I visited the site on February 6th. It took me four days on Bing and Wikitravel to find the site (from January 27th to 30th). It was a blustery cold (23 F) Saturday afternoon that I spent an hour taking over 220 photographs, video and sound recordings. This is a 13 minute transcript (edited for readability) of a voice recording I did once safely and warmly back in the car:
The vast salt flats of parking...
I'm really excited about the site. There's a lot of lower income people moving around on Parker Street with a fair amount of students. The site is surrounded by parking lots to the North; they're owned by Wentworth Institute of Technology. There's a gigantic pile of dirt on the site -- it looks like it was transfered from the adjoining lot used for storage/construction by the MBTA. There's a lot of topography I can work with. The building is still here [note: this was a worry of mine due to ruins constantly finding themselves on the short end of the stick], still boarded up, but there's construction vehicles next to the building [note: bobcats and portable sanitation]. There was a Comcast Van parked for the whole time I was there -- there was no one in the cab, so I assume they were all in the back. There was a rubber tube sticking out and into the ground [note: so there's sub grade possibilities?].
The various stormwater devices on Halleck Street
There's lots of manholes and stormwater management devices, drain inlets [note: archeology of site may now be necessary]. A lot of these are on Gurney meets Station St as well as on Halleck St (which is one-way, towards the southwest). There's lots of junk and overgrowth with decrepit pavement. There's a strange wall against the rail line -- it has a bridge like character too it. That's a potential sub site. The rail line itself has potential for sound overgrowth: when the train comes in/comes out, you can hear the sound from the vent at the High Voltage Building -- a subway sound appears to emanate from the vent as well as bouncing around above grade. You can hear an echo, a reverb of this subway sound in the courtyard between the big building and the small building.
The Wall to nowhere, abutting the retaining wall to the below grade rail line
There's some trees on the periphery of the giant landfill that there is. They seem to be relatively new growth, ten years or less, in random arrangement. When I first came in [into the courtyard] I believe there was a falcon sitting on the outcropping of the freight elevator of the big building. There was also a squirrel that climbed up into the eave of the small building; when I approached the building from Halleck Street, I heard this mysteriously frightening howling that made me briefly stop before completely crossing the street.
The "Small Building"
On Halleck Street there were some homeless people -- one with a shopping cart... but most walk on Parker Street; that seems to be the main road. You wouldn't be walking on Halleck or Station Street unless you were walking to/from your car parked in the lots.
Minidoro's Streets Potholes, Transformer, and Permit Parking
On the far end, next to the rail line, there's a power transformer -- there's parking there too, but you need a permit. The lot is much worse in its disposition [note: crumbling].
If you look closely, you can see the man hole cover center left, and to the right, the different inlay pattern suggesting an arch. A pipe may have been over said arch.
On the site there's some interesting things. For example, in the courtyard, there's this one spot in which you can tell from the building there used to be a door or a roof that connected to something else -- but all you can see is the upper reaches of the vestige of what remains. So it's quite possible that there is a basement or other kind of subterranean structure that is now either covered over or filled in. The smaller building may have been used as a garage or warehouse because there is a remnant of a concrete plinth, a chain-link railing, and barriers on the edges of a bricked-over garage entrance.
A stopover site to the main site perhaps? The building is massive. It's on Terrace Street, still in Mission Hill.
Next time I go visit the site, I'll have to take the train to Ruggles and then walk over, mapping the experience. Another note: When I was driving up Route 28, across the way, about 3/10 to 1/2 a mile to the site there's this ruin of a factory building along the rail line. It's at the bottom of Mission Hill.