Acme Steel, Chicago Coke Plant
I was eager to get back to the plant after the nightmare wet weather last week. It was bitterly cold but I am well acquainted with that after at least a dozen visits last winter. It feels good to know that I have the place to myself and won’t be disturbed, normal people have families […]
Employee #1, a larry-car operator on top of a coke oven, regularly cleared coal that became stuck in the distribution hoppers above the larry-car. This involved climbing up on top of the larry-car volumetric and “rodding” the upper bin chutes with a long pole until the coal would free. On the day of the accident, […]
It had been a few weeks since I visited the plant, and quite a bit longer since I spent any amount of quality time there. As Saturday rolled around, a blizzard was supposedly in the works as well so I thought it would be a good day to accept the challenge and do it the […]
When I first started retrieving documents from the plant in the autumn of 2020, I would only scan what was worth saving, and then discard. Soon after I began to realize that this was a mistake and I ought to save some of them for posterity. I have a laminator at my disposal and no […]
eBay is a service everyone knows as an online marketplace where people sell new and used goods. This much is true. I have used the site for 20 years in both roles and still look at the site almost everyday. What most people do not understand is that eBay is an excellent way to research […]
Just a couple days after my Thanksgiving feast, I headed down to the plant for my first visit in over a month. This one was mandatory and I had planned it for the better part of a year. In late November 2001, the plant began it’s shutdown under the thought of a feasible but quickly […]
It’s been a long time since I had a serious mission to accomplish at the plant. The past 5-6 visits were brief and mostly just to hang out. Nothing wrong with that, but I have longed for last winter when the sense of urgency was palpable at 6am as I lay in bed on my […]
What you see above is the very first of many hundreds of texts Doug Podgorny and I have exchanged in the past 9 months. I was standing on Baltimore Ave, about to embark for a very chilly ride to the plant. We had just exchanged phone numbers via email the day before and he alluded […]
I look back on when I first started my research, and later began to build this website….if you told me then I’d make a couple friends as a result, I wouldn’t believe you. Former plant instrumentation supervisor and general good guy Steve Buckner sent me the above text out of the blue and I could […]
I spend a lot of time on ebay looking for Acme/Interlake artifacts and I have come across some interesting historical items, a few of which I even purchased. I came across an Acme Steel patch which was clearly used and authentic a while back and before I even considered what to do with it, I […]