Allied Paper Photo Project

The following photo series is from a project that Eric and I worked on last month with the last standing building of the old Allied Paper/Portage Paper mill in downtown Kalamazoo. Taken over by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and dismanteled in its entirety, this site is one of the last of the big mills that once made the area one of the largest producers of paper based products on the global scale.

Today, most of the mills have been torn down due to the many environmental hazards present at these legacy sites from a centuries worth industrial waste damage (pre EPA). In the history shelves at the Kalamazoo Library, I had once found pictures from the local papers of many tens of thousands of dead fish in the Kalamazoo river during the spring time. Not stated in the article was the more than obvious cause that would later come to haunt this town: massive pollutants being poured directly into the river by plants involved in the paper industry.

A long paper making history is all but gone from this town, and these photos reminisce of a era from not too long ago: this particular site was active up until the late 1990's.

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