Chicago bestows the photographer's lens with wildly variegated archetypes. For the patient, it grants vignettes of ornate splendor, sleek modernism, industrial potency, and—exceptionally—juxtapositions spanning multiple architectural schools and genres. On measuredly founded microcosms of stone, brick, steel, and glass, its footing is eminently pragmatic. Yet, Chicago's myriad parcels comprise a faintly orchestrated, emergent macrocosm. Myriad components bathe in complex forms of shadow, interspersed with ever-changing shafts of luminescence.
Chicago's manmade coppice—ever yielding to the avid exhortations of architects, capitalists, and philanthropists alike—evolves. With each new pile, its skyline's effervescent, dynamic topography imperceptibly metamorphoses. Whether the latest erection be mere chaparral, or canopy soaring with the architect's ambitions, evolution brings concomitant alterations to the solar light cone. These unremittingly recast, happenstance patterns of light and shadow are Chicago's very essence—for they alone educe its visage. Through a cavalcade of visionaries, the ecosystem is nourished in succession by street address. Accordingly, the crop of sunbeams on which our emulsions gorge are coaxed from their repose, forever altering what we may commemorate via the lens.
Unabashed capital of the steel bascule bridge, erstwhile butcher of America, enmeshed in a filigree of steel rails, scored by the branches of its namesake river, ornamented with magnificent structures, and stippled with historic reminders of past floods and fires, Chicago is verily a metropolis of the world. Its oversight in the average American's trichotomy of "East Coast", "West Coast", and "everything else" ranks among our greatest cultural misdeeds.
As Henry Ford once said,
Life, as I see it, is not a location, but a journey. Even the man who feels himself most 'settled' is not settled—he is probably sagging back. Everything is in flux, and was meant to be. Life flows. We may live at the same number of the street, but it is never the same man who lives there.
As it is with humanity, so it is (perhaps doubly so) with cities. The Chicago we adore is far removed from the Chicago of 1900. Railroad consolidation, the advent of trucking, and suburbanization have irrefutably drained Chicago of industrial vigor with nearly the deftness that her slaughterhouses once exsanguinated hogs. The plodding evisceration of her butchering industry through industrial disintermediation stands as an exemplar. While the trucking industry radically upended businesses and supply chains globally, its effects were perhaps nowhere else as profound. The fluctuating relative competitiveness of trucking versus rail waggled the economy and ultimately transformed Chicagoland.
Vast relics of now-surplus railroad yards were gifted to the salvager. Neighborhoods sundered by miles of elevated railway embankment now witness their reed-like concrete invaders loiter, imperceptibly reverting to verdant thickets suited to little other than miscreance. Languidly shorn by wind, rain, and ice, concrete tumbles, leaving fractals in its wake. Neglected by the absent painter's brush, iron oxidizes. In an ironic twist of fate, these decrepit, neighborhood-cleaving invaders are themselves cleaved by the cutter's torch. Strikingly, the very scions of the railroads' former potency, vestigial bascule and lift bridges, poise—severed from their bygone arteries—, forlornly awaiting Godot (now wouldn't that be a fitting moniker for a steel scrapper?).
At their nadir—circa the mid-1970s—many railroads found their Chicago infrastructure teetering on deliquescence. To the student of business cycles, it was all very logical. The great super-cycle in railroads had been precipitated by ebullient over-investment stretching back over a century. Under fierce competition, many railroads hazarded to build their own downtown passenger terminal. Nothing espoused industrial vigor like one's name emblazoned upon an imposing edifice fixed on prime real estate. Return on capital be damned: this was a game of ego. Entire fleets of coaches shuttled passengers and their baggage across town to connecting trains. The utter hubris of inconveniencing their riders was lost on all but the passengers themselves.
Naturally, though, success begets exuberance begets overextension begets collapse. The implications of surfeit infrastructure came home to roost after many decades of faltering decay. Today, passengers exhibit their rancor at O'Hare, rather than in a stagecoach ride across the loop (and as the only constant is change itself, I'm sure the next great mode of transport shall similarly disembowel O'Hare). Merchandise flows that once were plaque on the city's rail arteries now skirt the city via exurban belt railways, making waypoints at sprawling facilities, such as Union Pacific's Global III in Rochelle. And, thus, we find ourselves in the city of the butcher-cum-futures trader.
Yet, undoubtedly, it was trucking that swung a barbed dagger at the heart of Chicago's transportation empire. The railroads enervated each other, unknowingly granting entrée to the truckers for the final act's disembowelment. Economics is a fickle companion, though. The interminable bustle of the bean-counter, pursuing efficiencies with robotic insouciance toward workers, grew weary of diminishing returns from railroad-gutting. Soon, the accountants faltered, then lurched at the truckers. As the pendulum doubled back, Chicagoland birthed rail yards specializing in "transloading" trailers and shipping containers. The intermodal industry flourished, albeit as a far-flung empire situated on expansive, economical, generally exurban plots.
It is an irony of economics that concentration begets more concentration, as supply and demand chase each other 'round the vortex. Thus, Chicago grew. However, this vicious, reflexive cycle works equally well in reverse. As railroads and industry jostled to lead each other out of the city, they invariably left behind wastelands befitting criminals (and the occasional Superfund contractor). As manufacturers and railroads absconded from the scene of their economic depredation, property prices plummeted, accelerating the race for the exits. Jobs, careers, and dreams vanish on the wind alongside the sounds and smells of grimy modernity. In their wake, decaying factories and rail yards stand guard over neighborhoods in search of purpose.
Factories are highly specialized spaces. Lacking fungibility, seldom are they reimagined. Salvagers and thieves only plunder the high-value items: motors, copper, stainless steel, etc. In the lingering twisted carnage, it's hard to recognize where the machinery ends and the building's exoskeleton begins. I challenge you to spend a few hours perusing an urban exploration website (I cannot recommend substreet highly enough; I quite literally cherish every moment I've spent reading his articles and gazing upon his photographs), then produce economically sound plans for repurposing a facility. Purpose-built structures are at a severe disadvantage in a world where how, when, and why we work has evolved so profoundly over the intervening decades.
If we switch to a legal lens, owners have a severe disincentive to properly document a plant's state at decommissioning. Other than assisting salvagers and auctioneers in transmuting the former works into cash, there is no reason to inspect and document the facilities. Making the building more difficult to sell is hardly a concern when accurate documentation could open untold legal liability. No wonder that when the padlock hits the factory gates, the chances of it ever seeing reuse are low. Buyers are scared away by the prospect of assuming liability for decades-old pollution. Sellers are discouraged by the laughably low prices such property commands. Brownfields are simply not worth the owner's attention. Pay the property taxes, hope no litigation ensues, and move on. Within a few merger & acquisition cycles, all memory of past misdeeds will have faded to a greater extent than the flakes of paint slowly wafting from their bygone perch on a catwalk's rail, slumping downward to a dank, moldy grave beneath the vestiges of some bygone production line.
The true surprise isn't that factories succumb to decay. Rather, the great shock is that anyone possesses the creative genius and fortitude necessary to outstrip the vast unknown unknowns attendant in spaces interminably forsaken. Fallow long enough for all those acquainted with her deepest secrets to transmute into dust themselves, who is to risk life and limb to break her interment and inquire within? Does that steel drum bobbing in a half-flooded basement merely portend a sump pump wanting for electricity, or is it rather the manifestation of a groundwater remediation project hibernating in the murky recesses of a retired plant manager's nightmares?
It is a rarity indeed when an abandoned factory finds rebirth sans demolition. This is the tragedy of the commons writ large: public money must be expended to raze obsolete means of private production. Yet, public safety demands it. Future growth and prosperity compel it, lest the liberation of sentiment and dreams be encumbered by fœtid carcasses of prosperity past.
Much like fallen trees past are mushroom fodder present, our forlorn hulks of yore must pass to the other side, whether coppiced by the wrecking ball, or decayed indifferently by wind, rain, and entropy alike.