The factory at 140 Thomas Street in Newark opened in 1920 for the Waterman Pen Company and later became home to Conmar Products, once one of America’s largest zipper manufacturers. After Newark’s manufacturing economy declined, the abandoned building was used for illegal chemical storage, became a hazardous Superfund site and provided shelter for homeless residents. The factory was demolished in 2001 and replaced by housing.

I photographed the abandoned Conmar/Waterman factory in Newark in 2001, after years of photographing the industrial ruins of northern New Jersey. What interested me increasingly was not simply the architecture but the layers that accumulated after a factory closed—the lost jobs, contamination, homelessness and the new uses people found for a building the formal economy had abandoned.