I believe this might be my favorite “urbex” experience that wasn’t with my dad. Dad and I had a lot of neat experiences over the years and I’d be hard pressed to pick a favorite among those, but without him, this venture into the Cement Factory was my favorite. This was probably the most dangerous of my explorations, apart from the mineshafts, which are stupid-dangerous. The main danger with this site was that, unlike the pipe company, this place was much smaller, so if anyone else was around the chances of me running into them at a close proximity was much higher. Adding to that, this place was COVERED in graffiti, and was located right off of Van Buren, so it was an extremely high-traffic area, AND was located alongside railroad tracks, so it got a lot of homeless traffic in addition to the gang activity.

Despite the risk, I loved the industrial architecture to this place, as well as all the graffiti that had taken over.

Not much commentary to add; initially, the main reason I had come here was to document as much of the graffiti as I could. there was a long wall which was totally covered in it, which was visible from Van Buren. Once you were actually on the property, all of the industrial equipment and buildings were more visible and caught my attention, but my original purpose had only been to come here to get photos of the long, graffiti-ed wall that served to block some of the sound from the railroad from the buildings that had once been there.

I surmise people had been driving up to the back lot here and dumping trash, since it was obscured from the road, but a lot of this stuff appears to have been taken out from the office buildings, so who knows what was going on here.

This last photo is actually one of my favorite out of all the photos I’ve taken. It looks staged, but you can see in an earlier photo that the porn was laying there while I was crawling around up on the catwalks. Something about the way the color in the porn ties into the color of the graffiti, despite it being just… straight-up urban decay, trash, and indecency, it all ties together in a strangely cohesive form of ugly beauty. I could crop and edit the photo to look better, more artistic, but for some reason I’m fond of a lot of these early “rougher” photos before I had trained my eyes better and started more habitually framing my shots.

A kind of weird “organic” or chaotic quality to my photos is a theme I frequently return to, with many attempts to strike a balance between order and chaos. These early photos are not that in any deliberate sense, they are just me being inexperienced and exploring the world, but something about the chaos of them still appeals to me.

Cameo appearance here involving my first wife, about 8 years before we got married, and I think 3 or 4 before we began dating. In hindsight, while it was good that I didn’t go here alone, it was irresponsible for me to bring someone who likely would have faced a worse outcome than I might have if things had gone south, considering the kinds of folks we could have run into. I had told her my intentions and she accompanied me, thinking it wasn’t safe to go alone. And she wasn’t wrong–it wasn’t safe with or without her company, but with her there if I fell and died at least someone would know about it; if we ran into hostile people we were probably both going to have a bad time of it. In later years, most of my urbex partners were more “prepared for physical conflict” if necessary. In these early years I was very naive about safety and risk.

The tunnel I have two shots of was pitch black without my flash going off. I was terrified but I was compelled to go down that tunnel and see what was at its end.

I am certain that these images cannot convey how frightening it was to go down the length of this tunnel. I would estimate it to be about 100 feet deep, give or take. For a kid who grew up watching every horror movie you can imagine, I have never felt more as if I was the idiot walking right into the den of the serial killer as I did “flashing” my way down the tunnel to get to that hopper at the end.

I think you can tell once I got out of that tunnel I wanted to stay out in the open for a little while. Lots more evidence of dumping taking place on sight, and a friendly stink bug wandering by to say hello.

Bagels, anyone?

I loved the graffiti in here, but my hair was standing on end while we wandered through there. If anyone else had been around it would have been really easy to ambush us in here and nobody ever would have known about it if we went missing. This was super unsafe. Also, more trespassing/b&e, though as I’ve pointed out elsewhere my intentions were never to damage or steal any property.

Fun fact about that second photo from the end–all that dust in the air is only visible because I used a flash. Given the state of that entire building, odds are strong that we (and anyone else who roamed around in there) were probably breathing in old asbestos and other nasty crud. So, dear reader, we can add potential risk of cancer to the many possible dangers of the day and all more supporting reasons why you should not do the things I did/do (or if you do decide to trespass and break into buildings, wear a particulate mask; conceal your identity and avoid inhaling nasty stuff, win-win).

Bonus photo of Boris and Bosco chilling.

This site was demolished about two years after this little adventure.