Steampunk Heaven: Seattle Gas Works Park

The Bioephemera blog has a gorgeous series of what has to be steampunk heaven: Seattle’s Gas Works Park: A former refinery that converted oil and coal to gas, the plant became obsolete in the 1950s, leaving the ground beneath saturated with tar and aromatic hydrocarbons. It was one of the first toxic industrial sites to […]

Gaswf3

The Bioephemera blog has a gorgeous series of what has to be steampunk heaven: Seattle's Gas Works Park:

A former refinery that converted oil and coal to gas, the plant became obsolete in the 1950s, leaving the ground beneath saturated with tar and aromatic hydrocarbons. It was one of the first toxic industrial sites to be successfully reclaimed for public use through bioremediation (although it is still monitored, and intermittent cleanup efforts continue)...

From the park outside, the gasworks now resemble a gigantic modern sculpture with a fashionably distressed patina. The unreal blue-green of the Seattle grass contrasts so strongly with the red rust that it stings the eyes. But in among the towers, the scene is ghostly. Blackberries twine lushly through the iron girders, obviously undaunted by any lingering contamination in the soil. Small piles of bleached bones, perhaps from rodents or birds, litter the ruins. Only a few dangling loops of slender T1 cable, probably from a security system, betray that the Internet Age has supplanted the Industrial.

This is my Jannah, where I traipse through verdant foliage and lurid rust with my 42 goggled virgins for eternity.

Gas Works Park [Bioephemera]