Nearpara Rubber Company: From Tire Reclaiming to Toxic Brownfield

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The Last Days of Nearpara Rubber I smelled it before I saw anything worth photographing. That warm, faintly sweet bite of old rubber, the kind that hits you somewhere between a tire shop and a summer highway, drifted through the first building the moment I stepped inside. The structure was burned out, charred and broken, rubble underfoot. But the smell was alive. And then I saw the pile. In the corner of the room, faded brown and heaped maybe two feet high, was a mound of baby bottle nipples. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of the small rubber tips, just sitting on the floor of a collapsed industrial building in Trenton, New Jersey. I stood there for a moment, genuinely confused, and then kept moving. Nothing like the smell of warmed-over rubber. Twenty minutes later, I understood even less. Through another door passage, I found the main source of the smell: six open metal trailer containers, still loaded with bagged baby bottle nipples, sitting in open air. Bags of them, mountains of bagged n...
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Archives #5: Best Graffiti Piece of 2017

Street Art by Philly native Septic The Outlaw





I believe this to be one of the best graffiti works I have ever come across in my explorations during the last year. It even beats out the Brooklyn skull mural that I found to be widely creative and a great use of an abandoned space. The intricate, detailed eyes and wrinkles. The use of the full length of drywall really captured my attention once I entered this warehouse in Pennsylvania.

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