Lampworks, Waterbury, Customer Service

Although built in the dimly lit 19th century by Holmes, Booth & Haydens to manufacture oil lamps, only the first floor was still used when I began making photographs here. At that time in an adjacent shed men still ran giant presses and ovens to produce large diameter, metal tubing used in submarines. It was all supposed to be top secret, and the old lampworks added a look of abandonment to the active tube mill. On the first floor of the lampworks a well-equipped machine shop kept the tube mill running, but the three floors above were vacant. Each floor seemed like a different universe to be photographed. The second, with windows only on one side, was dark and grimy and littered with parts, and the 4th floor attic belonged to the pigeons, but the third floor, with a suite of offices divided by glass partitions, was a photographic kaleidoscope of shadows and reflections that moved with the sun. The offices shared a common space that still had an ancient Graphotrype spewing rusting address plates into a pile of forgotten customers.

See also:
    https://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2018/08/lamp-works-rip.html)
    https://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2015/04/attic-pigeons.html
or type “lampworks” in the search window.

 

Ghost Light, Lampworks, Waterbury

 

Factory Siding

 

 

 

 

 

Little Pond, June, 2022

 

 

A Torrington Company Tour

From above it seemed quite orderly. Satellite photos show perhaps seven long sheds with east-west axes that begin in the west at a ribbon of courtyards and end in the east at a multi-story work shed. Most of buildings between were put place between 1906 the early 1920s. The interior sheds are mostly one story, and all are crowded together and stingy with the light delivered mostly through roof monitors and skylights, many boarded over. Our path was often through darkness, sometimes shattered by lens flaring brightness, and when possible to a forlorn glow and glimmer or the splendor of luminous, spaces carried on columns still marching, hollow and silent where machines no longer keep time, classical spaces that shout emptiness and paint left to its peeling.

 

 

 

We end where we began.

Torrington Company Rumblings

The first sheds of the Torrington Company were built in 1906, two long brick structures that were connected midway in the form of an “H”. It is not clear to me how these initial structures became incorporated into the airless, mass of sheds that remain today, but I'm sure they're there and that I've passed through them. 

The brightly lit shed in the middle of this picture has a concrete inset above the entrance saying, “1912.” That was also the year in which the company's initial steam-driven, belt and rope system was replaced by an Allis Chalmers engine and generator providing the enterprise with 440-prime-volt current, power which did not come on wire poles. 1912, a pivotal year! The world was electrifying and thereby creating increased demand for all the things that made wheels spin. Additional sheds were also added at that time. The Balkans rumbled.

The Torrington Company — 2

Does photographic beauty lie in the subject photographed or in the photograph itself?

Photographs such as this remind me of the compositional rigor that seems to drive my enjoyment of photography. For me, every photograph poses the question of the rectangle. How will it be cast over the forms that attract me? The viewers' eyes must be drawn along an interesting path that syncs the picture’s tempo, tensions, mood, and that makes the rectangle whole and complete. 

How the photograph is “finished,” is, as Ansel Adams, who played Bach’s Inventions on a piano, tells us, merely orchestration, and the original negative or RAW file is the score which can be re-orchestrated at any time. Digital technology has vastly changed the nature of orchestrating and displaying digital photographs.

 

The Standard Plant, Torrington Company

Even with a flashlight, it took a few seconds for our eyes to penetrate the murky darkness that extended like a mine shaft into a sequence of factory sheds indifferently spotted with the light from broken roof monitors. Variously, passages connected to similar sheds left and right, some glowing, others black as a crypt and all empty down to the walls and vacant. What went on here?

I’ve learned the first of the sheds was built in 1906 to house a spinoff of the Excelsior Needle Company (see: New England Pin Co. No.2). These buildings would serve the newly formed Standard Spoke and Nipple Company. Motor cars were still gadgets, but bicycles had become practical and popular, high-speed transportation requiring strong legs but neither hay nor barn. The new sheds would have been filled with machine tools strung together by belts and ropes to a hungry steam engine and the workers who knew how to use these to make products that wound include not just needles, bicycle pedals and handlebars, but metal tubing, machine screws, carpet sweepers, piano hardware, ball bearings, eventually spark plugs as well as bicycle spokes and nipples. At its peak the Torrington Company’s Standard Plant, as it would be known after 1917, would employ more than 1000 workers, tho nobody has worked here for 2 or 3 decades.

 

Washington Street Bridge

Iron bridges spanned the era between wood and steel. Those like the one on Washington Street are sometimes called “Pumpkin Seed” or “Bow String” bridges and were built throughout New England and beyond by the Berlin Iron Bridge Company. Officially known as lenticular truss bridges, they follow principles of a patented, “parabolic, lenticular, truss design employing paired elliptical arches connected at the ends and cross-braced between. The trusses which carried the loads used cast iron for compression members and wrought iron for tension. Berlin Iron and Bridge would build nearly 400 lenticular truss bridges throughout New England, NY, NJ, PA and as far away as Texas. The Washington Street bridge, built in 1879 when Berlin Bridge Company was still called the Corrugated Metal Company, is thought to be the earliest of them.

Interesting info here: http://next.owlapps.net/owlapps_apps/article?id=67923819&lang=en