Hamilton Manufacturing plant gone
As some of you are aware, the huge Hamilton Manufacturing plant where so much of our letterpress history was manufactured has been raised. The wood type museum had to move because of this. The last, sad piece of this once incredible operation just bit the dust, link courtesy of George Chapman:
http://www.htrnews.com/story/news/local/2015/05/31/hamilton-stack-two-ri...
Sometimes progress is sad to watch…
I can definitely understand the need to re-purpose the site for a modern economy, but I often wonder how much of our cities’ heritages (and our overall cultural heritage) we have lost this way. I’d have thought they could at least keep the stack as a symbolic link to the site’s history. We seem to be hell-bent on utterly destroying the past in this country. When you look around my own city, in most places you’d be forgiven for thinking it was founded in the 1940s.
—
Michael Hurley
Titivilus Press
Memphis, TN
Commiserations from afar, regarding Hamiltons *Stack* a few of us Old Codgers now exactly the feeling, especially when in the Authors case, The Monotype, Factory, Works, virtually everything was raised to the ground. Very Sad.!!
M.H. as you imply, Very short sighted with the Hell Bent approach.
Not quite as bad here in the U.K. with a little help from our Heritage Lottery fund etc.
Do you have, Stateside, any equivalent of our Lottery funding system.?
Google Earth doesn’t know yet that the Hamilton plant is gone so it is still possible to take an internet drive around the factory. Here’s a starting point:
https://www.google.com/maps/@44.147563,-87.563593,3a,75y,323.37h,84.69t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sL3okMC5aj-ZFi60mJAVd_Q!2e0!6m1!1e1
Continue down the street to the first cross street, 17th St, turn left and enter the complex—it was huge, built over a number of years, and had streets going underneath some of the buildings.
In later years, as manufacturing wound down, the buildings were not maintained and the new owner, Fisher Scientific, had other locations where surviving operations were moved. The Hamilton Wood Type Museum was operating under leaking roofs, bad electrcial systems, and all the ailments of neglected property.
I am glad I had a chance to make a “pilgrimage” to the original site before the museum moved, and before the building was torn down. Little did I know my “bucket list” trip, while I was in Chicago for a meeting, would have been so well timed.
In Houston Texas, the rich money people all and any of Houston cultural heritage to replace with tall condos.
An old building in Houston, Texas is just under 70 years old.
The rich money people hate Houston history and remove it as some as they can.
If these old printing mfg had their business in Houston, the day they closed, the building would come down.