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Nothing Shocking: Abandoned & Derelict Battery Factories

23 Oct

[ By Steve in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

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These former battery factories once lead, er, led the way in electrifying society; now they sit abandoned in environs rife with heavy metal contamination.

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The abandoned Power City Warehouse in Niagara Falls, New York began producing batteries for automobiles and tractors back in 1910. In the early 1940s, work of a classified nature was being conducted there in support of the Manhattan Project – the top-secret initiative charged with creating the atomic bomb. By the 1960s it had been bought by the Prestolite Company, who re-tolled the factory to manufacture hard rubber battery cases and to fill lead-acid batteries with sulfuric acid. The factory was abandoned in the late 1980s.

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The EPA conducted a survey of the site in 2001 that revealed extensive contamination with lead, semi-volatile organic compounds, PCBs, and pesticides in the soil and buildings. Radioactive slag was discovered on the property in early 2012. Flickr user Kevin McBride (Mr Kevino) visited “The Battery Factory”, as it is known colloquially by urbex’ers, in August of 2008 to snap a small selection of photos… hope he wore appropriate clothing like, say a haz-mat suit.

Edison’s Other Bright Idea

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Better buy glass company stock STAT – the former Edison Storage Battery factory in West Orange, NJ is being renovated and re-purposed into Edison Village and roughly 900 windows in the circa-1914 main building are due to be replaced.

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The factory manufactured batteries for submarines, mining lamps, railroad signals and more. The Battery Building, abandoned since 1965, was the only remaining building in Edison’s once-enormous West Orange industrial complex aside from Edison’s old laboratory, now part of the Thomas Edison National Historic Park. One reason for its longevity was the special “Edison Cement” used in its construction – wrecking balls bounced off the outer walls leaving nary a dent.

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Nothing Shocking Abandoned Derelict Battery Factories

[ By Steve in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

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Art Of Power: 12 Visually Shocking Electric Utility Boxes

14 Dec

[ By Steve in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

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Electric utility boxes don’t have to look utilitarian and these creatively painted examples illustrate art’s power to beautify urban neighborhoods.

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What’s in the box? Your guess is as good as Amy Johnquest’s and since she was the artist commissioned to paint this utility box in Easthampton, MA, she oughta know! Situated at 50 Payson Avenue, the artwork approved by the Easthampton City Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council was completed in August of 2015

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Johnquest’s bold interpretation of the utility box’s innards is “suggestive of a circus poster” according to the Photo-ops blog but one must admit, the design is both appealing and timeless. Well, except for the date.

Pleasanton Gets Pleasanter

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In the summer of 2014, the City of Pleasanton’s Community Services Department, Civic Arts Division introduced Project Paint Box. The first phase of the program invited selected local artists to transform 6 traffic utility boxes in and around the downtown area into bonafide works of art. One of the chosen artists, Lisa Hoffman, brings us a rare two-fer: “The Outlet” and “Florescent Bulb”, which can be found just off Telegraph Avenue at 30th Street.

Articulating Culture With Art

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The city of Calgary, Canada “is still trying to articulate without artifice, its natural history, environment and cultural heritage beyond just cowboys and oil wells,” according to Jean of the Cycle Write Blog. One way of accomplishing this noble aim is to enlist local artists to express their vision of the Canadian city’s culture through their art – via city-owned electric utility boxes. Above are both sides of such a box located near the Erlton LRT station.

Municipal Manifestation

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Commissioned by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, artist Mona Caron’s “Manifestation Station” projects a visionary streetscape onto a utility vault at the intersection of Church St. and Duboce Ave. While striking in and of itself, Caron’s artwork works on a number of levels.

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“If you look at this box from a specific point and distance,” the artist explains, “its perspective lines will match the background, providing a glimpse into an alternative reality.” Compounding the illusion, an earlier installation by Caron entitled “Duboce Bikeway Mural” can be seen spreading across the Safeway store’s left front facade.

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Art Of Power 12 Visually Shocking Electric Utility Boxes

[ By Steve in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

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Shocking Aftermath: Nature Reclaims Post-Disaster Fukushima

17 Oct

[ By Steph in Art & Photography & Video. ]

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Looking at photographs of highways entirely eaten by vines and destroyed shops filled with trash and cobwebs, it’s easy to downplay their tragedy by comparing them to the set of a post-apocalyptic film. All of these images of Fukushima, Japan, taken four years after the earthquake and tsunami that caused the local nuclear power plant to melt down, almost seem too shocking to be real. But they are, and photographer Arkadiusz Podniesinski doesn’t want you to forget it. Within the exclusion zone, contaminated by radiation, lies a haunting ghost town with signs of its abrupt abandonment strewn everywhere you look.

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If this all sounds reminiscent of another nuclear disaster, that’s part of the point of Podniesinski’s photo series. The photographer has visited Chernobyl a number of times over the past seven years, documenting its deterioration and subsequent reclamation by nature in the hopes that he could help remind the world that it’s human error that keeps causing these events to occur.

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“It is not earthquakes or tsunami that are to blame for the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, but humans. The report produced by the Japanese parliamentary committee investigating the disaster leaves no doubt about this. The disaster could have been foreseen and prevented. As in the Chernobyl case, it was a human, not technology, that was mainly responsible for the disaster.”

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“I came to Fukushima as a photographer and a filmmaker, trying above all to put together a story using pictures. I was convinced that seeing the effects of the disaster with my own eyes would mean I could assess the effects of the power station failure and understand the scale of the tragedy, especially the tragedy of the evacuated residents, in a better way. This was a way of drawing my own conclusions without being influenced by any media sensation, government propaganda, or nuclear lobbyists who are trying to play down the effects of the disaster, and pass on the information obtained to as wider a public as possible.”

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See dozens more incredible images and read the accompanying story of Podniesinski’s journey through the Fukushima Exclusion Zone on the photographer’s website.

[ By Steph in Art & Photography & Video. ]

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Small Worlds: Strange & Shocking Miniature City Scenes

17 May

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Sculpture & Craft. ]

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There is no unifying theme to these surreal depictions of urban architecture and landscapes, save perhaps their imaginative improbability and singular creator, Frank Kunert, a German photographer and his bemused sense of wonder.

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Each is at once clearly a model yet quite lifelike, lovingly crafted, painted and photographed. Some show impossibilities seemingly for shock value alone, while others contain a subtle message – some commentary on politics, religion, television or other aspects of everyday life.

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The resulting scenes question function, accessibility and the role of architecture, exterior and interior design in shaping both public and private experience.

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It is also worth noting, too, that none of them are post-edited – they are created sans Photoshop and shot with an analog camera. The process and product are closely related, and each creative choice is made carefully by hand.

[ By WebUrbanist in Art & Sculpture & Craft. ]

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