BG&E's Westport Generating Station
One of the three massive turbine halls in Baltimore's Westport Generating Station
Built to serve the rapidly growing industrial base around it, the Westport Generating Station was opened in 1906 on a twelve acre parcel of land on the bank of the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River in Baltimore. This was the same year that Consolidated Gas Electric Light & Power Company, Baltimore Gas & Electric's predecessor, absorbed all competing electric companies in Baltimore, as it had done with all competing gas companies eighteen years previously. Westport, originally a steam plant, was at the time of its construction reputed to be the largest reinforced concrete building in the world. Using concrete rather than wood made the plant fire resistant, and when Consolidated decided to merge all of the smaller plants it had acquired in 1906 to one location in 1908, Westport was the natural choice. At the time Westport boasted the tallest smokestack in Baltimore at 209 feet and its steam and combustion turbines could produce 252 megawatts. Conveyors raised coal to an elevated railway that ran over the top of the plant and delivered it to the furnaces below.
The 1940s were a prosperous time for Consolidated. Industrial production output during World War II was high leading Consolidated to increase generating capacity. In 1948 the Westport facility was expanded and renovated. By the 1950s the production of plastics had taken a toll on the nearby factories, and the community library and theater closed. Westport Generating Station closed in 1993 and the neighborhood's last surviving factory, the Carr Lowry Glass Company, closed a decade later, plunging the area into poverty and blight. The Westport Generating Station was razed in 2008 for a waterfront development slated to start construction in 2010 that has yet to materialize. Despite $160 million in funding from the city of Baltimore to return the brownfield site to a functioning part of the community, Westport Generating Station remains an relatively lifeless empty lot.
The floor in the boiler room at Westport Generating Station was covered with moss.
Westport remains one of my favorite places of all those I've visited, and among the few people who managed to gain access to it before it was abruptly demolished it is still remembered fondly and frequently when talking about spots they would go if they could turn back the clock. The original visit fairly challenging - entry involved pulling yourself up some pipes on the wall, and then wriggling into a hole in a ceiling about ten feet off the ground, all while contorting yourself around the maze of pipes inside. When I finally emerged through a hole in the second floor, it was an enormous relief as falling through the pipes onto the concrete below would have been painful.
The plant itself was spectacular. The first turbine hall was gargantuan, but there were two more equally large turbine hallways behind it. The scale of the machinery and the building itself was unbelievable. When I had finished absorbing the grand vistas in the turbine halls, I entered the room at the bottom of the multistory furnaces. Soot-blackened machinery lined the hallways, and in the golden afternoon light shimmering in through the grimy windowpanes, ferns that had taken root in the furnaces glowed an enchanting green and complimented the dreamy and surreal aura. When I was done with this area I made my way up the stairs along the furnaces until arriving at the massive bins where the coal was dumped into the top. Even though it seemed that the site couldn't possibly be more fascinating, here was an elevated, narrow gauge railway that ran the coal cars around the top floor of the building.
One of my favorite surprises in an abandoned building was the narrow-gauge railroad above the boiler room at Westport Generating Station.
Entering the railroad that was perched atop the labyrinthian network of turbine halls and furnaces at Westport was an abrupt shift between the waking and dreaming world. It seemed it must be an illusion; there was no precedent in my mind for such a thing. In my experience, railroads had always existed outdoors, on the ground. Yet here one was, stories above the turbine hallways where it seemed to have no business being, softly lit by dusty sunlight. It was as though it had been randomly inserted into my consciousness by a misfiring synapse, as though it had never been built at all but had in fact always been there in the back of my mind waiting for me to find it. For a moment I felt I had seen a ripple across the surface of reality itself and could almost glimpse the murky forms beneath it.
The afternoon swiftly vanished and in what seemed like no time the building too was gone forever. Occasionally it would reappear in my memory but seemed too odd and improbable to be real. If I told someone about it, surely they would think me a liar, but I had the photographs to prove it. These flickering collections of pixels, they were not only Westport's witness but my own. I was there. I did see it. The veil is perilously thin in places and without the testament of these weightless images to anchor me I fear sometimes I might lose my place and forget which side I am on.
Westport Generating Station is a chapter in my book, Abandoned America: Age of Consequences.
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