🏭 Smith Foundry closes this week. What's up with Acme?

If you regularly travel along Hiawatha Avenue, then you also regularly wait at stoplights along Hiawatha. The pickings are slim for nice things to look upon at these intersections, which can elevate otherwise forgettable buildings into objects of interest. One of those, for me, has always been the Acme Foundry at 32nd Street.

The peeling pink building is kind of attractive, in a steampunk way, with its skyline of protruding stacks and neat four-letter sign that tells you the name of the business and absolutely nothing more. It's built right up to the sidewalk, which makes it feel almost inviting by Hiawatha's standards. It seems plucked from a different era, conjuring grainy images of overall-clad workers with metal lunchboxes and sooty faces filing out to catch the streetcar, their daily toils spent in service of some vague industrial purpose.

It's also plenty creepy. The windows are a patchwork of rusted metal, plywood, and painted glass. The doors have tiny windows that seem like someone might slide open and demand a password for entry. There are messy stacks of boxes and binders visible in the few windows that let light through. The fact that its name is shorthand for "generic company," and it has no subtitle or slogan, only furthers this impression.

Anyway, the news of nearby Smith Foundry closing up — it ceases operation this week after a century in business and decades of conflict with its East Phillips neighborhood over repeated air pollution violations — refreshed my generalized curiosity about Acme. What does it do? How long has it been there? Is it still in operation? Does it pollute?