Abandoned America: Faded factories across the USA

Chemung was torn down and rebuilt three times, and the structures were eventually abandoned in 1939, and the 20 men remaining at work there lost their jobs. By the 1950s the nearby town of Masonic was abandoned also, leaving Chemung to fade quietly into the dust.

Currently, Chemung is supposedly haunted by a poltergeist that makes trouble on Saturdays, although during my visit the only thing haunting the site was a herd of free-range cattle who surrounded the area where we had parked. The buildings have nearly collapsed, and any winter could be the one that reduces what is left to a twisted pile of boards.

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette has remained one of Pittsburgh's leading news sources since its foundation in 1786 as the Pittsburgh Gazette. After a merger with the Sunday Press, the Post Gazette moved into their offices on Grant Street in downtown Pittsburgh in 1962.

The offices had been built in 1927 and featured presses that spanned three floors. They relocated in 2015, leaving this building closed awaiting redevelopment.

The former Pittsburgh Post-Gazette building remained untouched for over a year until the end of 2016 when work started to gut the building for reuse. I was able to visit it shortly before the work began - the staff of the newspaper recognized the historic significance of the site and have done the best they can to document it before it is lost.

The Carrie Furnaces are one of the last remaining vestiges of U.S. Steel’s sprawling Homestead Works facility in Pittsburgh. They were abandoned in 1978 when the plant closed.

Carrie found a new lease on life under the stewardship of the Rivers of Steel group and is now a federally designated National Heritage Area. Visitors to the site can marvel at the sheer scale of the blast furnaces firsthand.

One of the most well-known fixtures at the furnaces is the Carrie Deer, a 40-foot sculpture built out of onsite materials by a group of artists in the Industrial Arts Co-op who snuck onto the site in 1997. The Carrie Deer is now a proud part of the site’s legacy.

Within the past year work was carried out to shorten the smokestack for safety reasons. Doing so shows the commitment Rivers of Steel has to ensuring that the site will be around for years to come.

The Fisher Body Plant 21 in Detroit was built in 1919 and designed by architect Albert Kahn. In 1919 General Motors bought a 60% stake in the Fisher Body Corporation, and the “Body by Fisher” plate became a well-known indicator of the origin of cars produced there.

GM closed the facility in 1984, transferring production to other facilities. The Fisher Body Plant 21 remains abandoned to this day, deteriorating rapidly.

Even 30 years later, however, graffiti-covered remnants of the production line remain, a relic of Detroit’s auto-making heritage.

When it opened in 1903, Packard's plant in Detroit was the most advanced auto factory in the world. Designed by renowned architect Albert Kahn, the plant was located on a staggering 35 acres of land and boasted over 3.5 million square feet of space. It also was the first industrial site in Detroit to use reinforced concrete in its construction. The Packard Motor Car Company built an excellent reputation not only for innovation (introducing the modern steering wheel and 12-cylinder engine) but for luxury, attracting some of the wealthiest auto buyers across the world.

Packard’s legacy as a status symbol was slowly diluted by their introduction of cars aimed more at the middle class. Losing their upper-class market and not finding footing as a middle-class manufacturer because of heavy competition from the Big Three, their last car model, simply titled the "Packard," was produced in 1958 though the Detroit plant ceased manufacturing in 1957. Several attempts were made to resurrect the brand, but to no avail.

Recently the Packard Plant was purchased by Arte Express, who is currently in the process of converting the buildings into a mixed-use commercial space that will revitalize the area. While the ambitious project has had many skeptics, their progress has been a welcome surprise and offers an exciting opportunity for preservation of the historic complex.

The history of Vulture City, the most significant ghost town in Arizona, reads like a dime store Western novel, full of Apache raids and stagecoach robberies. Attempting to find any concrete truth buried in a never-ending stream of conflicting and inaccurate accounts feels a little like panning for flecks of gold in a nearly barren claim.

The surviving structures there were not built to last as long as they have, and, much like the city’s past, they are disappearing beneath desert’s shifting sands.

The Vulture Mine, which necessitated the surrounding town, is the most profitable mine in Arizona’s history, having produced an estimated 340,000 ounces of gold and 240,000 ounces of silver. During its operations from 1863 to 1942 it has been said the mine generated anywhere from $30 million to $200 million (like many things related to it, there are nearly as many differing accounts as there are sources) and is directly responsible for the foundation of the nearby cities of Wickenburg and Phoenix.

Henry Wickenburg, the man who discovered the mine, ultimately wound up destitute and ended his own life. The town and mine are reminders of a different era, one that shaped the state as we know it today but did so at the cost of many lives.

Once the second biggest steel manufacturer in the United States, Bethlehem Steel was one of the world's largest shipbuilders, provider of the steel that fueled the skyscraper boom, and a proud icon of American industrial might.

This was their flagship plant, with furnaces dating as far back as 1861. Bethlehem Steel was driven to bankruptcy in 2001 when shifts in construction methods made their high-grade steel obsolete. It remained abandoned until purchased by a casino in 2007.

While the property looks quite different today, the iconic steel stacks still remain and visitors can walk along the Hoover-Mason Trestle, an elevated walkway that gives them a view down into one of Bethlehem Steel’s most fascinating relics: the gas blowing room that generated the plant’s electricity and fueled the furnaces.

This children’s clothing factory was a perfect time capsule when I first visited it, fabric still threaded in the machines as it had been the day it was left.

Over the years the owner scrapped the machinery and the factory increasingly became a target of theft and vandalism, which is why its location remains undisclosed.

The region it inhabits never fully recovered from the loss; the factory still stands, and no current plan for reuse exists, but its condition is markedly worse. Little is left inside to indicate what a fascinating glimpse into the area’s past the building once offered.

Pemco International Corporation's 20-acre glass and porcelain plant was built in Baltimore in 1911 as part of a family business that eventually became a profitable multinational corporation. Its founder is considered the father of the porcelain enameling industry, inventing a process that converted porcelain to a wet form that could coat iron. Their products were used in kitchen and other household appliances, barbecue grills and floor tiles, and their roofing tiles gave Howard Johnson hotels their distinctive orange color.

The flagship Pemco plant had a long history of environmental violations, dumping frit (waste porcelain and glass) into a ravine on the property where heavy metals such as lead and arsenic then seeped into the soil and groundwater. When the plant was abandoned in 2006 to move south towards the company's industrial customer base now in Mexico, the CEO pledged that the site would be redeveloped rather than sitting vacant.