Almost every town of a certain size has an old reliable abandoned building, one that's more so a ruin after decades of withering away amongst encroaching trees and vegetation.

Examples of this exist in both Windsor & Chatham, but since I didn't grow up in either of those places, I never visited these old stalwarts as a teenager or a young adult. In addition, once I started going into some abandoned buildings, it was always over in Detroit. Lastly, if I had a car and a desire to go to one of these chill, really forgotten places, I'd probably find it more interesting to cross the border and go to Michigan examples like the Newport Nike Base or the Johnson Hose Factory.

For all of these reasons, I'd never been to Chatham's "glue factory" or the old Windsor Dragway.

Over Christmas, a recent wave of demolition and added security left us struggling to think of somewhere to go. Dependable, well-known abandoned buildings will usually come up at this point, but then they are usually thrown out for something better.

In the case of this afternoon, there would be no better idea than the Chatham "glue factory". Especially considering that I'd never been to here, Donnie & Steve were surprised and quickly ready to head over to Kent County to remedy that oversight.

Parking in a neighbourhood of small houses, we walked up the empty street until coming to train tracks and the smokestacks up ahead. It was hard to miss our destination without a single leaf blocking our view in the dead of winter.

Speaking of how noticeable this place is, I'm constantly surprised by the number of online people who claim to have "lived in Chatham their whole lives", but have no idea where this place is located. I guess if they never knew anyone in this tucked-in neighbourhood, then they didn't have any reason to come down here? Still, I always envisioned Chatham being so small that you'd see every nook & cranny by the time you grew up.

Not to mention the glue factory's popularity amongst partying teenagers. In addition to providing backdrops for modern weddings and getting your Instagram likes, this is the type of place that's so forgotten that it's ideal for underage drinking and weekend fires. This has been true for so long that you have online commenters reminiscing about this fact, then you click on their profile and find a 50- or 60-year-old in the profile picture.

(Someone who must've partied here in the late 90s/early 2000s was my friend Debbie, seeing as she couldn't believe it when I went to Cooper's annual Xmas get-together a couple of days later. "That place is still there?!?" Deb amusedly exclaimed. Turns out she beat me to this place by just a few years, haha.)

Almost everyone calls this place the "glue factory", but that's not correct.

The "glue factory" refers to Darlings fat rendering plant that was located at the base of Park Street, behind modern-day Lenover's Meats & Seafoods. Darlings was where you brought dead horses, cows & pigs - and even a bear one time supposedly - so that they could be burned and their fats put into train cars for different industrial purposes. The smell of this process was so awful that many Chatham folks remember this much more than any old industrial building.

Darlings was actually a brewery at one time & located in a much more remarkable building (shown at right). Unfortunately that's not the abandoned place you see here today.

These ruins belong to the C.I.L. Fertilizer Plant. CIL was built sometime before 1964 and looks so much like a modern-day fertilizer plant, that I doubt it was built as anything different originally. On this property you had these smokestacks, a Quonset hut, chemical lab and a four-story office building.

While I don't know when it was built, I know that it was abandoned in 1968 after a spectacular fire. This totally destroyed the chemical lab and damaged the office building, although the office building was a metal girder and concrete floor structure that withstood the neighbouring fire. This taller building would stay around for decades, providing a place for teenagers to drunkenly showcase their bravado as they climbed the girders to different floors and dodged missing concrete. Bruce Mercer has a picture that shows the fire-damaged ruins of this building still standing. Sadly a teenage girl would fall to her death here in mid-90s, leading the city to finally tear it down.

The other missing building, or I should say collapsed, is the Quonset hut (you can see the tangled mess of it in my first picture). I have friends who have pictures of this hut still standing & judging from online posts, it looked like it was cut down or collapsed sometime in 2011 or 2012.

For a high traffic place like this, I was worried about people coming through just because we were enjoying ourselves, drinking our Colt 45s and I didn't feel much like talking to any weirdos or teenagers. Thankfully the only person we saw was some middle-aged dude on a beat 10-speed who rode through here, then rode by again with some beer back to wherever he came from.

It wasn't too cold either, just cold enough to induce the nostalgia of being outside in the bare, midwinter woods of Southwestern Ontario or Michigan. The three of us laughed at bad JUFFALO graffiti, chugged away at cold 710s of malt liquor and joked about climbing the smokestack ladder, where a bicycle wheel was hung to make up for missing ladder rungs.

Looking back, I'm worried this might be a case of where I insist we should do this again and it won't be as good as the first time. That being said, I want to head back here every Christmas now. Good times.

As for plans for the "glue factory", I don't know of any. I see that a political candidate held his election speech in front of here, but nothing about tearing it down was mentioned (he was just using it as a backdrop?)

There's also the fact that more & more kids climb the smokestacks nowadays because of YouTube and Instagram, which always poses the hazard of one of them getting hurt and getting this place torn down.

Fingers crossed it lasts another 50 years.

Another spot I wanted to check out in Chatham was the Montreal Tavern.

I've lamented before about how every small town tavern and roadhouse is going away due to a variety of factors, and sure enough Chatham is no different.

I thought about stopping here with my Mom when we went to that Chatham hockey game a year ago, but she was really excited about a Portuguese restaurant and I didn't think an old roadhouse was a good replacement. (Thoughts like this are killing old roadhouses! Haha.)

And then I was in Newfoundland over the summer and saw that the Montreal Tavern had finally sold and was closing within a couple months. As always, I should have went when I had the opportunity.

I mean it's a bar with an Orioles logo painted on it...how could I have went wrong!

I was especially sad because this street features so much stucco and big box retail trash. I thought for sure this building from the late 1800s would be plowed over, but lo and behold, Steve wrote me the other day to let me know that Lighthouse Dental had renovated the building and did the unthinkable - they adapted to an old building instead of building a crappy, cheap, disposable square! In 2018 people!

Streetview has a view from September of 2017, mid-renovation.

If ever I'm home and need dental work, I know where I'm headed.

Sticking around Chatham, Donnie knew of a random bar that he thought we'd like: the Royal Tavern.

Constructed in 1897, the Royal Tavern was purchased in 2007 and the new owners "drove away the prostitutes, dope dealers and crack heads" according to a 2009 article from the Daily Chatham News. This article goes on to say how well the new owners were doing and how they'd spent a lot of money completing interior upgrades and constructing a new patio.

Walking from the gravel lot and into the narrow entryway, this was definitely the type of place I wanted to check out. Low ceilings, cabinetry from the 50s, old tube TVs and the walls littered with caricatures of the customers. Plus it was bumping enough that everyone was so busy, that I was able to simply relax and take it all in.

We wanted to hit up another similar bar afterwards, but these places are so few & far between nowadays...

So we went to some nightclub in Woodstock instead, haha.

Getting back to the focus of this update, the next weekend we were again stumped on where to go to have a relaxed hang during the daytime. We decided to head over to the old Windsor Dragway, an old drag strip off of Manning Road, between the 401 and 42.

This was another place that Donnie & Steve couldn't believe I hadn't already visited.

Within a few hours we were rumbling through some poor farmer's field, thankfully frozen and encrusted with the recent snow. Due to people illegally using this track in the 70s and 80s, there isn't a direct link to the roadway anymore but we found our way out here anyway.

There was just enough tree cover to hide the Liberty from nearby Manning Road.

The Windsor Dragway was only open for 3 years, opening in 1968 and being such a big deal that the grand opening was attended by Wally Parks, president of the National Hot Rod Association.

It would close for the season in 1971 and fail to reopen the next year. There's no definite reason given for its failure, but the two reasons I could find were either that Chrysler stored vehicles over winter here and the drag strip became rutted; or that the 1971 season was decimated by rainy weekends where the owner had to pay American racers rain or shine, even if he wasn't selling any tickets to the weather-cancelled races. This led to bankruptcy and closure of the track.

Seeing as the track isn't rutted in any of the photosets I've seen from this place, it seems like weather is the more likely reason.

Today all that stands back here, 250m from Manning Road, is a pair of concession stands and the old drag strip lined with guardrails. There was a control tower that was much more prominent than these low buildings, but it collapsed in the late 90s/early 2000s.

With everything else built of cinderblocks, I guess the old control tower was built with wood too, something that looks plausible from this old picture. A 2004 picture shows it in a collapsed heap.

Also, I want this jacket.

The Windsor Dragway doesn't have prominent smokestacks, it's far removed from any town and there's not much there; all of which plays a role in why this place isn't as popular as the "glue factory" in Chatham.

Outside of people who explore old ruins, I've never heard of anyone coming out here to party or hang out. (Admittedly, I only know a handful of Tecumseh people.)

Although it's a quick and simple explore, for us the Dragway worked great as a place to sip more cold Colt 45 out in the woods, clown on each other and die laughing at random nonsense. The walls were even standing enough to provide a windbreak from the chilly winds that had arrived since last week in Chatham.

We had all we needed. I was happy to have an abandoned building around that can provide a home for this type of afternoon.