Acme Steel, Chicago Coke Plant
I have found three large tools at the plant in the past month or so. I took them home to clean them up and give them a new life. There is something magical about giving these abandoned tools a new, safe home where they can live out their days. When I hold them in my […]
I’ve lost track of how many consecutive weeks I have risen early on a Saturday to make it down to the plant for more research. I was out the door by around 9am and was at the plant about 90 minutes later. It was a wet night and morning and roads were foul so I […]
Another Saturday with a singular plan – back to Acme I shall go. Had a couple loose missions in mind but felt a bit aimless – in the best way possible. The weather was in the balmy mid-30s range, I took advantage with an extended jaunt up Ave. O all the way to 100th before […]
Every time I visit Acme, I end up having a a few missions I know I want to complete on my next visit. But it is self-propagating, once I return new missions reveal themselves. I suppose eventually I will run out of things to do. That’s OK, when that time comes I will just pack […]
The best way to take advantage of a ruined holiday is to spend it doing something that you enjoy. I think that most people don’t have something they enjoy enough to just sit and do it for hours, with no other stimulation and only yourself as company. I slept poorly, drank too much and my […]
A few weeks ago when I first entered the coal bunker, amongst the load of paperwork I hauled away I found a videotape. Stupidly, I left it behind. When I got home, I realized I had a folder full of info pertaining to said videotape. You can read all of it over at the document […]
Digging through hundreds of pages of documentation I have pulled from the plant, I pretty quickly learned the names of some of the managers in the late 90s. One that came up again and again was Doug. After some sleuthing, I was able to contact him via email and ask him some of the nearly […]
The Friday night you see me not having a beer is rare, and it means I must have something very important to do Saturday morning. The week went by so slow waiting for my chance to go back and clean out as many documents as I could carry. I went to bed at 10pm just […]
I had another mission for this trip. I wanted to climb up and dislodge some coke from an oven, break it up and get it into a jar to display in my bedroom. This was a bit harder to accomplish than I figured but I got it done. More exciting than that was finally climbing […]
After spending almost three months in Georgia for work, I laid in bed many times and thought about the peace that awaited me back at Acme. Finally, I was home and had the time to head down. So much was revealed to me, as fall had stripped the foilage away from the property. New things […]