ORIGINAL CONTENT: The William B. Pollock Co. / Penguin City Beer - Youngstown, O. circa last week.
The nice people at Penguin City Beer let me come down and photograph their building before the build out started to convert it to their taproom and brewing facility. This plant that once turned out hot metal rail cars and blast furnaces (i.e. the Trumbull Cliffs furnace that worked at Republic Steel in Warren, Ohio and was the largest in the world when new) will be making good ol fashioned working class beer. Oh and trust me, I know my cans of American ales and lagers. It’s crazy I had mutual friends with everyone I talked to down there; I miss Youngstown so bad I could spit sometimes.
Figure 1 - General shot of the one remaining brick wall from the old configuration of the plant - I believe theirs is the newest building in the Pollock complex.
Fig. 2 - Alliance Machine Co. overhead crane in the NW end of the bay. She’s an oldie but I can’t date it, also not sure if that says 100 ton capacity or what.
Figures 3-6 - Detail shots. Well worn wooden man door, mosaic glass block window, klaxon horns, and the prettiest clipboard holder I’ve ever seen
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Figures 7-9 - Overhead trolley crane in the SE end of the bay, including a tasty video (fig. 7) I made with the drone I learned how to fly the day before. This century +\- old 15 tonner was mfg. by The Morgan Engineering Co., Alliance, Ohio. Morgan’s still exists, I want to reach out to them to see if that can put a number on it. Now my first thought was to climb up into the cabs of the cranes to shoot the facility, which I’ve done before in several mills, then I realized I had a drone. My grandpa and uncle were cranemen at Youngstown Sheet & Tube and ran cranes like these so it’s in my blood, but it’s probably safer to stay on the ground. Plus the angles you can get with a drone are wild so I put ol Stan Droney up in the air. If I ever meet the person that invented drones I’ll buy them a shot and a Penguin.
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Figure 10 is courtesy of Steel Valley Artifacts and shows this same building in the original Pollock livery which is beautiful in my opinion.
fig. 10 via Steel Valley Artifacts
Figure 11 is the last remaining bit of Pollock signage on this building. This building will be repainted but hey better than getting demolished!
fig. 11