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Walking Michigan City (Indiana)

Someone has to do it: A town that makes things everyone needs, but few romanticize

This wasn’t the cinematic blue-collar town, from movies and novels, of foundries, mills, and mines, with hard hatted men shuffling from factories belching thick black smoke as sirens blast, done after a long day of building battleships or bombers, but instead a low-key hard working town, with tranquil, multi acre buildings that look more like community colleges than factories, where they manufacture non-woven fiber materials for filtration, rotary-screw air-compressors, industrial portable air-compressors, roofing shingles, hydronic heating systems, and commercial boilers, to name just a few things. The power plant is constantly visible, its cooling tower always off in the background, apparently menacing to most people, although the engineering and photo geek in me absolutely loves it, and I was especially tickled to realize you can hear it as you get closer to it, a low, rumbling, watery hissing that to me sounds like a giant mechanical snake. A heavy, imposing building, with an austere design, that according to internet represents "Typical American penitentiary architecture from the Civil War era," its vastness, over thirty acres, comes out of nowhere, exuding a serious authority coupled with a tinge of the menacing.

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