Aston, PA – Tank Farm
The neighborhood where I grew up was a strange place. Overhead, it resembled the chain from a chainsaw laying in a pile in some grass, with its teeth jutting out into the landscape with craggy, sharp edges. Blanketed in neatly trimmed grass and butterfly bushes, it was the image of the typical American town on one side. On the other, it was padded in by sets of massive geodesic domes surrounded by razorwire fencing. If you stood in the middle of the river-wide streets and stared in one direction, you saw a symbol of prosperity and middle-class aptitude – if you looked in the other, you saw an image of the unrelenting hunger of industry.
Built sometime in the late 60s or 70s, these gigantic domes were pylons to the oil processing industry that had its headquarters on the banks of the Delaware River just a few miles away. They were built to store excess gasoline (or gasoline byproucts – we were never sure) and paid no mind to aesthetic. They were these hulking products of iron and glass, and more closely resembled a space ship moreso than they served to represent the titanic strength of the petroleum industry that watched over them from afar.
There where nights where, under the warm and pulsating glow of the refineries, I would sit on the sidewalk of the outskirts of the tank farms and watch, slack-jawed, at how the structures unapologetically struck into the sky and eclipsed even my loftiest ambitions. I felt humble and small at the base of these things, looking and studying them even as I drove by every day.
In a lot of ways, they were anachronistic postules that clung onto Aston’s colonial past. Just in eyeshot from the metal fences, you could see a road interchange that was originally built for horse-bound traders to get from Philadelphia to Wilmington - an institution even older than engineering.
This place, and perhaps myself, were truly a hodgepodge of history. I think about those tank farms from time to time and feel that they made me the person I am – a mixture between brute-forced comfort and cold, utilitarian drive.
