The quaint yet heavily industrialized Mad River lazily carves its way from Bristol down to Waterbury, Connecticut, before ultimately joining up with the mightier Naugatuck River, which effectively slices the city of Waterbury in half. Along the Mad River's eleven mile route, the tributary becomes briefly subterranean, directed underground within an artificial concrete channel buried beneath the parking lot of a strip mall and McDonalds restaurant, before re-emerging onto the Earth's surface yet again, just south of Interstate 84. However, before the Mad River's relatively calm waters reach the energetic Naugatuck, situated at this point no more than half mile away, a series of derelict mills spill crumbling red bricks along the banks of the Mad River, just one last obstacle before reaching its end.
The mills of Waterbury are a many. Some remain repurposed into shops and business of various sketchiness. Others however, exist as no more than hollow brick skeletons, full of twisted steel and charred timbers scorched from arsons recent and past. Yet still, a few mills remain as derelict time capsules dating back to the days when Waterbury was the United State's leading manufacturer of brassware, after all, "What Is More Lasting Than Brass?", the city's motto still reads. While the brass industry has long since left the Brass City, the manufacturing scars are very much still abundant.
Today, the numerous remaining dilapidated brass mills of Waterbury have taken on a completely new function. Unofficial asylums, houses of refuge for the city's homeless and less fortunate. Guardedly wandering through the slumping ruinous mills one is reminded not so much of the brass these factories once produced but rather the people they clearly now house. A plastic bag dangles, full with human excrement, affixed to a corroded iron nail recessed within a centuries old dry-rotted wooden beam. Discarded needles can be found strewn across the ground intermittent with the decaying natural detritus and gas station junk food wrappers which blow in the breeze like man-made leaves. Discarded alcohol bottles roll to the lowest sloped corners of the settling mill, where so to the water naturally drains, soaking worn-out garments and moldy mattresses, significant of makeshift bed from someone's previous nights sleep.
The footsteps from residents can occasionally be heard above as the wooden floors creak and sag, willingly speaking their age. Wooden boards removed from windows appear as blackened eyes into an empty abyss. Vines snarl up the crumbling facade seeming to hold together the decaying red bricks as the mortar disintegrates away like enamel on a decomposing tooth. It is within the brass mills of Waterbury that the city's shunned remain. The mills have evolved into a playhouse for all sorts of antisocial behavior, from drugs too graffiti and exploration too. Those who choose to visit the mills have done so either out of necessity or morbid curiosity. A combination of beauty and desperation are well alive within the forgotten Waterbury brass mills, and so is a renounced encampment of shadow people, cast aside by a society blind to decay and hardship.
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