This is the heart of the Forgotten Triangle, and i had been hanging around its scrapyards and brick yards for twenty-five years, when i saw this guy with a fire recycling bricks, which, for me, was its third reincarnation as someone's brick yard.
I took my camera and tripod, and shot as i approached him, and intuitively felt, he was ok with me. We hung out and shared stories of the area and he spoke to me of bricks.
That was 2005 and we still hang out quite a bit. Joe was eighty-nine years old and iwasstill slinginging bricks in another section of town. He left the Triangle around 2011, along with everybody and everything that was left there, worked at a demiltion yars ooff St. Clair.
Joe's wife died of Covid in 2021, and, he briefly went back to work, but his health began to fail, had a heart attack and rarely left home after 2022. I continued to visit him at his home, and, his son, Mike, took over the Brickyard.
