A few months back, my friend John and some of his friends and I went to explore this huge abandoned factory on the Southside of Chicago right off the I-55. While his friends shot some scenes for their zombie movie (of which I play a zombie at one point, there are pictures of that shoot in the blog archives), I wandered around the factory very carefully, as there were many frightful dropoffs, holes in the floor, weak stairs etc. Some of the graffiti was impressive, there is tons and tons of artwork here that I'd like to eventually document. Hopefully I'll be getting a digital camera soon, disposable polaroids do have a sort of gritty charm to them though. On the way out we met a few natives who were 2 scruffy guys who lived in the crumbly smaller building which can be seen from above in one of the pictures (and kind of shows the scale of things and how high up we really were). They were good dudes and told us a few stories about the origin of the buildings....which I've of course forgotten since then which kind of sucks because they put a lot of things about the buildings into context. In the same picture mentioned above with the smaller adjacent building, there is an interesting juxtaposition of the run down building with the brand new looking factory warehouse next door.
