The perfect place to have a post-industrial picnic.
history under ground
chairs
Looking up at the remodeled projection booth from the small stage.
A scene on the balcony.
A blue chair in a blue room
There’s a chair in there… on the auditorium balcony.
Part of the historical hospital was walled off with glass block.
Lacy hated playing for people. She wanted to make the piano speak back to her, not make people stare.
Camera: Pentax 67. Film: Kodak Ektar 100.
Someone’s abandoned to-do list.
The Hamm-stenciled chairs are all destroyed as far as I know, now, as are the custom ladders built in-house for the company. Taken between the Filter House and Keg Wash House.
Below the main stage are some of the older (I will guess 1940s) theater seats, along with an assortment of old screens.
The well-worn chair in one larry’s operator cab, next to an overgrown coke battery.
In the corner of the foundry, this lunchroom was literally collapsing under one small leak in the roof. Tile by tile the water ate away the ceiling. Note the clock.
Looking out of the boarded windows in the Great Western Sugar office.
Plaster doesn’t last long without a roof.
2015. Water damage hastens the decay of the annex and its stage. Every time I visit this room, the chairs are in different places. Kodak Portra 400 in a Voigtlander Bessa.
This section of the hospital recently collapsed.
A fireproof room in the basement, perhaps for ammunition storage at one time.
This seems to be the space where upholstery patterns would be drafted. On the table were half-finished notes on a new design.
This is the far interior of the hotel, where the darkness made the shag carpet seem to move whenever the trees outside swayed. That is to say, constantly.
Part of the hotel where employees slept and spare bed parts were stored.
One of two control towers that reached over the lake. The control panel here was used to move the conveyors over the ship’s hold doors, adjust flow of the taconite, and so on.
The private bathroom for the staff in this building was simple. As blue paint peels away from the yellow undercoat, islands emerge and grow.
The man behind the curtain watches, but doesn’t say anything. Probably the smartest one in the room.
The new dining room is still set up for the Twelve Step meetings that took place here a few years ago.
The balcony used to be beautiful, you say. I say, it still is.
In the nurses’ dormitories, beds, couches and chairs still sit. It’s unclear whether these are remnants of the homeless shelter in the 80s or the actual nurses.
Though the proscenium went through two overhauls (1940s, 1970s), it is almost totally original to the 1916 design.
Chairs facing the stage in the old cafeteria. Fuji FP100c in Fuji GX680.
This is my favorite wallpaper in the whole hotel.
The chair tried to leave, but found it had grown heavy with the weight of water and wood. Today, it shelters the mice and maggots.
From the back of the house, looking at a lone chair on stage. From these seats it’s amazing to me that such a giant theater existed out of sight in the middle of downtown.
This chair burned in the 2005 arson that gutted this building, which is the oldest on the property.
A green chair in a green room.
The primitive chair caught the falling plaster.
…when injection molding was the new thing that everyone was experimenting with.
The last wooden school chair survives—almost intact—by being jammed between a pipe and the ceiling of the boiler room.
Seating in the former top balcony is now front row for a secondary stage above and behind the main house.
Hard to find your seat when it doesn’t know its own name.
The stage had two pianos. Did they ever duel?
As if they were planning to move the furniture out of the hospital, it all sits in the main hallway in the ground floor.
The second floor in the smaller house, which was a bit smaller than the Head Keeper’s house.
One of my favorite pictures of the tunnel. I am holding a bike rim and wearing a headlamp. My friend triggered the flash just behind my lower back. The fog is a temperature inversion at the entrance of the tunnel; it was 102 degrees outside of the tunnel and about 50 degrees inside, and humid.
When you’re incoming’s piling up with paint chips, what’s one to do? Call in a sick?
Pocket door and light switches in the upper control room, at the top of the spiral staircase.
Where the workers would rest their feet and clean their plates.
Behind one of the kitchens is one of the few pieces of furniture remaining. Beside it, a small electric space heater–small by 1970s standards.
Mismatched chairs in a patient room.
It’s a straight view from the projection booth to the stage, but hell of a walk. At a fast pace, I think it would take 10 minutes to walk from this spot to the chair. Behind the curtains is a big white screen, so the theatre could be used for either stagework or moving pictures. The two projectors are set up for 3D movies right now–hence the little switch below the window–a Polaroid 3D synchronizer. Cool, huh?
On the ground floor of the main factory there seems to be only one chair left.
The main floor of the hospital was crammed with furniture.
“Place Tripod Here” my friends would say. But for me, it’s the money shot. Note the painting around the inside of the skylight.
A closeup of the finely-carved seats in the house, presumably original to the Sattler. There are not too many of these in this kind of condition. If you have a better name for this figure than Cordelia, leave a comment.