Atlantic Avenue Power Plant*
The turbine hall of the abandoned Atlantic Ave Power Plant
Updated July 24, 2019 | By Matthew Christopher
There is little information available on the coal-fired power plant I've renamed Atlantic Avenue Power Station to protect its actual location. Most news sources state it opened in the mid 1900s; some sources indicate it was in the 1920s but I believe this an error and rather the time when a massive consolidation of all the city's gas and electric companies occurred. For many years from this point Atlantic Avenue Power Station would be the sole provider of electricity for the entire city to well over 100,000 customers.
The plant closed in the early 1970s as a result of the shift toward generating electricity via nuclear power. Nearly a two decades ago it was sold to a developer but plans to rehabilitate it have been in limbo, mired in bankruptcy proceedings. The fifty acre waterfront property was slated to be repopulated with hotels, shops, restaurants, and an expansion of the nearby convention center, but two of its investors defaulted and litigation was required to remove them from the project. A 2013 news article pointed out that both the investors who had been removed and the development company that remained had histories of fraud and bribery.
An ongoing corruption trial of the city's mayor included testimony that the former Atlantic Avenue Power Station investors bribed him in a kickback scheme involving the plant and two other properties. While millions of dollars have been borrowed against the property, no apparent progress at the site has been made. It seems like the redevelopment plan was little more than a massive swindle by all parties. A recent news article about a young man who fell to his death inside and a renewed push to secure the site indicates that things are roughly the same as they were when I visited a decade ago.
The secondturbine hall of the abandoned Atlantic Ave Power Plant
The five story building is one of the oldest and most recognizable in the city but vandalism, scrapping, and exposure to the elements continue to follow their inevitable course. Recent photographs indicate several areas inside have flooded, and while I am a firm believer in not naming vacant sites that are unprotected, this policy has little effect on the larger factors that shape the fate of places like the Atlantic Avenue Power Station. Quite often I hear people talk about buildings being too old or deteriorated to save, throwing up their hands and in a weird mix of fatalism and blind optimism calling the destruction of historic sites "progress".
I don't see progress, I see a greed so insatiable that it consumes all things that cross its path. I see a project that could have saved a landmark building and revitalized a polluted area derailed by corruption and fraud, another casualty of urban governments that prioritize stuffing their pockets with as much cash as possible over the well being of their citizens. I could rattle off a depressingly long list of similar stories that ended with the erasure of important places that could have been vibrant and distinctive destinations for city residents and visitors. More often than not, the cycle just repeats itself over and over, until so many great places are lost that it's hard to even count them all.
Atlantic Avenue Power is a chapter in my book, Abandoned America: Age of Consequences.
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