Acme Steel Ruins

Oil on canvas. The Acme Steel plant was the last of the 20th century steel mills to shut down on the southeast side of Chicago, finally shuttering for good in 2001. Most of its metal components were scrapped years later, but its brickwork structures linger in a polluted and dilapidated state, slowly collapsing one wall at a time. Too ecologically devastated to be of any economic use, the land wastes way like so much of the American rust-belt, in a process of slow architectural and ecological decay. I have vivid memories of the Acme plant's steam quencher letting off massive plumes of white-hot steam that could be seen from miles around. Today, that quencher, like the rest of the plant, lay in ruins.