PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Dates on images indicate I’ve been coming here to shoot since 2011. Even then the Hendey casting shop was nothing but a pile of brick, rubble and a concrete base on which much of the plan of the building and the floor tiles of some of the rooms are still visible today. I walk from room to room though the walls are gone.
Though I’ve seen the pictures, it’s hard to imagine it whole again while standing here in the open yard between the wood pattern shop (yesterdays image) where the wooden molds for casting were made, and the buildings in the picture, where castings were finished and tested and assembled. By 1910 it would have been a tightly packed hub of intense industry with a tall stack and a staff of skilled toolmakers, machinists and engineers and apprentices and grunts and accountants and draughtsmen and bookkeepers and stenographers and secretaries and managers, and every day they all walked to work from houses nearby. Imagine.
