Conner Creek
A half-mile-wide scar between relatively pleasant residential neighborhoods and urban prairie, the Conner Creek Industrial Complex stretches from the riverfront almost up to I-94. Huge, hulking assembly plants, now vacant and purposeless, occupy sprawling parking lots that have long since cracked and buckled. Meadows surround those swaths of decaying pavement, weedy stretches that were probably once neatly trimmed lawns.
There are slashes in the fence, places where aspiring looters have come onto the premises in search of ...what? The desolate manufacturing centers must have had something to offer. New canvases for graffiti, for one thing; their giant walls offer plentiful space for the aspiring tagger. Scrap metal, maybe, though that supply was likely exhausted in the first year or two. It's the sort of place that might prompt kids or teens into dares. It's also the sort of place where those dares might end badly.
