Abandoned Spaces #2: Almont Shipping Terminals

Abandoned Spaces
Episode 2: Almont Shipping Terminals
Brian Blackmon
(Part 1: Surrey St.)

It’s 9am on a rainy Saturday morning. While most of Wilmington is sleeping in, sipping coffee, or recovering from last night, I have just jumped from a fenced-off loading dock into a puddle of water and now find myself with wet socks in the cellar of an abandoned shipping terminal on N. Front Street.

For this expedition, I took along a friend who also has an interest in urban exploring. Ahead of us is the deceptively tame Almont Shipping Terminals, a disused and decaying industrial leftover sitting defiantly on some of the most valuable land in Wilmington.

Let’s be upfront about this: the building is ugly and there are no architectural spectacles to see here; it is a shipping terminal after all. We park behind the building and comment on some graffiti that says “Ween Roses are Free” (which I’m assuming is a song reference) before nonchalantly leaping onto the loading dock and nudging open the door.

When we enter, it’s not quiet like most abandoned buildings. In fact, it’s loud inside. Rain is pouring in through the broken skylights above us, beating rhythmically onto the scrap metal, cans, and bottles that are on the ground. I must subconsciously choose to explore buildings during the most depressing and ominous weather.

We enter one of the two large warehouses. The first is empty except for trash on the ground. The floor is mostly dirt, but because of the rain there are islands of mud and puddles scattered around the room. Inside the second warehouse is a completely obscure cutout of a hot-pink car (remnants of a parade maybe). The warehouses dead-end at a tiny door that leads into the office area of the shipping terminals. Squeezing my way through the partially blocked door, my heart begins to beat harder and faster, my hair is wet partially from the rain and partially from nervous sweat. The light coming from the broken skylights has been stifled and these rooms are much darker, like a dungeon. I’m following closely behind Jonathan, listening for his instructions. Despite the fear of cluelessly wandering through an abandoned building, there is an overt thrill I get each time that outweighs any of the fear.

Gradually light from the office entrance brings sight to our surroundings. We are in a fairly new office building with about eight offices, two bathrooms, and a kitchen area.
Beside the office is an open-air loading station. Creeping through this area, ducking whenever a car goes past, we ignore warning signs that read “homeless members only” and the destroyed toilets and fire extinguishers until we arrive at possibly the most unnerving part of this adventure: a new add-on to the Almont Shipping Terminals, which is completely black and stuffed with beds, clothes, and grocery bags. Confronted with the reality that my curiosity of abandoned spaces is another person’s haven from the cold rain, I felt uneasy and a little ashamed. I am not sure who was squatting here, but in order to do this, they would need to climb through a shattered glass window frame in the pitch dark, through ankle-deep mud, and into a bug-infested mattress where they can rest sheltered from the storms.

I wasn’t able to get many pictures in here because there was no light and honestly I only walked about ten feet down the hallway. We decided it was best not to proceed any further.