Steam Punk

What could be more steam punk than a steam plant? The Willow Steam Generating plant on 9th and Willow was built about 30 years too late (1927) to meet the Victorian-futuristic definition of the term, yet it has such an abundance of dials and pipes and gauges and valves that the comparison is hard to resist.

As Harry Kyriakodis remarked last week, Willow Steam is indeed the prototype of the hulking industrial building that broods over the landscape. And although we try to avoid anthropomorphizing buildings too much here on the Daily, this rusty, asbestos-filled eyesore has a powerful presence that might be best summed up as “baleful” on both the outside, and the inside.

Peter Woodall is the co-editor of Hidden City Daily. He is a graduate of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, and a former newspaper reporter with the Biloxi Sun Herald and the Sacramento Bee. He worked as a producer for Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane and wrote a column about neighborhood bars for PhiladelphiaWeekly.com.

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