Digital Ink'd

Some locations earn their reputation before you ever set foot near them. This one came with a viral video, a Weird NJ feature, and a State Trooper parked directly across the street with nothing better to do. The wind tunnel building had been on my list long enough that the anticipation had curdled into serious obsession, and my first two attempts did nothing to help. The debut was a non-starter before I even reached the building — the road was cordoned off for repairs halfway down, and with local law requiring enforcement nearby for that kind of work, I turned around and went somewhere easier. The second visit was worse in its own way. I pulled up to find a State Trooper sitting in an unmarked car with a clear sightline to both the building and the road. I spent a few minutes convincing myself he was there for speeders — this stretch apparently draws racing traffic — but I wasn't convinced enough to walk past him. I left again. The third time, I didn't park anywhe...

Mattatuck Mfg Co Screw Products Advertisement If you stand at the corner of Southmayd Road and East Main Street in Waterbury today, you will not hear the clatter of heavy machinery. You will not hear the sharp blast of a factory whistle cutting through the afternoon air. Instead, you will see a senior center, an outpatient hospital annex, and a funeral home. It is a quiet corner of the city, dedicated to rest, healing, and memory. Yet beneath the clean pavement and tidy lawns lies the ghost of an industrial giant. For more than a century, this ground belonged to the Mattatuck Manufacturing Company, known simply to generations of locals as Mattaco. Two Mills and Seven Houses The story began on October 15, 1896, when the company was organized with Henry L. Wade as president, George E. Judd as treasurer, and George Tucker as secretary, on a capital of $225,000. That was a massive sum for the era. It raised two imposing four-story mill buildings, each measuring 150 by 44 feet...

I was taking a walk down my residential street recently when a flash of weathered iron caught my eye. Poking up above a neighbor's inner backyard was a tall, rusted metal ladder. It stood upright, narrow and tall, reaching straight toward the sky. I stopped in my tracks to look at it. To anyone else passing by, it probably looked like a piece of industrial scrap left behind by a careless contractor. But I recognized it immediately. Growing up, we had the same rusted tower planted in our backyard. It stood two feet away from the exterior wall of the house like an unmovable monument. Through decades of changing seasons and vicious winds, it never leaned an inch. My parents never made any attempt to dismantle it or repaint it, even as thick flakes of orange rust gathered along its frame. Back then, whenever I looked out from our second-floor window, I would scan the neighboring lots. None of the other yards on our street had one. Down the enti...

The Box Man's Legacy: How H. J. Mills Went from Match Boxes to a Parking Lot There is a community parking lot in downtown Bristol, Connecticut, that does not look like much. Cars pull in, cars pull out. The lot sits in the middle of the business district, unremarkable by any measure, crossed underneath by a culverted stream called Ivy Brook that runs east to west beneath the pavement. For twenty-three years before the asphalt went down, this ground held a burned ruin, then a vacant lot, then weeds so thick and deep that homeless people took shelter in them. Before any of that, for 120 years, it held a factory. The man who built that factory also ran a newspaper, served in the state legislature, belonged to the Masons, the Knights of Pythias, the Bristol Lodge of Elks, and the Hartford Gun Club, and died in 1933, leaving behind a house that still stands on Summer Street. His name was Herbert J. Mills. His company made cardboard boxes. And al...

Photo courtesy of NYC Municipal Services / 1940s.nyc From Mack Trucks to Apartments: A Century on Empire Boulevard For most of the twentieth century, the block at 73-99 Empire Boulevard in Crown Heights handled the heavy work of the city. Trucks came in for service. Tires were swapped out. Parts were stocked and sold. The buildings on this stretch of Brooklyn were built for vehicles, and for about sixty years, that's exactly what they served. The site directly neighbors the much taller Ebbets Field Apartment complex, which is the housing that replaced the ballpark. By 2025, both were rubble. By September 2026, the foundation of a 13-story apartment building was going in. A hundred years of industrial and automotive history on a single block, cleared in a matter of months. The main building at 73-99 Empire Boulevard went up in 1925 and opened as a Mack Truck auto service facility. At 29,000 square feet, it was built for the scale of commerc...