Old Fairfield

[tangly!]

I'm not entirely sure how many people know this about me, but I'm really into big, tangled masses of pipes, mechanical parts, and other sorts of crazy bits of metal. Yeah, that sounds weird, I know, but being in close proximity to large, powerful looking machinery with lots of exposed parts is something that I have, for most of my life, found really thrilling, even if I have no idea what the thing does (like the subject of the above picture) or how it works (like a car motor, a bicycle's gear-shifting apparatus, or my own liver). Maybe it's got something to do with growing up in Pittsburgh, where the old mills along the Mon sit and rust temptingly by the river on the way to Kennywood. Or maybe it's some innate male attraction to tinkering, the same place where Rube Goldberg devices come from: somewhere full of business and technicality but bereft of the reasoning or expertise that makes it real. 

Anyway, a few days ago, while working on a story, a local real estate attorney mentioned to me something about Fairfield, a port district in the oft-forgotten peninsula of industrial South Baltimore that sticks out into the Chesapeake, prickly with loading docks, sout of the Middle Branch, and Old Fairfield, a former residential area nearby. "Fairfield is one of my favorite places ever," he told me. "It's just pure heavy industry."

Really? I thought. Last time I was there it was just one parking lot filled with recently-offloaded cars after another, with some overgrown weedy lots in between. For me, I thought, it ranks somewhere between a courtyard in front of a municipal building and a public restroom on my list of favorite places. 

But then I was back there the other day working on a related story, this time in that soft light of the afternoon, and I actually stopped and looked at all the goddamn tangled masses of pipes and other things, and I ended up wasting a whole lot of time taking pictures, which are totally industrial-artsy-chic. And if you can't see the beauty in these, then you, sir, have no soul. 

[containment]

This are shipping containers, those ridged tin cans that are ubiquitous to any port city, and which Scuppies like to turn into elitist houses. These ones looked particularly depraved to me. 

[brewin' health tonicks]

This is a chemical manufacturing facility of some sort, belonging maybe to Condea Vista or Conoco Phillips or some such company, but all I know about it, really, is that they brew medicines in there, or at least the chemical compounds that become medicines the same way whiskey is distilled (now THAT caught my ear): on a large scale, at high heat, with lots of pressure. Sweeeeeet. 

[sniff sniff sniff]

The above monstrosity of a piece of equipment struck me because of how animal-like it seemed. Like it's scratching around for grubs to eat. Or something. 

[pwn3d.]

And then, oh glory of glories, the car-chewing machine. There were thousands of cars piled up at the Fairfield Scrap Yard, in huge, heaping, triumphant piles. Because they were compressed so thin, they all looked like 1960s Cadillacs, no matter what type of horrid wood-panelled wagons they were to begin with. It was like huge piles of Americana!

[the mighty chewer itself]

[crunch'd]

And this peekchurr I like because it reminds me of a Richard Estes painting I used to have hanging in my room in high school, after I became enamored of that guy's work in senior AP art history class and a field trip to the Met. 

[beauty.]

And then, just in time for Halloween, I found this creepy-ass church, which once provided a place of worship for the hideous vampires of Old Fairfield:

[brrrrr]