The Same Building Keeps Converting
A cotton mill, a loft block, a leather warehouse, a research lab — different cities, one arc.
The same building keeps converting. I have photographed it in a dozen forms. A cotton mill in Southeastern Massachusetts. A loft block in Lower Manhattan. A leather warehouse in Boston. Bell Telephone Laboratories in the West Village — where talking film and the vacuum tube were invented, now Westbeth, housing for artists. Different cities, different decades, the same arc every time.
Each was built for work that left. The textile machines went south for cheaper labor, then overseas. The research lab outgrew its walls and moved to a New Jersey campus. The warehouses emptied when the freight stopped coming to that part of town. None of these buildings failed. The work moved — the way work always moves when the technology under it changes — and the demand for that kind of space, in that kind of place, moved with it.
So they sat. Often for years. Too obsolete to use as built, too solid and too large to tear down for what the land was worth. That vacancy is the part the conversion story skips, and it’s the part that tells you the most: a building standing empty is a building between one use and the next, waiting for its neighborhood to catch up to it.
Then each one converted. Lofts, condos, studios, subsidized artist housing. The freight elevators are features now. At Westbeth, the old West Side rail line still runs through the second floor — cut off now from the rest of its track, which became the High Line.
I keep photographing them because the pattern is the point. One building is a story. A dozen of them, in three states, doing the same thing across a century, is a cycle. The machines left. The buildings waited for the next use to arrive.
This is the first in a month on conversions — what empties a building, and what fills it. The others, and the essay that ties them together, follow through the month.
— Eve Moss
Map & Parcel. Field Notes. June 2026.
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