Acme Steel, Chicago Coke PlantI can usually be found at the plant on Saturday mornings. After my visits, I always share the details including photos, scans, video and a detailed list of the new documents to be added to the Document Archive.
I guess things have really gone off the rails when you have to make a ‘to do’ list in outline format before you visit the coke plant. But on my 12th visit, that is exactly what I did. It starts innocently enough – you think about all the fun activities that await you the following […]
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 […]
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 […]
That video is taken at the end of ‘the snake’: the path that leads from the gate house west, leaving you at a dead end. I had been looking at the satellite view trying to construct a way to get to the coal bunker without fully doubling back to the gate house and this was […]
Just a week after the fourth of July extravaganza I could not resist heading right back down. The summer months are a great time to cycle Hegewisch and there is almost never a bad time to stop by Acme and reflect.