The Warehouse Factory: The Writing on the Wall

Two photographers go through life being awesome.

We set up another photo-shoot. This time we took our cameras outside, to the industrial playground. We were careful to avoid squatters while we traced the floors and steps of the abandoned Goliaths in West Philly. In the larger Philadelphia area there are between forty thousand and fifty thousand vacant properties, and there are many, many more homeless than empty homes. From a macrocosmic perspective, they work like saprophytic bacteria, blackening rooms with soot and opening wounds in the roof and frame for the heat to be let out. In general they facilitate necrosis.  

            Frank and I came to our first great building, which must have died of tetanus, because the air was heavy with lead and iron rust, and red with thick, cough-able dust, and the body was sad and stiff, like the iron beams had bent and flexed too much. They had torn, and were now in a state of rigor mortis.

            As we gazed at the sheer steel infrastructure the wind shook skeletal beams forcing rust to fall and land exactly below the gridiron, like an ochre colored blueprint. We got redded on as well, and decided it was a kind of weather. We said that it was “rusting out.”

            The sun tilted lower and bleared the air with horizontal red rays. We also noticed, as it set, that there was a black spot on the roof that looked like it could be got into. I indicated what looked like a complex Jungle-Gym arching toward the ceiling. The rust gave us some nice grip. It did, however, become more like monkey bars by the time we came to the apex. We were forty or so feet high, and beneath us a frozen tide of blue auditorium chairs had paused, mid swell and crash. I foisted my camera gear into the hole in the roof after Frank had climbed inside, and we were sure no one was up there.

            “Check this out!” he said. Four feet of space separated the ceiling we stood on and the actual roof overhead. However, stowed up in the crawl space amidst rags and trash there was a square chalk board. It was chipped on one end, but 4 x 4 feet otherwise, and as we quickly learned, it weighed about 200 lbs. We dragged it closer to the hole we’d climbed into and amused ourselves with how and why it might be up there. I thought perhaps some dance director had orchestrated spotlights from this place, and needed to have the choreography drawn onto the slate to remember which way to shift marionette-like dancers.

            “Let’s draw things on it,” I said. There was still chalk hidden beneath were it had been lying. We spent an hour drawing fine details into two policemen, one of whom was accepting bribes while chugging from a bottle labeled “drugs.” The other was beating a pauper with a nightstick and, with his other hand, arbitrarily shooting the fourth wall.

            We hadn’t noticed while exacting these details that someone had entered into Shell House, which we’d decided the building should be called. We hadn’t noticed that others had entered until we smelt something like burning tin foil, with the plasticity of scent that flaming photographs have. Then we heard the infrequent frantic voices bargaining and we looked to see crack heads congregating below and building a fire with one small chair. One of them stuck the flower of his crack stem into the flame and narrowly burned his face. He must have practiced this before, because in a moment he had extinguished that eyebrow.

            Frank and I looked around the room. For the first time considered the graffiti screams on the wall, which read, in a scraggley hand-

            “SOMEONE IS TRYING TO SET THE JOIN ON FIRE WASCHOUT”

            “To the Lame F--- FIRESTART IF i get caught in this b---- when use it it’s on.”

            A few smaller threats were written to deter the purported arsonist, but all was muted by the giant expletive brought to the forefront.
            “SHUT THE F--- UP!” It said, but judging by the font and handwriting this may have been meant for the voices.

            Still we became aware that there was a party of paranoia beneath us, and that down was our only way out. So we waited.

            “We should probably stay up here all night,” Frank suggested and I nodded, when a tin can tumbled through our hole in the wall. It was followed by a single voice.

            “Who’s up there? Who’s up there? Who’s up there?” it repeated, first curious, then angry, then monotonously. We stopped moving to the point of suffocation. I thought my blood was stagnating.

            “I hear them too,” Another voice called.

            “They’re screaming!” a third voice cried, excited that other people heard it too. We heard clinks at the bottom of the Jungle Gym echoing up into rattling bangs at the metal apex beneath us.

            “I have an idea,” Frank said, moving to the chalk board. Without a word I followed and we struggled to lift it with stifled grunts between us. The shape, and not the weight, made lifting the slab difficult, and dangerous for the ceiling we stood in. We came to the hole through which we had entered our room. At the site of us the crackheads (there were seven of them) began yelling and scurrying more frantically. They grabbed from the frozen wave of seats to add to the chair fire. We began to feel the slight warmth as the heat travelled up and into our box in the roof. For a moment I felt that destiny had provided us with box seats to a show of giant insects learning to build fires.

            We dropped the chalky black slab. It cracked out the fire with sound and the dark fell, knocking one of the giant bugs from our archway ladder. They scampered out at the sound of a gun, though it had visibly been something else. The crash was enough.

            We climbed down the metal ribs with our gear in a backpack and cursed ourselves for not getting pictures, but the scene had really been magnificent, and we could go back the next day and see what had come of the fire and the shattered police. Actual sirens painted the empty buildings as we talked this over and we slipped into a bar just before they rounded the corner.

Author's Note

This is a fixed, elaborated on version of a former piece.

Reviews

[Marie]

Now I see a different view of what you posted before...also I'm not sure but what I liked the other better.