Dickson Incinerator

Built in 1955 and abandoned in 1978, the Dickson Incinerator feels like an organ torn from the body of Montreal, a beast of brick and steel that once devoured the waste of a city in transformation before being sentenced to silence. Its two chimneys, rising into the sky like rusted needles, haven’t smoked in decades but still carry in their walls the acidic memory of the years when everything ended in dust and heat. Inside, the gaping pits resemble dried-out throats where the temperature collapsed all at once, leaving only a ghost smell and a hollow emptiness that echoes beneath every step. The metal walkways still creak, stubborn, as if the machine refuses to accept that it has nothing left to burn. Part of the site is still used, the rest lives in a half-reality, a fragmented territory where pigeons, wind, and graffiti reclaim the surfaces like wild plants. Dickson is not just an industrial ruin; it is a concrete warning, a place where time settles slowly, where every photograph seems to capture the held breath of a creature that never fully sleeps.