Drawing by Turner Brooks.

I first became aware of the New Haven, Connecticut, coke plant when, one evening, I looked out from the roof of the Yale architecture school and noticed a distant, enormous cloud of steam—so thick it looked like one could climb into it—somewhere near the harbor. After a while I realized the cloud appeared at almost exact forty-five-minute intervals. I biked to the harbor and saw the source on the far shore: a huge black form rising out of the yellow marsh grass into a marvelous configuration of towers connected to diagonal shaftways, all held aloft on spindly steel columns and cross-bracing that looked like the elegant legs of a giant praying mantis.

The belching steam emanated from somewhere in its interior. I made some distant drawings. I was in my first year of architecture school, in 1966, and this building was where industrial coke was produced. Later, under the cover of night, I crossed the harbor bridge. There were no gates or fences surrounding the complex. I found my way in, and I was quickly immersed in the most all-consuming physical environment in which I had ever been. I wandered through, first past some sheds. Between them were inscrutable contraptions that looked like giant robots, working in what I would slowly understand was a choreographed rhythm, moving the coal and coke, apparently independent of any human intervention. This apparatus clanked, crunched, and squeaked loudly. Blasts of steam erupted unpredictably from underground sources. In sheds built over the railroad tracks, one could hear the rattle, escalating to a roar, of the coal and coke being deposited into huge steel bins.

Toward the shore there was an enormous field of silhouetted mountains of coal, illuminated by a hazy mist. A huge gantry crane with a double truss, held some sixty feet above by two steel vertical trussed towers, spanned the hundred-yard-wide field of coal, gliding along the field’s approximately quarter-mile length on railroad tracks at each side. A huge bucket dropped the coal arriving from barges onto the shore in piles. The same bucket picked the coal up again to feed it into a chute, and from there it was emptied onto a conveyor belt and distributed to the ovens to be burned into coke. The gantry looked like another type of gigantic, strange animated insect. In the far distance, on the shore, other cranes hovered over barges in the harbor filled with incoming coal.

The coke factory represented for me, with overwhelming force, an embrace of darkness and shadows. Everything I could see around me when I was there was blacker than the night, until suddenly, coming around the corner, there would be a raging ball of fire and smoke, flickering shadows everywhere, and then, a few moments later, a thick, expanding mass of steam levitating into the sky in a convoluted, glowing mushroom shape. The fire came from the emptying of one of the hundred and seventy ovens, aligned side by side, where the coal was burned and transformed into coke. Just as charcoal burns hotter than wood, so does coke burn hotter than coal, and thus coke was better for use in steel mills—its eventual destination.

The structure holding the ovens was the center of the complex. Each of the ovens was approximately seventy-five feet deep, two feet wide, and eighteen feet high. Additional insect-like mechanisms slid on rails across the oven’s flanks to open the doors at both ends of the oven to be emptied at the finish of the burning process. Then a steel battering ram slid into place. Its arm fit the oven’s section, as well as its length, and pushed the coal that had now burned into coke through it and out the other end. Simultaneously, a little electric engine pushed what was called the “hot car” along a track under and parallel to the ovens. The spectacle unfolded as the white-hot mass of coke emerged from the oven, briefly keeping its rectangular shape as it cantilevered perhaps ten feet out into space, before slowly crumbling and then crashing into a fiery mass and shower of sparks. The hot car moved slowly along the tracks below, absorbing the entire volume disgorged from the oven. It then continued several hundred feet down the tracks, its load glowing and pulsating and illuminating the scene around it. It passed under a vaulted brick structure that held above it an enormous reservoir of water. The water was released all at once onto the coke in the final, dramatic act of cooling, causing a furious, overwhelming hissing sound, and issuing the monumental cloud of steam that had drawn me to the coke plant in the first place. As soon as the coke had been emptied from an oven, another machine that rolled on tracks above poured new coal through roof portals to fill it up again. Then it was quickly sealed for another round of firing. The process never stopped; it went on for twenty-four hours a day.

After the coke had cooled off, it traveled on conveyor belts, via other shaftways, and was dropped into railcars that were pushed or pulled by small, puffing steam locomotives that passed through the complex to the main railroad line that would transport the coke to the Bethlehem Steel plant in Pennsylvania.

Over the course of my nighttime visits to the coke factory, I continued to make drawings. In the dark, the atmosphere of the place dominated each the individual object. It became, in a way, like an enormous interior stage set on that forlorn shoreline. The curtain rose at dusk. As the sunlight died, so did the rest of the world, and the smoky, hissing drama of fire and steam took over.

Drawing by Turner Brooks.

At first, the only sign of human life I saw was an arm coming out of the cab of one of the moving contraptions, or a head silhouetted against the fire or the steam. But during my ongoing nightly visits, I gradually got to know the owners of these arms and heads, and they kindly allowed me to join them in the cabs of the various machines they operated. I was invited into the cab of the gantry crane that hovered over the entire field of coal, and—most exciting—into the little engine that pushed the “hot car” full of burning coke under the dowser. The workers did not ask many questions and referred to me, in a friendly way, as the “Russian spy” who was stealing American technological secrets through his cryptic drawings. In the second year of my acquaintance with the coke factory, I began to see the date JULY 7 written in white chalk on many of the black steel walls. I learned that this was the last day the coke factory would be operating. It was 1968. New Haven had brought in a pipeline of natural gas from Texas that replaced the gas supplied to the city as a byproduct of burning the coke. The coke factory was closing.

I came to the factory at the end of the day on July 7 and stayed all night. There might have been a miscalculation: there was more coal than the workers had expected, which still needed to be burned into coke. Suddenly, in the early evening, the filling and emptying of ovens and the dowsing all started to move at a much faster pace. Very early in the morning, the last of the coke was doused. After the ovens had been emptied for the final time, the hatches on the ovens’ roof for loading new coal were left open, and whatever remnants the ovens contained were burned off into the atmosphere. The sky filled with sparks and steam. The steam reflected the exposed, glowing embers in a vast orange haze that engulfed the entire place. It was an apocalyptic end; the sky above looked like the charged atmosphere in a J. M. W. Turner painting. By the time the sun came up, all was quiet, except for a slight hissing sound.

From Spatial Memories and Preoccupations of an Architect, forthcoming this August from NYRB.

Turner Brooks is a principal of Turner Brooks Architects, based in New Haven.