Abandoned Chicago Factory with Piles of Melted Batteries and a Skyline View from the Roof

The first thing in this factory is a pile of batteries, frozen and melted together, enough for a lifetime supply. We walked right past them at first, because we had already seen broken glass bottles and figured it was more of the same. Then someone said corrosive.

This was a massive factory used by a couple of different businesses, somewhere in the Chicago area. The batteries looked like they were supposed to be recycled. The exact location stays off this page, and the best part is on the roof.

What we found

After the batteries, the building opens up. One sign read packaged broiler feed system, and the place is big enough that I said so out loud. Past that is a room with a ton of mail on the floor, letters and flyers drifted against a wall of purple graffiti. It looked like people were living in here, with what looked like a pull out couch and a lot of trash.

The ground floor goes on in the dark. There is a men’s bathroom, then more open floor with pillars, one of them peeling green, and we went upstairs from there.

Upstairs are the offices, and they are trashed. Everything was so moldy that someone joked about asbestos. One room was labeled company store. Other rooms are just stud framing with graffiti on every wall.

One side of the building was for storage. The pillars there are painted red and white, with graffiti along the back wall. Then the colors change. A little further on, the pillars are yellow and orange, then blue and green, or teal, and I had not even noticed until it was pointed out.

The middle of the building is where it got more interesting. There is a conveyor belt, which we called one of the coolest things so far. Next to it are rows of boxes. We guessed pill sorting, then guessed they were for the controls. I’m still not sure what they are.

Further on there is a lot of exhaust, big ducts and some fans hanging overhead. I wasn’t sure how safe that part was.

Back near where we started is a freight elevator. I stepped inside to read the sign, which says only authorized employees may operate it. It’s probably not hooked up at all. We took the hallway instead, with its peeling green walls.

One more floor up is the roof access. The Chicago skyline looks beautiful from right there. The other guy was already up above me, climbing on a higher part of the roof, and he said it was gorgeous. The last thing on camera is a mattress and a ladder.

Why places like this end up empty

Chicago has a long list of factories that stopped running before anyone worked out what to do with the buildings. According to a University of Illinois Chicago public health study of the southwest side, decades of industry drew workers into the area’s industrial corridors. Many of those facilities later became obsolete and were abandoned.

Reuse is the hard part. The same study notes that possible contamination complicates redevelopment. It lists lead, petroleum products, arsenic and mercury among the contaminants at brownfield sites in the neighborhoods it examined, and says many of those sites have been assessed but not yet cleaned up.

The rules add to it. A 1995 Christian Science Monitor report estimated the federal government counted about 500,000 brownfields across the country, mostly in older manufacturing cities, and said strict federal cleanup laws passed since 1980 had discouraged companies from redeveloping them. In one Chicago case, the city spent $350,000 in 1995 to clear hazardous waste from a single acre next to a West Side meat plant.

Which is why a factory can sit with a lifetime supply of melted batteries on the floor and a view of the skyline from the roof.