Give me some of that old time refrigeration

The is a great old building in downtown Yakima, referred usually to the Perry building, now currently owned by Hollingberry. From what I’ve come to understand is the building was originally built in the 1930s for storage of some fruit storage, but mostly as a ice producer.

There used to be a underground tunnel to move the ice from the freezing tanks to the railroad tracks that are all around the place. From there the ice would be loaded on to railroad cars going back and forth from the coast, such as Seattle. The Ice would keep the produce, meats, or other items needing refrigeration, like giant ice chests on tracks.
Although the older sections of the building are not in use any more they were extremely fun to walk around in. You could almost feel history radiating of the walls, and the ghosts of the past still walk the halls.



If any one has more information about this building, or equipment that I’ll be showing shortly, let me know, and I’ll fix the entries.
First off this is an original Ammonia refrigeration system, not a Freon system that most people would find familiar (your refrigerator, or freezer in your house uses compressed Freon). Ammonia (NH3) has an extremely low boiling point, making it an ideal heat absorption element.

The ammonia used in industrial refrigeration is nothing like the ammonia you may use in you house hold cleaners, that may be as high as 4% and just smell obnoxious. When the ammonia is pure, it’s deadly; never mess around with it. NH3 is attracted to water and is easily absorbed, people are mostly water, do the math. When there is just vapor it becomes very difficult to breath as your lungs (being normally moist) will try to reject the vapor. Long term exposure (more then a few minutes) can cause modest to long term damage to you lungs. Ammonia will attack any areas of your body that tends to sweat, such as pits and groin, this is the reason most refrigeration plants have emergency wash down showers, incase of an accident.
The good news: In the ten years I’ve been in the industrial refrigeration business there has only been a small hand full of accidents (no one hurt) I’ve heard of, mostly do to equipment failing. And only one fatal, do to a group of people not used to working around this type of equipment, and pierced a charged pipe with a scissor lift and pinning that individual to that spot. The majority of the people working in this industry are very cautious and intelligent and know what to do when a problem occurs. Firemen and Hazmat people tend to quickly get involved when a larger emergency occurred, and this has only happened twice that I know of.

The other good news is; ammonia evaporates very quickly, in a matter of minutes a spill would be latterly gone (the place would still stink to high heaven for a while). At one plant I was at once, a transfer pump failed. And through one way or another the floor was flooded with maybe a ½ inch of liquid ammonia. Though I couldn’t stay in the building; watching through the open roll up door the floor was sizzling and popping like butter in a hot pan. And within minutes the serviceman had the problem fixed and the building was safe to enter again.
Why not use Freon if ammonia is so dangerous? Well from what I’ve been told: first ammonia is not as dangerous for the environment and Freon (ozone layer, remember). Ammonia is a natural product (urine, bird crap, you get the idea). Ammonia is far cheaper then Freon, and therefore cheaper to store the end product, and that translates to less overhead to get product to market. And the last reason not to use Freon; when Freon is used ignited it turns into a deadly phosgene gas that was used in WWI trenches.
Lets stop this and get back to the fun stuff: pictures.

The older part the building is actually in 4 layers: the basement where the refrigeration compressors are housed. The Ground floor there the old offices and loading docks were. The top two floors were for longer cold storage.
Although it is difficult to see the walls clearly in the above pictures, the wall are actually coated in 3/4 inch of cork over wood slats, covering saw dust for insulation.

You can see one of the old apple carts here on the 3rd floor and a small elevator in the background for moving product up and down from the lower floors.

This is what happens to a lot of old buildings, this is old growth wood, and in this case someone removed some of the ceiling form the second floor. Don’t walk around in the dark on the third floor!

The valves were the temperature regulation for the floor. The valves would tie into long lengths of iron pipe running the length of the room, back and forth. The ammonia in the pipes would expand as it absorbed heat and transform into a gas, pushing past the restrictors back to the compressor room, pulling the heat with it. This is very much like your refrigerator in your house works but with out all the fun valving. (I would very much like to see a refrigerator look like that.)

The darkness looms.

This is cool. What you are looking at is a cast iron condenser. Back when this was in use the hot gas would be pumped through these coils with possibly a water drencher and fan to cool the pipes making the ammonia shrink back to a liquid.

The condenser is in the old electrical room. Imagine finding a fuse above the door!

This building can serve as a fall out shelter in the basement, a nice little blast from the past.

Here’s the small elevators on the ground floor, you can get a better feel for the size with the wine barrels sitting in front of them.

A nice view down the basement/shipping room. Would you looks at the size of those timbers supporting the columns!

If you look close the storage tanks for the ice are right behind the columns. From here the ice would be pushed (?) down a shoot to the railroad loading tracks.

The computer room. Don’t blame me for the wire mess. I was just supposed to write a control program to replace the old DOS control system that was already there. Replace the computer and nothing else.

Basement level. There are some room that look as though they could have been crew rooms for lockers and sleeping and eating. But those are just guesses. Bomb shelter, yes defiantly.

This is the drive system for the big elevator. The belt drives are total cool, but some how I’m just not sure I would trust them. One person I talked to remembered bringing driving a forklift on and off this platform all the time.

Part of the basement has always been a machine shop in one way or another. You can still see part of the belting system hanging from the ceiling. At one time a full size lathe sat in one corner, also ran of the belting system

Not a ban saw, but a moving hack saw, power off the belts.

How’s this for a drill press. When the belting system was no longer in use someone made a little stand and hooked up a 110 AC motor to power the belts for the drill.

This is an cool one, some of these fly wheels measure up to 10 feet tall and were obviously installed when there was no building yet, at least above. I would love to know the weight of the behemoth.

Some of the old tools still hang on the wall

Look at the little prop fan blade, it’s pointing at a solid wall. Makes me wonder if this section was above street level at one time.

Everything could be run off of belts, like this little pump in the back.

Storage for some removed compressors

This beasty was a functioning Frick up until around 20 years ago. The fly wheel is so big it extends several feet into the ground. The oiler must have been constantly feed as I could not find any return lines back to the canister. The whole compressor was powered off of 2200v AC and ran about 100rpm. All around the motor, rubber mats line the floor. One electrician once told me that at 2200 volts sparks could jump a good gap if there was a better ground.

No simple switch to turn these compressors on, they had to staged on slowly or you could brown out a city.

My boot for comparison on a small motors coil.

If this place ever gets scrapped, I wan these gauges!

That’s it.
Personally I think this place should be cleaned up and opened to the public as a museum and or a wine tasting area, there are possibly lots of uses that I think people would be willing to visit.

I’m glad I was allowed to take the pictures and show them for the rest of the world. People talk about history like it happened centuries ago, but I feel even our recent past is probably not as well documented as it should have been. If I come across any more info on this place, or items I will post it.