Ghost Town of Aguirre Central Revisited

Another installment of PR’s Sugar Industry of years past.

The San Juan Photo and Social Club decided to take a ‘guerrilla’ run at the old sugar mill in Aguirre.  I could not pass that up!  We met the guys from San Juan at the Aguirre Post Office, on Sunday morning. It was a bright and sunny day.  The weather forecast was for a 35% chance of rain.. other than a light shower on our way there, it never rained while we were shooting. This would be my 2nd visit to Aguirre.

We are in the middle of the dry winter season now so dead grass and dying brush was everywhere. In Coamo, they are busy burning it away from the side of the road. You can see some of that from the last video I did, from the San Blas Marathon Route. In fact, some of the burning came very close to our house. I digress…

The shoot consisted of 2 Mates from San Juan, me-self and me First Mate. There are more photos taken by the group over on the Meetup Group Web page, ‘A trip to the South Side‘.

We started at the abandoned hotel, up the road a bit from the local Post Office. I had shot it before so I wanted to try a little HDR photography this time around.

For photographers that want to know: High Definition Range (HDR) is done by taking a series of 3 or 5 or more bracketed shots from the same position and combining them into a single finished image. This will inevitably produce a shot with longer, more dramatic tone and more vivid color. I work from within Photoshop via a plug-in, but there are dedicated, free standing apps that can do this too. Very dramatic results can be produced this way. Unfortunately HDR has been over done lately, verging on a fad.

I prefer a less heavy-handed approach.

It’s a great way to add a little drama to an image. The one draw-back to shooting true HDR is you have to do it from a tripod and no moving content, or the images will not line-up later.  A ‘pseudo’ HDR effect can be created with one image, if that’s all you got. Something that’s easy to do from within Photoshop. HDR is also an option on newer digital SLR cameras as well, making the whole process less of a hassle. Bracketing: To shoot a series of normal, under and over exposed images of the same subject, from the same position.

Photographers who used to shoot 35mm slide film, often bracketed their shots to guarantee a usable image.  Better to burn-up a little film than to loose a shot.

Light-meters are not infallible.

We spent most of an hour working over the hotel before moving on. It is still one of my most favorite sites to shoot and easy to get to. The other guys ventured off to the overgrown swimming pool. I didn’t want to wade through the brush to see it.

There are still shots I want from the hotel so I will get back to it sometime.

From there, we moved over to the abandoned Sugar Mill. It’s a sprawling complex of steel and concrete structures in various states of decay covering many acres.

Aguirre Central was basically a company town with its own port.

You can easily make out the grounds and old port via GoogleMaps satellite images.  We spent 3 hours working our way up and through it. Parts of Aguirre Central were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2002.

There is a sign out at the gate (in
Spanish) warning about the presence of Asbestos.

We did run across some and were careful not to disturb any of it. An effort had been made to collect it up, but there is still plenty of it there. The lower bays had standing water 3 to 4 feet deep and deeper. It was clear enough to see the bottom in most places.  Much of the wooden flooring has rotted away and the corrugated tin roofs are rusting out and falling to the lower levels. This exposes more of the interior to the tropical climate so it can be slippery in places.

There were bull frogs all over the place.

The largest frogs I have seen to date. The one featured here is at least 4 inches long and 3 inches wide.  A beautiful specimen.  I saw one iguana, but he didn’t want to have anything to do with us and ran off. Another hazard to watch out for are wasps.  They like to build their nests up high in the steel girders. I had to back-track from one spot because of them. One other thing to mention, stray dogs live on the property, they will go out of their way to avoid you. Just something to keep an eye out for.

We made our way up inside one building where the huge sugar crystalizer vats stood.

It takes immense amounts of heat and pressure to force crystalization. The scale of this facility is hard to fathom, even when standing in front of it.

By 1961, Aguirre Central could process 12,500 tons of sugar a day.  A very advanced, almost autonomous facility requiring minimal human interaction.

In 1949, there was 31 miles of rail serviced by 11 engines and 798 wagons supporting this facility. This was all before the development of island-wide roads. Remnants of the rail system are still on the grounds and there is one rail car on display next to a little park. Because of its level of automation and sophistication, it was the last sugar mill to close on the island, in 1993 (per Wikipedia).  Aguirre had changed hands several times in an effort to save it. In 1973, Aguirre Central passed to the Sugar Corporation, a government agency of Puerto Rico who ran it until it was formally closed.

As we were making our way back out, we checked out part of the main office where Brad had discovered an old Platen Letterpress. It was definitely from the turn of the previous century, not this one. It had been stripped of it’s motor and rollers, but was largely intact. Badly rusted, for sure.

I had once briefly used a letterpress like this in Alaska.

Lead cast letters were spilled all over the floor. The wooden font trays were all rotted away by termite infestation. There was even a Litho darkroom in the back with the remnants of a horizontal copy camera. It brought back a lot of memories of working as an apprentice.

I don’t miss those days,
thank you very much.

We collected ourselves up and then headed out to get something to eat. The original plan was to stop at Casa de los Pastelillos. But it was packed for a Sunday with a line out the door of folks waiting to get in.  We ended up stopping at one of the smaller road side shacks and scored some freshly fried goodness.

Most authentic road-side Puerto Rican food is mild so by all means, try it.  A bottle of hot sauce is never far off.  The guys had fresh Bacalaito and we had Alcapurrias. We washed it down with ice cold cokes. It was delicious and reasonably cheap.

El Fogon de Suza was the real deal.

Once we finished with ‘dinner’, we said our good-byes and headed home. A great day, all in all.

Research for this story was taken from the online, Encyclopedia of Puerto Rico. A much more thorough collection of PR facts than can be found on Wikipedia. I’ve added it to the Side Bar list of good Puerto Rican sites. Thanx Brad, for the link.

Next Up: The Ponce Carnival, then the Coffee Festival
of Maricao, weather permitting