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Posts Tagged ‘Abandoned’

Kid Stuffed: 10 More Eerie Abandoned Orphanages

28 Nov

[ By Steve in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

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Little orphans any? Not so much these days thanks to fostering and improved economies, the result being many former orphanages have been left eerily abandoned.

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While many orphanages were built from scratch back in the day, others (mainly in the UK) occupied vacant country homes sold by latter-day aristocrats laid low by falling incomes and rising tax rates. Such was the case of the now-abandoned Bramham Children’s Home in West Yorkshire, England.

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Dating from 1806, the building was owned by the Ramsden family until 1947 when they sold the rambling pile to the West Riding County Council Children’s Department for the princely sum of £8,000 (roughly $ 10,000 at the time)… about £350,000 ($ 435,000) in today’s money. In its new incarnation as the Bramham Children’s Home, the orphanage only housed 35 children in 1970 cared for by about 16 staff. Not too shabby! By the early 1980s the orphanage had closed yet the building still stands, as photo-documented by Imgur user LeeRielly in August of 2016.

Freinetschool Kasteel De Wip

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The Freinetschool Kasteel De Wip, located in Wezemaal, Belgium operated for well over a century: from 1880 through 2008 to be exact. At the time of its closing due to dangerous structural decay, the building housed 54 live-in students divided into 3 preschool classes and 6 primary school classes.

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For the past 8-odd years, this exquisite little “castle” has continued to deteriorate with camera-toting explorers such as urbex.nl having to deal with rotten floors, the state of which worsened between visits in 2011 and 2014.

Silverlands

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Silverlands, located in Chertsey, Surry, UK can trace its roots back to 1814 when a local brewer invested his prodigious profits in a grand country home. In 1938, The Actor’s Orphanage backed by none other than Noël Coward took over the home but by 1958 the cost of urgent structural repairs had made the orphanage economically non-viable.

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In the late 1990s, local governmental authorities floated a proposal to re-establish Silverlands as a live-in clinic for pedophiles. Local residents opposed to the plan mounted a candlelight vigil (presumably they were fresh out of torches and pitchforks) and got the council to change their minds. Photographers Stacey Louise and Tim Barber visited the still-magnificent remains of Silverlands in early 2015, returning with a visual record of its former opulence.

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Kid Stuffed 10 More Eerie Abandoned Orphanages

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Tee’d Off: A Dozen Abandoned Golf Driving Ranges

21 Nov

[ By Steve in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

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Golf isn’t the hit sport it used to be and one consequence is the proliferation of abandoned driving ranges closed due to changes in recreational pursuits.

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The good thing about abandoned driving ranges – at least, for those who photograph and/or write about them – is that they’re usually outdoors and as such, are often overgrown with invasive vegetation. Kinda adds to the post-apocalyptic vibe if you know what we mean (and we think you do). In any case, Flickr user Josh Lightbody visited one such overgrown abandoned driving range in Northern Ireland just this past summer. “No Golfing”, in my abandoned driving range? Indeed, it’s more likely than you think.

From Swing to Sting

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Welcome to Kejonuma Leisure Land, or maybe “unwelcome” is more apropos. Located in northern Japan, KLL opened in 1979 as a sort of pay-as-you-go themeless theme park: visitors could partake in amusement park rides, a campsite, a six-hole golf course and last but not least: a driving range. The shattered clock in the first photo, by the way, now houses a nest of suzumebachi… “sparrow bees” in the direct Japanese translation, Giant Asian Hornets to the rest of us. Yep, the fun never stops at Kejonuma Leisure Land even though the park itself has.

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The intrepid urbex explorers from Abandoned Kansai visited Kejonuma Leisure land – with the owner’s permission – in May of 2014. We would have gone during the winer, what with the Giant Asian Hornets and all, but that’s what makes those guys so intrepid… and presumably unaffected by extreme pain.

Magnum PEI

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Flickr user Brett Sanderson took the strikingly detailed HDR photos above at an abandoned driving range in Charlottetown, PEI, Canada in mid-September of 2013. Bud the Spud unavailable for comment.

Ball’s-Eye View

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Driving ranges can be so large it takes, say, a camera-equipped drone to take them in properly. Cue YouTube Eric Milewski, who accommodatingly brought just such a device to an abandoned driving range in Burnaby, British Columbia in the summer of 2015. Milewski employed his ZMR250 250mm Carbon Fiber Mini FPV Quadcopter drone at the now-closed Hastings Golf Centre. Watch the entire 4:13 video here.

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Teed Off A Dozen Abandoned Golf Driving Ranges

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Spilt Milk: 12 Udderly Abandoned Dairies & Dairy Farms

07 Nov

[ By Steve in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

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Now you calcium, now you don’t… OK, that was awful but so’s the sight of these abandoned dairy farms moldering away ’til the cows come home.

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The so-called “Scary Dairy” in Camarillo, California was a dairy farm operated under the auspices of the former Camarillo State Mental Hospital. The dairy opened in 1932 and was part of an enlightened (for the time) program that explored alternative treatments for the mentally ill. We’ll refrain from making any “mad cow disease” references.

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The dairy was closed in the mid-1960s and the hospital itself shut down in 1997. Five years later, the hospital was renovated and occupied by the new California State University, Channel Islands and in 2009 the university bought the 367-acre parcel of land that included the abandoned dairy farm.

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Now known as the CSU Channel Islands University Park, the land is open for public use though the Scary Dairy is fenced off – not that this has stopped graffiti artists from making their marks. Flickr user Thomas Hawk visited the Scary Dairy in June of 2011, taking these and many more spectacular and spooky photos.

Boom To Bust

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Here’s the Sinton Office of the Red Canon Dairy in Cañon City, Colorado. Flickr user jimsawthat‘s photo captures the well-worn aura of a business with deep roots going back many decades. The photographer captured the above image on December 26th of 2014.

No Milk Today

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Flickr user David Benjamin visited an abandoned dairy farm in early May of 2013, and although he doesn’t give any hints as to where this gently decaying farm is located, that’s just as well: not everything needs embellishment with graffiti.

Southburied

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The Southbury Training School in Southbury, Connecticut opened in 1940 and stopped accepting new mentally-challenged “students” in 1986. The facility has operated in a sort of weird limbo since then: in 2001 there were 639 residents (down from 1,111 in 1986). At that time the average age was 55 and the average resident had been at STS for 43 years.

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The school’s on-site dairy farm was closed in the late 1990s with the last 101 cows sold off to a local farmer in 2003. Urbex explorer infraredrobert visited STS in March of 2015, where he snapped the photos above and more.

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Spilt Milk 12 Udderly Abandoned Dairies Dairy Farms

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Power struggle: Hauntingly beautiful images of abandoned cooling towers

05 Nov

A look inside active and abandoned cooling towers

Belgian photographer Reginald Van de Velde has made a project of exploring the inner workings and mechanisms of some of Europe’s awe-inspiring, dormant giants: cooling towers. His images document both active and decommissioned cooling towers, as well as towers slated for demolition.

The interiors of the towers yield astonishing vistas, and as they’re abandoned he’s able to enter explore them, document and admire them. In his imagery he searches for patterns, a sense of scale, repetition, and disruption, rendering landscapes within the massive structures.

‘One thing that fascinates me extremely is the fact that not a single cooling tower is the same,’ Van de Velde says. ‘Each and every one of them has a unique interior design and build! They all look the same from the exterior, but with each visit to a new cooling tower I’m always surprised by a different interior, time and time again.’

To see more of Reginald’s work, visit his website or follow him on Facebook and Instagram.

A look inside active and abandoned cooling towers

Vegetation is slowly taking over the bottom area of this cooling tower slated for demolition, Belgium. Photo by Reginald Van de Velde

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Inside the belly of an active cooling tower: billions of water drops fall down while releasing heat to the environment. Belgium. Photo by Reginald Van de Velde

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The impressive interior view of a giant cooling tower scheduled for maintenance, France. Photo by Reginald Van de Velde

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The spectacular view inside a decommissioned gasometer in Germany, looking upwards. The air vents at the top dome create natural ambient light. Gasometers can reach heights of 150 meters. Photo by Reginald Van de Velde

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Unreal scenery resembling the set of a sci-fi movie. This is the view inside a defunct cooling tower in Belgium. Photo by Reginald Van de Velde

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Warm moist air rises from a central outlet inside an active cooling tower, Belgium. Photo by Reginald Van de Velde

Inside Active and Abandoned Cooling Towers

Snow particles cover the interior mechanism of an abandoned cooling tower in Belgium. Photo by Reginald Van de Velde

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Covered in moss and algae, these beams support the inner structure of a defunct cooling tower, UK. Photo by Reginald Van de Velde

A look inside active and abandoned cooling towers

A structure that resembles the look and feel of a cooling tower: this is the view inside a gasometer, an industrial recipient used for the storage of natural gas. Belgium. Photo by Reginald Van de Velde

To see more of Reginald’s work, visit his website or follow him on Facebook and Instagram.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Scrubbed: 10 Unclean Abandoned Soap Factories

30 Oct

[ By Steve in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

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These abandoned soap factories sure look filthy… if only there was something that could scrub away the dirt & grime, making them look shiny and new again.

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The old abandoned Wink Soap Company building in Racine, Wisconsin was built in 1900 though Wink didn’t move in until 1938. The company then proceeded to make soap like it was going out of style – it wasn’t but Wink was, shutting down their soap-making operations in 1980. The building, still sporting its handsome though faded painted sign, looks like it closed fairly recently instead of 35-odd years ago.

Hosed Down

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This abandoned soap factory somewhere in France isn’t much to look at but within its bland decaying shell, a graffiti masterwork by the artist Ziru complements the factory’s detritus of hoses and rust. Kudos to Flickr user Romany WG who captured this ephemeral artwork for posterity in mid-October of 2011.

Finnished

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This abandoned soap factory in Kaarina, southwestern Finland, is close enough to a major city (Turku, in this case) to attract graffiti artists yet isolated enough to let them do their deeds in relative privacy.

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It’s not known why the factory closed – supplying all those saunas must have been good for business. Kudos to Flickr user WIGILOCO for snapping these images and more on a visit to the factory in late 2010.

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Scrubbed 10 Unclean Abandoned Soap Factories

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Beauty in Decay: Moody Murals Bring Human Faces Back to Abandoned Places

25 Oct

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

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Abandoned places are often steeped in a mixture of emotional impressions, commingling a sense of loss and a confrontation of our own mortality with slivers of hopefulness for a new future, as nature begins to take over what we’ve left behind. As we move through these deteriorating spaces, strewn with the belongings of former inhabitants who seem to have simply disappeared, we wonder who they were and why the spaces that once sheltered them as they went about their lives have come to this. It’s these emotional qualities that make a new series of murals by Australian street artist Rone all the more poignant and powerful.

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Entitled ‘Empty,’ the series places the artist’s signature portraits of women on the walls of abandoned interiors, deepening their emotional weight. Much of the subjects’ glamour is stripped away as their skin takes on the texture of peeling paint, the lines of their faces are interrupted by fallen tiles and their gazes are pointed down at the destruction of their environments.

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For the Melbourne-based artist, this series represents a shift from the smooth, clean surfaces of his canvases and even the more clear-cut exterior walls upon which his murals are typically painted. But Rone has always found meaning in the temporary nature of these installations, as the artworks are gradually worn away by the elements or painted over by vandals and other artists.

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Rone exhibited ‘Empty’ at the soon-to-be-demolished Star Lyric Theatre building in Melbourne, presenting photographs of the murals in situ along with works on canvas and paper. The artist also painted a new mural directly onto the back wall of the theater, stretching nearly 33 feet from floor to ceiling. It’s a fitting way for the decaying Art Nouveau building to go out, with Rone’s canvases lining its blackened and stained surfaces. See more photos of the installation at Street Art News.

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Nothing Shocking: Abandoned & Derelict Battery Factories

23 Oct

[ By Steve in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

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These former battery factories once lead, er, led the way in electrifying society; now they sit abandoned in environs rife with heavy metal contamination.

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The abandoned Power City Warehouse in Niagara Falls, New York began producing batteries for automobiles and tractors back in 1910. In the early 1940s, work of a classified nature was being conducted there in support of the Manhattan Project – the top-secret initiative charged with creating the atomic bomb. By the 1960s it had been bought by the Prestolite Company, who re-tolled the factory to manufacture hard rubber battery cases and to fill lead-acid batteries with sulfuric acid. The factory was abandoned in the late 1980s.

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The EPA conducted a survey of the site in 2001 that revealed extensive contamination with lead, semi-volatile organic compounds, PCBs, and pesticides in the soil and buildings. Radioactive slag was discovered on the property in early 2012. Flickr user Kevin McBride (Mr Kevino) visited “The Battery Factory”, as it is known colloquially by urbex’ers, in August of 2008 to snap a small selection of photos… hope he wore appropriate clothing like, say a haz-mat suit.

Edison’s Other Bright Idea

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Better buy glass company stock STAT – the former Edison Storage Battery factory in West Orange, NJ is being renovated and re-purposed into Edison Village and roughly 900 windows in the circa-1914 main building are due to be replaced.

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The factory manufactured batteries for submarines, mining lamps, railroad signals and more. The Battery Building, abandoned since 1965, was the only remaining building in Edison’s once-enormous West Orange industrial complex aside from Edison’s old laboratory, now part of the Thomas Edison National Historic Park. One reason for its longevity was the special “Edison Cement” used in its construction – wrecking balls bounced off the outer walls leaving nary a dent.

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Abandoned America: Photographing a forgotten history

02 Oct

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Photographing abandoned spaces has gained a reputation to some as a voyeuristic act, with little respect paid to the subject or its history. But for Matthew Christopher, it’s much more than ‘ruin porn.’ He runs Abandoned America, and his interest in photographing abandoned structures started a decade ago with an asylum in Philadelphia. Working at mental health facilities, he calls exploring Philadelphia State Hospital a life-changing experience. He picked up photography and started keeping a record of the places he visited at Abandoned America.

He tells Resource Travel ‘If there was one thing I’d hope to achieve, I suppose it would be encouraging people to see abandoned spaces not as eyesores but as the treasures they sometimes are.’ He’s also aware of the often sad stories behind the buildings he enters, and encourages those looking to follow in his footsteps to do two things: ‘be careful and be respectful… just because these places are abandoned, doesn’t mean that nobody cares about them or that it’s OK to loot or vandalize them. Leave them as you found them.’ 

You can read the full interview with Christopher over at Resource Travel and see more of his images.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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True Colors: Sony Glitter-Bombs an Abandoned Romanian Casino

23 Sep

[ By SA Rogers in Abandoned Places & Architecture. ]

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An abandoned Romanian casino long past its prime is infused with new life in the form of thousands of colorful glitter bombs in this striking ad by Sony for its range of BRAVIA 4K HDR televisions. The whole thing was shot in 4K, capturing every little piece of glitter as it explodes out of popping balloons packed floor-to-ceiling inside the aging structure. Over 4,000 balloons and 3,300 pounds of glitter were used to create the ad.

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Onlookers began to gather outside the casino on the day of the shoot, drawn by the strange sight of all those white balloons stacked up inside the elegant arched windows. In the film, a single balloon begins tumbling through the space until it’s almost entirely filled with them.

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As you can probably imagine, it would have been hard for a photographer to hit the trigger fast enough to capture the action at just the right milliseconds – but they found a clever way around that. High-speed photographer Fabian Hefner attached a noise sensor to his camera shutter so it triggered every time a balloon popped.

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Sony commissioned singer-songwriter Tom Odell to re-record the Cyndi Lauper song ‘True Colors’ for the ad, which will be released as a single on September 30th. Watching the whole video is definitely worth a few minutes of your time, just for the satisfaction of seeing glitter spew absolutely everywhere – in 4K, if your connection allows.

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Stripped: 12 Sleazy Abandoned Adult Movie Theaters

01 Aug

[ By Steve in Drawing & Digital. ]

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These 12 abandoned adult movie theaters hark back to the days before the advent of the internet let porn aficionados get their kicks without leaving home.

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The bedraggled Franklin Theater was once a posh picture-show palace that seated 350 privileged patrons per sitting. Opening in the late 1920s – arguably Detroit’s golden age – the Franklin gradually deteriorated along with the rest of the Michigan metropolis. The name was changed to “Guild” in 1962 and the fare fell from first-run flicks to foreign art films to, finally, xxx-rated offerings. Kudos to Detroiturbex.com for snapping these gritty images.

Private "entertainment" booths.

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Like many movie houses forced by changing economic conditions to cater to society’s baser desires, the Franklin/Guild installed private “entertainment” booths in 1992. This audience-friendly feature allowed the theater to hang on another decade or so until it met the sad fate common to far too many Detroit establishments: abandonment, neglect and vandalism.

Flickering Out

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The Kinsei Theater in Yokosuka, Japan managed to hold out well into the 21st century though more recent photos appear to show a more expected outcome. As grungy as it looks, the Kinsei Theater hasn’t decayed much from its heyday… perhaps inherent grungy-ness comes standard when one opens an adult theater.

Roll Credits

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This unnamed abandoned adult theater doesn’t look too grotty in the light… provided said light isn’t of the UV variety. Credit the nice folks at Bugaga.me for the images above; hopefully they washed up REAL good after they left.

Ex-Salax

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Flickr user Emanuele (zak mc) captured the rich tableau above on September 5th of 2012. A casual crowd of all ages traverses the Seville, Spain street completely oblivious to the decrepit SALA X adult movie theater moldering away on the sidelines. Note the curious upside-down sign just to the right of the theater. Contrast Emanuele’s take of the SALA X with the monochrome shot by Alejandro Pacheco taken – presumably at night – two years earlier.

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Stripped 12 Sleazy Abandoned Adult Movie Theaters

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