RSS SPIRIT

Fire Up The Stacks,
Gotta 'Nother Order




The city's industrial corridor chortled and thrummed yesterday. Adjustable clamps were produced at Jorgenson and Pony's Adjustable Clamps, Inc. Bitchy interior designer types cajoled clients on cell phones while inspecting slabs at Italian Granite Warehouse (in an actual warehouse.) Circular forms were manufactured, and stringy dudes with shopping carts ferried pallets to and fro.

Diesel fumes overwhelmed pedestrians as 18-wheelers idled in the middle of the street. Trains temporarily halted all thought as they rumbled over a concrete pass. The hoodlums who fill up The Tableside Catering Company trucks noisily left their shift, descending on the street like a disgorged furlough bus.

Meat of various flavors was packed and carted onto delivery trucks by men in white coats and plastic head wraps. The slick bits of gore and blood staining the asphalt were promptly power washed by hose hoisters in smocks.

An 18-wheeler back knifed into a slender dock with unnatural dexterity. These trucks did not just come for the products related to feather down, specialty steel and carne fresco. Also awaiting delivery were theater sets, sausage-like TV shows and scale iron giraffe sculptures. Grinding away at the proverbial millstone yesterday was every sort of industry requiring 5,000 square feet and a five-ton lift .

Alternately the industrial corridor roared then became strangely quiet. A passerby reported enduring a cacophony of industrial production one block, only to encounter a silent gauntlet of brick boxes the next. A lesson in the nature of industry perhaps: there are only two realities – shift on, shift off.

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