A little over a month ago, I got a new job and on my way to my first day, I found an industrial building that looked rather intriguing. Without much extra time, I put it on my list and figured I'd stop one day after work in the next week or so. Well, I kept taking the same route to work and noticed that certain things kept changing with the building. A couple of doors would be open one day and shut the next. One day, I thought I saw a light inside but that may have been a reflection from something else. On one side of the building is a roll-up door that's always closed. Except for once. Most notably, there's a little dirt lot on the property that would occasionally have a few cars in it and other than a couple that seemed to be there all the time, they were always different vehicles. And not that I ever thought it amounted to much, but words spray-painted on a door read "24-hour camera dog inside."
Because of this, I figured the building may be lightly used for some unknown purpose. Clearly it wasn't anything major since there are plenty of easy ways into the building. But it was enough to keep me out for the time being until I could do a little more sleuthing. After about a month of points of entry not being repaired and never seeing any actual people or robot camera dogs around, I figured I'd go ahead and give it a try.
Some background information before I share what I found: The building was constructed in 1929 and used as a manufacturing and processing plant for much of its existence. In the past few decades, it has been utilized by a bunch of small companies that seemed to share the space because the time periods of their usage overlaps in several cases. Different portions of the building seem to have been abandoned at different times but it seems that none of it has seen any use in at least a few years. On September 2, 2009, a fire broke out around 10 pm in the far eastern wing of the building and did some serious damage to the second floor with more moderate damage on the first.
The whole building is packed with, for lack of a better term, stuff. All kinds of stuff. Vehicles, boats, tires, dining utensils, furniture, books, electronics, toys, construction supplies and much more. Some of it was neatly arranged on shelves and some of it was thrown into piles higher than your head. Several narrow hallways were completely blocked by mountains of debris and entire large rooms were difficult to navigate because of the sheer amount of stuff.
Finally, it appears that my concerns about the building being used were nothing more than that. I saw no evidence that anyone was still using the place for anything except maybe storage. As for the vehicles on the property, upon closer inspection, they all seem to have minor damage so I'm guessing they're just overflow from the body shop across the street.
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