This abandoned processing plant also happened to be a few blocks down the road from Francis Howell High School, where I was a student in the 1980s. The plant, known in local circles as the "Equadome" for reasons long forgotten, was a constant source of inspiration and wonder at my high school for decades. Some students snuck out to it at night to do drugs and have sex; others used the large abandoned stretches of concrete to construct spray-painted odes to metal bands; yet others used the buildings to practice their repelling skills on warm Saturday afternoons. The Equadome was a pretty dangerous place, both because of the crumbling conditions and because of the company the complex kept; rumors persisted for years that satanic rituals took place on a regular basis out there, a rumor never completely disproven.

In November 1990 I was taken to the Equadome by two friends of mine from high school, Tom Henkey and the late John Ballinger, two of the Saturday-afternoon repellers I mentioned before. Like many who had visited before me, I found the place to be powerful, spooky and awe-inspiring in a particularly weird way--a ghost town for the Industrial Age, if you will, an abandoned ode to a time when steel, steam and hard work ran the world. A few years later the city did end up bulldozing the entire complex to the ground, so I'm particularly happy to have gotten the shots I did when I did.

To your right are the best images from the shoot I had that day. Click on any of them to see a larger version.

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