacting the plight of the beached manatee, only this time in broad daylight and fully sober. I'd had a few close calls with this building already -- in 2011, with an unloaded camera; in 2013, at night, twice; earlier this year, not quite able to get in the hole in the window as I thrashed away at it helplessly. This time…

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Out Of The Loop

Imagine a world after cars, after trucks, after petroleum. Imagine walking through the snow, following the track of a guardrail along the ghost of what was once a highway, and now carries only the prints of a few snowshoes. This could be all of us someday. For now, it's just one little piece of the Inner Loop, but it's still a sign of progress. With an intermediate stage as some sort of accidental park, the former freeway will soon be a city street, filling in the moat that separates downtown from the rest of Rochester. Obviously I wasn't the first…

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Because It’s There

I've always had a bit of an attachment to Pinnacle Hill. It's not much of a mountain... just enough to notice you're getting up there, before the top appears. Then another 300 feet if you feel like climbing a TV tower. Which I've only done once, back in freshman year. But between that climb, and the mushroom summer last year, not to mention the inkling I had ever since 2007 that I'd live within sight of the blinking towers when I could; it's a place to go when I feel like I'm fucking everything up and I just want to…

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Oompa-Loompa Doopadee-Doo

Apologies for the title -- but you deserve just as much of a constant torment coursing through your head in an impossibly lilting and plodding e minor as we were both stuck with as we wandered around an abandoned chocolate factory. At one time Nestlé, then based in Fulton, NY, manufactured about 40% of the chocolate eaten in the US, including even franchised production for Cadbury and Hershey's, in this one enormous factory. Open from 1899-2003, it briefly played the role of Oswego County's largest employer, after the Miller brewery closed, but like so many other American factories, foreign production…

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Fallen Champion

Deferiet is everything you might expect a company town to be, when the company leaves. From the potholed entrance road off the highway, to the complete lack of businesses on the village's three streets (which wrap around one side of the mill), this is clearly no boom town. Even the bank, the post office and the fire department closed, all of them maintained by the Champion Paper Company of St Regis, just like the enormous industrial hulk that is still the focal point of Deferiet, even in its inglorious death. The houses aren't all empty, at least -- the town…

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