Into the basement

Every time I visit Acme, I end up having a a few missions I know I want to complete on my next visit. But it is self-propagating, once I return new missions reveal themselves. I suppose eventually I will run out of things to do. That’s OK, when that time comes I will just pack a lunch and sit in the larry car port and stare out into the abyss.

My missions for this visit were:

1. Get back into the 2nd floor of the main office and scoop up more BP paperwork. I also wanted to use the GoPro to document the walk up the plank.
2. Return to the basement beneath battery #1 and see how far I could go. I know I can get at least to the coal bunker, and possibly into the basement beneath battery #2.

Normally when I embark from 134th and Baltimore I head over to Avenue O and take that north to 106th. I cross the Calumet and then head south on Torrence. It was this route exactly that first introduced me to Acme. But since the weather has been poor, I just take Carondolet north to 127th, then come up Torrence from the south. This is about 3 miles instead of almost 6. I haven’t done the longer Avenue O route in a couple months probably, but for some reason today my brain decided it was the thing to do. I realized what I was doing pretty quickly but decided to stick with it. The roads were fairly clean and it was in the mid 30s. First ride of 2021 and it was a good one.

This was the first time I had entered the plant through the gate house in a while. I have been using the break in the fence near the quench station for months. Felt good to do it properly – only an animal comes in the back door! Enter like a civilized person and show some respect to the plant.

But this created a bit of a dilemma as checking out the battery basement was by far the more important of my two missions and it seemed silly NOT to head into the main office when it was right in front of me. So I decided to just go get that done first.

I scooped up a nice load of paperwork, the room in the SE corner seems to have the nicest stash. I hung out for a while and was kind of relaxing when I saw some people walking around through the back door (facing south). I didn’t really think, I just figured I should introduce myself right away. So I stood there for a minute because I had a feeling they would notice me first and they did. I waved and after a short hesitation one of them waved back. I called out and said hello and hollered out to ‘be safe’. At this point I figured I should head over to the battery. They were headed toward the ovens as well and I did not want to be disturbed when I was down there.

As I walked my bike down the main path parallel to Torrence, I saw them hanging out in one of the small buildings on the way. I didn’t think they noticed me and I decided I shouldn’t be obtrusive so I let them be. I decided since they were an unknown I better lock up my bike so after some searching I found a tree thin enough to get my U-lock around and then I headed into the basement.

I came prepared this time. Last time I had a small LED Maglite but the batteries were a bit low and the light was dim. This time I brought a different LED flashlight which is even brighter plus a larger old school flashlight that runs on D batteries. Not knowing how long I’d be down there, I even brought spare batteries for both. I think some of the rubble near the door way had cascaded down because I don’t remember so many bricks inside the door. I got myself down there and got to work, headed due south, toward the coal bunker.

My goal was to make it to the end of the battery at the very least. I did without incident – but as seen in the featured image at the top of this post, the doorway to the coal bunker was totally clogged with chunks of coal/coke and bricks. Like the rubble which is now battery #2, I have to wonder if this is a natural occurrence or something done on purpose when the plant closed to keep idiots like me from wandering around where they shouldn’t. I was a bit disappointed as this meant my investigations were finished with not much left to do. But as I said at the beginning of this post, new missions are spawned when one is completed. There are a couple holes in the floor of the coal bunker (ground floor) and as scary as it seems, I am not so bothered about trying to get down there now after experiencing the battery basement. So look for that soon.

I was headed back to the exit when I noticed in the NE corner a doorway! I had to climb over a giant pipe to get to it – I used a ball valve handle as a hand hold and it disintegrated in my palm. I made it over and realized there was a massive tunnel running the length of the battery (on the east side). It’s funny how you can become immune to your own fear and quickly adapt to a bizarre environment. I didn’t really hesitate to go right ahead and walk down to see what I could find. At the end was a large fan, some previous explorers had pried back the rusty grill so crazy through. The ground was muddy but there was no way I could resist seeing what lay ahead. Unfortunately, again my path was stymied by some kind of collapse. So I turned back to get out of there.

On the way back I found a huge pipe wrench, with a heavy jacket of rust laying in the sandy earth. Without hesitation I grabbed it and my mind raced thinking of how to restore it. Not more than a few steps later I found a giant open ended wrench. I decided I couldn’t take both so I stashed the pipe wrench for a future visit and carried my rusty spanner back out to the grey Chicago skies!

I’m very excited about restoring this wrench and I have a number of ideas which I will start on tomorrow. I will be sure to document my progress. I hope to mount it on the wall of my office at work. A testament to the history of hard work at this historic place and my own personal spiritual haven.

I brought the wrench back to where my bike was locked up and decided to peek in on the explorers I had seen earlier. There were still in the building I had seen them in 30 minutes ago. What were they doing? Carefully, I approached so as not to startle them or seem like some kind of threat. Turned out that it was two friends, one spray painting a huge tag on the wall and his friend documenting with a large camera. We got along quickly and discussed what brought us here and our own personal histories at the plant. For me, to say that my studies at Acme are solitary is an understatement. So it was odd for me to chat with others and likely I came off as a crazed maniac who talked to much, too loud and too fast. But my new mates were quite tolerant and for that I thank them.

They admitted that my introduction from up high above them came across as confrontational, they thought I was a security guard or the property owner! I gave them a brief history of the plant and coke making and realized my own excitement had me talking a mile a minute and that 99.9% of people couldn’t care less. Nor could I blame them. Conversation shifted to what we had explored/not explored and they said they had not made it up to the larry car port. I offered to show them the way and we all got up there and enjoyed the view. My guy FALS pointed out piece after piece and the artists he was familiar with or knew personally. Very, very cool!

We climbed down and they had to head out. We said our farewells and the solitary adventures I know so well fell upon me like a cloud of ether lowering to shoulder level. I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I wandered.

I came up around the back side of the coal handling office/locker rooms and admired the neglected heaps of coal that I never noticed before. I came into the locker room through the south door, which I haven’t done in months. I slunk through the rubbish and came back to the office in the NE corner. I was aware of it and I think I did enter months ago. But there was another office through a door way that I never looked at before! I found a nice trove of documents in both office to the heavy load in my messenger bag. It was good to finally find some coal handling documents, that department has been desperately underrepresented on this site.

I stopped back around the old powerhouse, west of the main office. I knew I had seen some more videotapes there and I wanted to grab them. With snow on the ground it wasn’t so easy but I finally located two of them. These would be VHS tapes #5 and 6. For the scorekeepers out there, I struck gold on one (venturi port inspection), and an honorable mention on the Actin Inc video I found in the same area. One other was interesting but not Acme related, and the last was clearly a bootleg of a crappy 90s flick.

These were in rough shape to put it lightly. Both had certainly been stomped on by travelers and one was PACKED with dirt – both of them had the tape broken.

When I got them home, I immediately removed the spools and discarded the cracked housings. I cleaned up the spools with my hands and a vaccum cleaner. I put the extracted guts into a clean spare cassette and crossed my fingers.

I must admit there is a thrill to perform surgery on a a found videotape and even get it to work at all. But the disappointment I felt when I saw what they held was tempered by how absurdly poor said contents were.

Still, it begs questions. Did an Acme employee have a fetish for ‘blockbuster’ bootlegs? Or did some other denizen deposit them? And bootlegs these are, believe me. Shaky camera, poor audio – the works. Most interesting is that the latter film was released in 2001 which puts it as the cusp of the plant closure.

And what of the documents rescued on a January afternoon?

• Phone directories (4) found in coal handling office
• Memo (1)
• 1994 profit plan (covers coke and furnace plant)
• US Dept of Labor citations (2) for incidents at furnace plant
• Diesel fuel tank measurement chart
• 1998 operating highlights
• Lab data (analysis of by products and incoming coal)
• Paper: “Use of petroleum coke in cokemaking and its evaluation through coke petrography” by Dr. Charles Lin and Jack Garzetta, includes add’l two pages of slide descriptions (from overhead projector?). 
• Paper: credited to ‘reserve technology LTD’, dated 10/11/90.  Analysis of coke oven wall movement (resources page)
• Schedules: for coal handling department (7)
• Equipment service list
• Coal handling daily maintenance checklist
• “Morning report” / daily operations reports
• Blank fax cover sheet from lab
• EPA operating permit for NESHAP (National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants) source (specifically, the BP plant and ovens), 1994
• Accident report from Riverdale plant
• Internal NESHAP compliance report, 1994
• Bill of ladings (4) for shipping foundry coke to four different foundries (in ohio and PA)

Of special interest is the paper for the Steelmaking conference mentioned above. I have a paper credited to ‘C. Lin’ already on the site and now I know this is Dr. Charles Lin. It was excellent to find the programs from the conference along with the paper. I found numerous copies, one of which has a plastic spiral binding, and will be kept in my personal archives. Interesting that the preliminary program does not credit Jack Garzella as co-presenter but the final version does.

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I took a slow creep back south toward the ovens and finally grabbed my bike to head out. I walked it patiently toward the quench station, and the ruined gap in the fence but all the while, mentally, I was like a misbehaving child. I knew there was nothing left to do for the day…I was cold, tired, hungry. But the child cried out, he didn’t want to leave. I took a deep breath and got back into Torrence Avenue and headed back to Hegewisch. There are more missions, and more days to accomplish them.