The kind of thing I can get into on a Sunday morning...
On one of the routes I take to get home from Tabby's Place, there was the skeleton of a large building. It was pretty clear that the business that occupied it had gone away some time ago. I dug around to try to find out what happened, but all I needed the search for was the details. The story is the same all over: there was a company, and like many other businesses, it was located next to a large body of water. Back then, the water served as a method of transportation, and not incidentally as a receptacle for the company's waste products.
This was a specialty paper company, and it produced lots of waste, much of it toxic. When I began to drive by it in the mid-2010's, it had already been designated as a Superfund site. Cleanup took years, complicated by the fact that the owners had declared bankruptcy and were no longer around.
Sound familiar? Everyplace I've lived has had the big local company where you went to work after leaving school (whether with a diploma or not). Where I lived in the 1960's and early 1970's, the big local company was being bought out by a bigger national company and starting to lay off employees.
Where I lived in the late 1970's and early 1980's, the bigger national company was coming to the conclusion that they were not making enough money in the location they had bought. Maybe they got the union to make concessions. Maybe they even reduced their own salaries. (I said *maybe*.)
The work was outsourced to another part of the country, or another part of the continent, or even another part of the world, and the local place went silent. Maybe not right away, maybe it changed hands a time or two, but inevitably the workers went home and couldn't come back, and the buildings remained empty for years. Time did to them what time does to everything. If there was toxic waste in addition to deteriorating structures, it took longer to settle the estate.
In the case of the site I passed every week or so, the last of the landmark see-it-from-anywhere structures went down in late 2019.
No more walls with faded lettering just off the road to my left, only great piles of debris behind chain-link fencing. Then came 2020, and you know what kept me away during that year. Finally, I drove by last week, and there was nothing in sight except an open, mostly grass-free area. The news sources said that there were plans to build new, modern businesses, a medical facility and maybe some housing as well.
On the blog where I learned the specific details of the story I already knew, there were quite a few comments from people who had been there. Everybody knew someone who had worked there, often one or more family members. Their father had worked there his entire working life and made a good living, and naturally the son believed it would keep on going just that way, except that time ran out and he was 60 years old and his former employer was offering to set him up with a contractor who would help him with his resume.
Modern Ruins has galleries of its namesake, and I learned about some area examples at Antiquity Echoes. There were other sites; if I'd had the time, they had the ruins.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
couldn't fit this in above: everywhere I've lived had this story, too. In the 50's, there was the big downtown department store where you could shop for your needs and wants, and maybe help yourself to a local specialty, like a good slice of strawberry pie. In the 60's, the downtown faded as suburban malls grew, and by the 70's downtown was barely alive. Of course, they tried to keep hope and business alive, and in some cities their attempts were a little more successful than others, but in my experience, Tiedtke's and the Lion Store and Lasalle's went under, and Hess's and Leh's and Zollinger-Harned went under. It was the same all over, for Hudson's and Lazarus and Marshall Field's, and so it went.
No comments:
Post a Comment