Henry's Incinerator

After the long walk it took to get there, I was happy to finally spot the huge brick building with its towering smoke stacks ahead. Finding an entrance proved easier than I would have thought, and I set to exploring the now dormant incinerator.
Around the back, I discovered the doors had been left open to the base of a chimney stack, so I climbed through. Inside was a huge, cave-like room, with piles of ash for a sloping floor and rough, yellowish brick walls. This led to a short hallway that went into the base of one of the huge chimneys. In the small, circular base of the chimney, the only light came through an open steel door- presumably, the chimney was built with baffles inside it, instead of just a straight rise. The entire exhaust area was very surreal, like being in a huge brick oven; full of texturs that spoke of heat, smoke and ash.
Next, I visited a dark basement loading dock area. Mostly concrete, there was a large central road located underneath several piston-operated sliding doors in the ceiling. Presumably, this is where the unburnt garbage and ash would fall from the furnaces into waiting dump trucks, to be carried away to a dump. There were also a couple of small mechanical rooms down here, that housed large boilers. More interested in what lay ahead, I didn't pay these boiler rooms much attention.
I took a dark stairwell up a level to some musty offices, suddenly entering the land of peeling paint. If there was a painted surface, it was peeling- walls, ceilings, lockers, windowsills. The textures generated made the offices seem more interesting than they actually were, although some rooms had cool leftovers such as a stove and a large circular common sink.
After a brief stay in the offices, I went through a dark hallway and through another door, and stopped in amazement. My heart jumped at the sight of the main furnace room, and I stepped down some stairs to get a closer look. The room was two stories tall, and probably 100m long, with a row of windows that let in the day's light. Three house-sized incinerator furnaces, with all their workings, sat cold and silent in a row before me. Each had several large oven doors on its face, with an accompanying tangle of pipes and machinery to allow them to function. Inside each furnace was a huge metal conveyor belt, made of large perforated metal plates that were corroded to a light rust color. The furnace room floor was dirty concrete, with ripped up pipe insulation (asbestos?) lying in chunks all over, mixed with pigeon crap. A few of the birds flew around in the rafters above me as I poked around the furnaces and looked into some small rooms behind them. There was something interesting to look at, or photograph, in every direction in this room. From corroded ductwork and power cables overhead, to some small utility rooms behind the furnaces, and cracked windows, and of course the furnaces themselves.
It was hard to leave the furnace room, but I wanted to see what else the building had to offer. I took a set of stairs up, in the hope of reaching the roof, but the door was welded shut. Back down the stairs, avoiding mummified pigeon corpses, I stopped off on the next floor.
Just one step through the door, and I froze in shock. The hairs stood up on my neck, and I could barely believe my eyes. I had entered a cavernous, open room that stretched the length of the building, over 200m long. Giant metal claws hung motionless underneath huge steel cranes, running on tracks spanning the room. To my left, just beyond a railing, was a huge, gaping pit; its concrete walls falling five stories to the basement. In the center of this huge room were big metal chutes, which led into he tops of the furnaces below.
Seeing everything at once was a shock- the scale alone was overwhelming. I slowly stepped further into the room, avoiding the masses of wet pigeon shit covering the floor. It was incredible. The metal claws were gigantic, rated to three tons' payload. There were three of them, hanging at opposite ends of the room, each with an attached operator's control booth. I imagined what it would be like to see them in operation- swinging around, flying down to grab a pile of garbage the size of a car, dropping it into the chutes, and then endlessly repeating the cycle.
The huge, empty pits at either end were also very impressive. It was easy to picture a line of six garbage trucks all backed to the ledge below, dumping the city's waste. In the bottom of one of the pits, I spotted a decomposing cat, frozen in the ice. At one end of this huge room, I stepped past a broken door into a smaller room. This one was filled with gigantic metal ventilation ducts and fans; no doubt the area charged with supplying the incinerator's demand for air. The room was pretty crowded, so I climbed onto one of the big fans to get some photos.
Then I walked slowly back to the stairwell I'd orginally ascended, admiring the giant claws some more as I went. I took the stairs down into the western dump truck bay, and went to the edge of the concrete pit. From below, the void was equally impressive; although there was a powerful stench from the stagnant water and decomposing filth in the bottom of the pit.
After that, I went back into the basement loading area for some more photos, before I finally stepped back out into the day.