Sherman Cahal is a historian and photographer based in a small town in upstate New York.
The Exposition Hall, once a part of the West Virginia Exposition & State Fair that operated in Wheeling until 1937, burned to the ground yesterday.
Victorian-era (“gingerbread”) adornments are one of my favorite architectural highlights of any building, transforming otherwise dull designs into lavish representations.
An exploratory group of veterans wants to relocate the dilapidated USS Ling, a Balao-class submarine of the United States Navy, from Hackensack, New Jersey to Louisville, Kentucky.
A late autumn drive in the fog and rain along Upper Delaware Scenic Byway along the Delaware River on the edge of the Catskill Mountains of New York can take anyone’s breath away.
One of the Mountain State’s best-kept secrets, Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum is a former mental hospital turned tourist attraction in Weston, West Virginia.
Uplands is a 42-room Victorian-style mansion that was constructed in the western fringes of Baltimore, Maryland in 1850.
Housing 155,000 inmates over its 104 years of operation, the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio commanded attention. Designed by Levi T. Scofield in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, the exterior of the prison resembled the appearance of several castles in western Europe. Aptly, it received the nickname “Dracula’s Castle” for its gothic presentation.
The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary Parish contains an abandoned church, school, and parish house in the Newburgh neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio.
The printing operations for the Crowell-Collier Publishing Company, then the world’s largest magazine publishing house, was located on High Street in Springfield, Ohio. After years of underutilization and disuse, the remainder of the once-storied complex will be demolished.
The Millard F. Field Building, located at Winchester Avenue and 16th Street in downtown Ashland, Kentucky, was home to the Field Department Store and Sears.
The first impressions of the historic Proctor’s Palace Theatre included several floors of debris, seats, and metalwork piled high, stairs that had devolved into ramps devised out of plater and asbestos, and dingy darkness. But the second tier offered views of the theater’s mammoth size and its remarkable, intact features, such as the balconies, orchestra pit, and extensive stenciling.
The Lonaconing, Maryland silk mill, last operated by General Textile Mills, is one of my favorite buildings to photograph. From its early 20th century machinery to its dated calendars and papers, it is remarkable that this testament to industrial heritage remains standing well over 50 years past its closure.
The historic Hotel Belvedere in Apollo, Pennsylvania burned to the ground shortly after midnight on July 24, 2019.
While living in the now-demolished Friar’s Club in Cincinnati, Ohio between 1941 and 1944, Lumen Martin Winter painted murals on the walls of the residents’ lounge. The 1,600 square-foot scenes, painted in tempera emulsion on a casein ground, depicted regional highlights of industry, music, religion, and literature.
Some time back, I was afforded an opportunity to view the private collection of airplanes of the late Walter Soplata in Ohio. Over the ensuing decades, he saved countless aircraft from being sold to the highest bidder and scrapped.
Warwick State Training School, a former alcohol and drug treatment center, youth rehabilitation complex, and prison will now be host to a brewery and medical marijuana farm in upstate New York.
The Palmer Park Apartment Building Historic District, well regarded for its ornate and varied examples of active and abandoned apartment buildings, is located in the Palmer Park neighborhood of Detroit, Michigan.
The Rust Belt defines a vast declining industrial corridor of the United States roughly between Chicago and Albany, New York, and dominating many of those once-bustling communities are churches. Many were built as domestic steel mills were being constructed across the country in the early 20th century, and many were closed with the collapse of the steel industry.
I visited the long-abandoned Van Nattas Pumping Station in Ithaca, New York while on a life-changing several-week-long road trip to the Finger Lakes in 2016.
