The American Dream of Ploiești

Don't take that title for granted and don't think for a moment that if you decide to come around my city, you will be able to find the suburbs of Dallas in the '60s, with it's massive, rounded Buicks and those powerful Chevys parked in the driveways. No nice, bobbed hair ladies, in their beautiful, all coloured dresses, running to their husbands that forgot their meal while leaving for work. No kisses through the side window of the car with the right leg bent behind and promises like: "I'm gonna cook you the dinner you won't forget tonight... and not only!".

I work in the middle of a fucking refinery. When it doesn't smell like rotten eggs, it smells like cat piss. If I get out of the office, I can bathe my eyes in the steep sulphur mountain that rises very close to my company's building. The peak like Kilimanjaro when it snows as the bottom is warmer. Wherever you look, communist buildings, industrial constructions, left to decay by either abandoning them or by intense use without any kind of investment for more than 25 years now.

Rust, dust, holes in the asphalt, crumbled walls and sad faces... I'm checking this out when I take my mid-day break and I go looking for a retreated place from where I can post something on Steemit, having a smoke in my car.

So a few days ago I entered through the old gates of the "Romanian-American Refinery" in Ploiești (now the Lukoil refinery, bigger than any neighbourhood of Ploiești and the refinery that surrounds my workplace). Built around 1907, it started as a joint venture between us, the inexperienced, oil-rich country, and the Americans, led by Standard Oil. Though for you foreigners may seem a little bit odd to hear about Rothschild investing in a godforsaken, end of the world country in the begining of XXth Century, you have to know that this refinery was state of the art at that time.

A mix of powers and influences: observe the posters and the flags in the entrance of the Romanian-American Refinery sometimes after the fall of the Nazi Regime

As soon as you make a left, coming from the city, passing over the old, abandoned tram lines that used to bring those thousands of working people on the industrial platform, you get the feeling that something is odd. In a brick round booth, that seems taken out of time and placed like a flower in the middle of a dog shit, there is this cheap store, "whatever product you buy is 0.5$" type, that is swimming in the water flooding the immense hole in the ground in front of it.

There's something weird in the architecture of the small booth. Something Victorian I would say, way out of the usual straight lines, concrete and functionalism of the usual soviet, industrial architecture that dominates this production platform. I've never been here before so driven by curiosity I pushed a little further, through the poor colony that still serves, in its matchbox-like buildings, as a shelter for a lot of people in need of a rooftop over their heads. Once you get to the entrance of the ghost that once was the communist factory which was built on top of the old Standard Oil grounds, you have to go left or right. That's the border of the old refinery.

Turning left takes you on a street on which you can see how the cultural layers settled, once the dust of each revolution settled. On both sides, you can see red brick houses, with generous porches, high attics and long windows, English style basements exiting directly in the large gardens. There's still a scent of America around, even though socialism cut down in half these houses in order to fit more people in them.

Once in full sight, fronting the main road that was coming from the city, the "American neighbourhood" of Ploiești was a small oasis for the engineers, mechanics, chemists that were settling here, brought by the American company. Together with their families or not, they had here a great time sometimes after 1918. I found out that the houses were built around that time contacting one of the owners that had an announcement on a website, trying to sell half of one.

Romanian - American Reffinery in Ploiești then and now

The Refinery Complex enlarged by communists

The American Neighbourhood position inside the refinery then and now

The community here had everything at its disposal, by the grace of Mr Rothschild:).
It seems they had a community pool, social club and American style burger barbeques were not unusual. During those times, the refinery was well away from the city's centre and I believe the feeling of being "in the countryside" was the main attraction here.

Now the whole place is trapped inside the industrial complex that was built over the years, crumbling under the years of toxic waste, proletaries, working men and later, dirty suburbs. If you look at the whole picture of the place and they way that it evolved, it's like it was engulfed by this monstrous disease called "industry".

Old, aerial view of the Romanian - American Refinery, sometimes during the WWII - in the background you can see Ploiești and on the left, the American Neighbourhood of Standard Oil

I bet not a lot of the people living there realise that they live in some architectural pieces of history. Life around the American villas in Ploiești is hard nowdays. Though in their glory they were probably an attraction for the people of Ploiești they are now mere ruble.

Here and there, the only living things still witness of that period are the tall trees that survived around some of the houses.