Scrapper

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SEE THE BODY OF THE plant, one hundred years of patriots’ history, fifty years an American wreck. The remainder of a city within the city, a fortress of squared buildings a mile long and five blocks wide. Three million square feet of interior. A century of reinforced concrete and red brick and steel crossbeams still standing despite injury, of parking lots stretched around miles of emptiness, their lights long ago darkened, their torn and opened fences made an invitation to the gutting.

See the factory roads left open to an incurious public, see the once-famous sign stuttering in broken glass across the bridge between buildings, hung high over the dregs of opposing traffic. And in each last windowpane see a letter, together reading mo_or city in_u_tr__l park.

See how names were not just markers but promises. See how the first name the sign had cried had been gone even longer. How in the city the advance of history displaced what it could not destroy, erase, unfinish: an American exclusion zone. There were sights here few strangers would see again. Except in the photographs of urban explorers. Destruction porn. Except through the window of a bulldozer. Destruction.

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