Many years ago, I night hiked into the Indiana Army Ammunition Plant (IAAP) in southern Indiana—the most substantial industrial abandonment in the United States. Sprawling over 19,000 acres, IAAP was overwhelming.
Driving home to upstate New York on a cold, blustery evening, I stopped to visit a childhood memory: the everlasting tourist attraction, Roadside America, but I arrived too late, and the kitschy gift shop and model railroad exhibit was closed for the day. Determined to make the best of the waning evening, I stopped by next door to visit the ruined Suwannee Belle.
Or singles day. Whatever.
Tucked away in the Catskill Mountains of New York is an abandoned artist’s residence once belonging to the Romesky family. The house is now in an unfortunate state of collapse but much of the interior remains intact and includes glimpses into their livelihoods.
Boarding houses began to develop in the Catskill Mountains in the late 1800s as working-class families sought refuge from the dirty, unhealthy city in the mountains. Lodgers would rent one or more rooms for one or more nights, and meals were usually not included in the tab.
There is nothing like coming across a wayside junkyard nestled deep in the Appalachian Mountains while traveling in Pennsylvania. Following up on the incredible Volkswagen graveyard, this junkyard is far smaller with only a handful of vehicles but every bit as photogenic.
The discovery of an untouched apartment above a long-abandoned pharmacy in New York led me to think about my mortality and how finite my life is.
Towering over the modest residences in its vicinity, the soaring blue limestone and Ohio sandstone faced Roman Catholic church is one of the most recognizable symbols of Albany, New York’s rich history. It’s also one of the most endangered.
I recently I visited the abandoned Genesee Power Station in the Southern Tier of New York on two separate occasions, and from my first visit early in 2017, not much has thankfully changed. Absent a camper’s fire in the turbine hall, nothing has been scrapped, nothing has been graffitied, nothing has been vandalized.
I piloted a drone over the abandoned Genesee Power Station in the Southern Tier of New York on a recent evening.
Déjà vu. Since relocating to upstate New York, I have come across numerous iterations of the Second Empire architectural style, including one that is a near-identical copy to the Wheeler-Knight House in Pennsylvania.
Along the southern harbors of Buffalo, New York are the ruins of several elevators. Some of those giants, such as the former Cargill Superior, and Canadian Pool, have been derelict for decades, but they can all point their decline to the development of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the unpreparedness of Buffalo’s industrial leaders as the reason for their closure.
The end of 2016 is fast approaching with over 9,000 photographs snapped, 35,000 miles traveled, and 200 new locations explored and documented. Here are the top 35 images of 2016.
Once considered outdated and redneck, dirt oval racetracks have made a resurgence across the rural swaths of America as unending regulations and expensive fares making it hard to justify trips to a NASCAR race track. Local dirt track racing has come back full throttle, although that resurgence has not spread to the abandoned West Virginia Motor Speedway near Parkersburg, West Virginia.
East Liverpool, Ohio, once lovingly referred to as the “Crockery City” and the “Pottery Capital of the World,” is the classic definition of the Rust Belt. Much like Pittsburgh with its reliance on steel mills and Cleveland with its manufacturing plants, East Liverpool was dependent around the pottery industry because of ample natural resources, access to newly laid railroads, the Ohio River, and an untapped market.
The factory that produced the first welded steel pipe is partially abandoned. Wheeling Steel’s Benwood Works dates to 1884 when Riverside Iron Works, its earliest predecessor, became the second mill in the area to produce steel.
The former St. Joseph Riverside Hospital in Warren, Ohio is nothing more than a scrapped, flooded, and fire-damaged carcass of a building.
Coming fresh from a visit to Vermont, I ventured on the back roads around upstate New York. The country was far too beautiful to pass up with rolling, overcast skies for as far as the eye can see. Autumn colors were plentiful. Rounding the corner, I look over and out of the corner of my eye, I sighted derelict locomotives. I did a quick turnabout in the car and hurried back. This was too photogenic to pass up.
When the Dennison Hotel on Main Street in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio closed in 2011, it marked the end of a hoteling era. The single room occupancy extended stay facility once competed with the Browne Hotel, Fort Washington Hotel, Fountain Square Hotel, and others — all of which are long closed and demolished.
America is not unique in having desolate shopping malls, but the sheer number of underperforming, closed, and abandoned malls should give cause for alarm—including the mammoth Century III Mall near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.