On the left are rows of dayrooms; on the right is one of two long hallways which connect the two halves of the hospital. The large, center section of the hallway would fit chairs for patients to look out on the gardens. They called it a conservatory. This hallway would be as close as some patients would get to nature.
The taller of the two smokestacks on site. Note the crack around its crown.
A rail maintenance building. I liked the color of the tree against the peeling red paint.
Summertime is when Duluth goes to the lakeside to listen to music, visit traveling fairs, and talk to neighbors about the smell of the lake. As seen from the castle walls.
The spectacular, if precarious, view of downtown Minneapolis from the roof of ADM Annex 4. Note the great messages left by various graffiti artists who made it to the spot.
I wonder what this guy is thinking, walking through the complex.
The building is winking.
Winter skies over Allouez Bay. From a distance, it looks almost fragile.
Looking across the catwalk attache to the elevated control room, in charge of the train dumping part of the operation.
The Barker turning around before it backed into Tac Harbor to unload coal for Minnesota Power.
The ghost town of Lauder, Manitoba. It’s seen better days, but I bet the TV reception on the flatlands is great.
A buck-fifty shot for a postcard stand. Taken from the Stone Arch Bridge.
A wide view of the poor house. Look at the smokestack and elevator shaft, which show the former roofline.
Wyoming has Montana’s ‘big sky’ reputation truly challenged.
The Eureka Mill, historically known as Sunnyside Mill, is now the gateway to Animas Forks.
Looking from the rail shipping building through pigeon-proofing chicken wire at another manufacturing building in high Fall.
A damaged roof channeled rain onto the adobe walls, cutting them in half. In the distance, a preserved house and the ruins of the Colmor School.
Looking down at the Port Arthur Ore Dock from Manitoba Pool Elevator #3. The conveyor belts are gone and King Elevator is in the far distance.
As the Barker steamed past the dock and island, the sunset casts the shadow of the Taconite Harbor receiving trestle on the boat. Through the fog, you can see some of the islands that were joined into a breakwater.
The parking lot is in better condition than most of the complex. The left building is the lab.
On the National Mine property are two shafts, both serving the same workings. This one seems to have gotten some upgrades in the 1960s, judging from the condition of the metal.
The hike to the village is steep. This is looking into the valley from the halfway point.
Looking north from the east portal of the tunnel… a beautiful place. Wilderness. Mamiya 6/Portra 160
Reflections of graffiti during spring melt.
No, it’s not your Mac’s desktop, it’s a beautiful Lake Superior night. Taken from near the former Pittsburgh and Reading Anthracite Plant. You can see the frame that used to hold the lifeboat that was auctioned in 2006 to the left of the Pilot House.
On the dark side of the workhouse at sunset, you can almost see where the walls used to be. Kodak Portra 160/Mamiya 6.
Some guerilla art for passing drivers on I-94 East to enjoy. Artist unknown.
Looking from abandoned to active. The end of Dock 6 often has a crane and some shacks on it, as the chutes aren’t used anymore. Instead, conveyors are installed on the land-side of the dock that fill docked vessels, making the end of the dock little more than a breakwater and a place to park repair and recovery equipment.
Delmar #4 is like two elevators in one, in capacity and design.
Counter-weighted ore cars alternately filled and emptied to feed Furnace 7. Honestly, though, the corner-mounted cranes are sexier in my opinion. Note the trees growing from the stacks.
The top three floors were removed from the top of the Temple Opera Block (right). If you have a sharp eye, you can see the outlines of some of the old floors on the shared wall of the Orpheum (left). For a time, the front of the building held a bus stop.
A shot of Longmont from the highway. Fuji 35mm.
A great lakes freighter slowly passes SK Wheat Pool 4 with ‘The Sleeping Giant’ in the background. Arista 100.
Looking out of the brewhouse toward the river.
…a better view of the huge tailings boom stretching outside of the tailings pond.
One of the covered rail loading docks. All of them were overgrown and rust-clad.
One of the old cooperage buildings is largely unchanged from when it was built. The raised section of the building houses a crane.
From a distance (here, Union Yards), you can still see ARMOUR spelled out on the smokestack in white brick.
The southernmost houses in Gilman are seen through the pines on the right, near the tram stop.
The rear of the complex shows the more than 100 year old workhouse–still working! I do not know if the tanks are original to the 1901 elevator, but I suspect so.
The gold mine is now a gravel pit.
“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.”
― Emily Dickinson
The top of the grain handler of Ogilvie’s. The flagpole serves as a lightning rod. In fact, I would not be surprised if that was its primary purpose.
Another perfect Indianan sunset alights like a bird on the tops of the vent houses and tree-packed smokestacks.
The back of the castle is barely visible through the trees that have grown thick around the walls, making it look so much older.
Like a railgun pointed at the Rockies… the boom would direct tailings–junk rock–outside of the dredge pond.
35mm Film, Expired. An abandoned swath of NAD is landlocked by soybean fields.
One thing I like to do at Gopher is imagine the shape of the planned buildings based on the partial structures.
I believe this is the push car, meaning it would push the charge in the oven out the opposite side into the train car.
Looking out at the town water tower (which I love) from the sugar mill (which I also love).
Looking up the tallest structure left at ACME.
The screen and mineral stained window cross-processed the sky.
The Osborn Block (front) and the Twohy (rear) at sunset. In the distance, you can almost make out Globe Elevators. One of my favorite photos of 2013.
On top of the light hoop, 160-feet up, a ship comes into port, ready to load-up. If you look really close, you can see my shadow cast on the dock below, courtesy of the full moon.
These houses were built for the use of the lighthouse keepers in 1913 (left) and 1916 (right). The second house was added when the entry added a fourth light and required a second rotation. Today, there are no unbroken windows in either building.
One of my favorite images from my stay… Note the snowed-over road in the distance! This is looking toward Animas Forks.
“Against the blue sky, its rusting central silos look like rising smoke meeting the last minutes of a sunset. These give way to a corrugated night sky of blue gray, punched-through with staggered four-pane windows, all glassless.”
Before Portland-Huron Cement’s Duluth Plant was (mostly) demolished and (partly) turned into a hotel, the top of its silos gave a cinematic view of elevator row.
The company headquarters. Abandoned last time I drove past it, though it is the classiest building in downtown South Bend.
An unshielded heaframe and single pulley.
Some of the earlier buildings were dressed up with brick facades.
Heavy industrial looks good in cotton candy pink.
A long exposure under the trestle-like approach to the dock, under which trains still pass regularly.
Near Howardsville, Colorado, the Animas River gets quite wide. This is near the Little Nation Mill, which is worth a stop if you’re traveling north from SIlverton. It’s also near the former Gold King Mine, which “blew” in 2015 and flooded the Animas River with toxic mine water.
The flour mill (rear) and its elevators. The taller elevator was moved here in 1955, when the Harrisons bought it from Federal, who declared it surplus. The smaller elevator replaced an earlier smaller warehouse in 1926. Taken shortly after dawn. This one picture made the drive worth it, for me. Medium Format.
When I see this picture, I imagine that I am an ant exploring a mushroom farm.
No matter what environmental disasters industry throws at Mother Earth, she will bounce back.
Like a grave marker, a single post remembers where Dock 3 stood on the bay.
This bridge over Eagle River is beautiful.
The layout and design of the buildings reminded me strongly of a brewery or distillery. To the right you can see some of the retrofits by the first lumber company to buy the buildings, in the 1970s.
An abandoned ranch on the east side of the tracks. This was not the Colmor Cutoff they were waiting for.
The gulls wait to eat the next load of spilled grain. Arista 100.
The sun sets in front of a huge concrete building—about four times the size of the power plant. Probably a corn storage bin from an ethanol operation that ran here in the 1980s.
If you look carefully along the side of the slip alongside this image of Cargill B-2, you will see the remains of the crane stops when this was a Hannah coal dock.
It seems like this pipe was made to return dust to the collector in the main workhouse from the annex.
Ava near the Memorial Building. The block glass embedded in the sidewalk here is actually a skylight for the tunnel below, which connects the Memorial Building to the steam and supply systems of the hospital.
Dr. Muchow’s offices stand near his ‘new’ mill, but they show evidence of vandalism.
SFAAP’s iconic smokestacks. You’d notice if you drove past this on the highway.
A little cloud passes over the Five-Stack powerplant ruins, like a puff of smoke.
There are 700 of these storage bunkers. Their design was to funnel explosions upward, rather than toward other buildings, to minimize secondary explosions.
The exterior of the factory is unassuming
The elevator tower seems to have been built with expansion of the dock in mind.
The topmost roof of the hospital is covered in antennae and includes a star that faced the rest of the complex, now demolished.
During the Cold War, the Air Force used the radar station to train bombardiers in radar-guided ordinance.
Taken just after the sun set over Duluth. Don’t you love that green glow?
The concrete walls, heavy steel blast doors, and plastic roof tell me that this was one of the shell loading buildings.
Looking out from what little remains of the second floor at the poor house, which was in terrible condition. No roof and no floors. Soon to be ruins.
The new concrete workhouse, as seen through chickenwire.
This building was an office and lounge for engineers. It is also demolished.
Looking at the huge and modern Cargill B2 from the circa-1919 Lake Superior “I”. This is a rather unique perspective of Enger Tower and Skyline.
The Algosteel crew strikes a pose while heading through Superior Entry toward Allouez
A look at the Longmont Sugar Mill in May 2014.
This sign was important when trains ran the length of the elevator.
It’s a small world… look at it.
The porch of the Gustavson House with the southern San Juan range in the background. Bring your own rocking chair…
The conveyor between the shore and Dock 2. Note the gap in the aerial walkway that used to connect Dock 4 to the rest of the complex.
The BOMARC launch buildings are spaced on a large concrete pad that looks like a parking lot. Out of view are underground pipes for fueling and cooling the rocket motors.
Kate in the crow’s next… very shaky by the time she got to it.
Before the clouds broke, I snapped this profile of the dumping control room and its spiral staircase. These are the colors that I dream in.
Taken at a junction in the tube world.
A row of houses north of Pommenige.
A gate large enough to accommodate a missile, next to the ruins of the guard shack. Wyoming is the intersection of lonely and beautiful.
The perimeter fence still holds strong, 50 years after it was put up.
2005. This is very likely the oldest image I have on the website; I took this in the early 2000s with my first camera when I was new to the hobby. I still like it quite a lot.
Frontenac’s shaft house is well preserved, compared to all other around it. Leica/Summilux 35/Ektar 100
I didn’t test the rungs, but I bet the view was incredible.
This photo illustrates how vertical the complex is.
One of the last times I saw the skyway standing. ADM’s Meal Elevator is in the distance.
Identical warehouses seem a little newer than the rest of the plant. I suspect these were added in the mid-1950s for the Korean War, during which about 200 buildings were added to the complex.
Near the guard post protecting the launch pad at the Duluth BOMARC is an orange windsock.
Because of the dangers of storing the materials to make explosives as well as the explosives themselves, there were earthen bunkers all across the plant like this.
2013. As part of the Head House’s facelift, it’s gotten new windows. However, you can now still see where the conveyor-way connected this building with the elevators behind it in the upper right of the image.
The Clipper was one of the most popular Packards, but its production was cut short by WWII. Had they produced the car instead of Rolls Royce plane engines I imagine there would might be driving a Packard today, rather than a Ford.
Looking at The Windy City from the top of the coal tower. The pond you see is the former ACME Coke coal yard.
Not a wisp of smoke can be seen today.
Looking up at the most conspicuous graffiti in the city on ADM #4.
Exploring the plant while live Reggae plays nearby was bizarre.
The fiery side of a launch building, just is it began to rain.
A panorama of the dock buildings, before the left one was demolished.
Just across the North Dakota border, a rusty Milwaukee Road boxcar sits where it was shoved off the mainline. The grain elevator in the background marks the tracks, which is still used by BNSF.
The main street of the ghost town is also the maintenance road for the BNSF line that bisects Colmor.
Taken several years before the tornado story when the weather, and the condition of the buildings, were nice.
A panoramic view of the sintering plant’s gas plant (?). Everyone who visits must get a picture of these rusty smokestacks!
You first.
Colleen on the roof.
The side of a launcher, with outbuildings in the background. You can see the tracks where the roof would open before launch.
Minnesota Power’s Taconite Harbor power station, as seen through the ship loading control room windows.
Gopher Ordnance Works, aka the U-Lands, is a landscape where roots and boughs break apart concrete and steel.
Street lights and pavement are some of the obvious signs a town used to be here.
Looking from the brewhouse at the death of its sister building, across Minnehaha.
The modern shaft stands above the north side of Gilman.
A windmill marks one corner of GOW.
A bridge crosses the main street of the village; one that goes nowhere. Ambiguity intended.
The hiking around Central City is beautiful and full of history. Just get a proper topo map!
A huge steel tank, one of several left over, left over from either the Ashland Oil or Allied Chemical periods.
A broken signal light that would indicate to incoming engineers and brakemen the status of the dock deck. The streetlight-style lighting is a retrofit; originally the top of the dock would be lit by strings of lights suspended by towers on each side of the deck… a poor system according to the workers at Allouez who had the same lights.
SWP4-A on the left and Viterra C on the right in a 90-degree panorama.
The control room floats above the top of the dock atop a spiral staircase.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve been getting reports that several Yellow Helicopters have been seen hovering above town. We are all aware of the Black Helicopters, which are World Government, and Blue Helicopters, which are Secret Police, and the Helicopters with Detailed Murals of Diving Birds of Prey, which are the helicopters that took all the children in Night Vale away a few months ago (we still don’t know what those helicopters are but they did bring all the children back unharmed, and much more well-behaved than before, so they are deemed just as safe as the other helicopters) but these new Yellow Helicopters, no one quite knows.” – Welcome to Night Vale, Ep. 32
The blast pit carried the smoke and flame from the rocket motor away from the other base buildings.
The Brown Hotel still stands, but has recently gone out of business again. One of the nice things about historic buildings in New Mexico, though, is things tend to stay around a lot longer than if they were subjected to lots of rain and snow. It will probably be reopened eventually.
Looking at the tallest part of the plant from a skeletal loading dock. Kodak Portra 160/Mamiya 6.
The front of the mill reads “Montana Flour Mills Company”
A cloud moves across the attic in front of the window. How? A photographer’s secret.
The valley is full of rocky peaks that stand out from the winding creeks, which only truly run after storms. It is a very beautiful place.
Looking across the spired rooftop of the Kirkbride building. In the foreground is a fire chute that contains a metal spiral slide designed to evacuate patients in case of a fire. Note the ironwork on the chimney.
A defunct UGG elevator in Killarney, not far from where the Harrisons (of Holmfield, MB and Harrison Milling) once operated a small elevator. Medium Format.
The hospital featured a farm that once helped to sustain it. This is one of the few remaining signs of those years, near the Nurse’s Cottage.
Where equipment was scrapped.
Knowing that a tornado just passed nearby is less distressing when you’re surrounded by nuclear-attack-hardened buildings.
San Luis may not be a ghost town, but it’s aspiring by all indications. Luckily, it’s close enough to Cuba, NM to hang onto life, unlike the other ghost towns down the road.
The roof had structures bigger than most buildings in South Bend.
Near the base of the mesa is a modern house, which seems to be a ranch of some sort. What a fantastic spot to live, but for the fact every rainstorm floods the arryos, muddy ditches at the bottom of gullies, making it impossible to travel.
Looking out at the abandoned neighborhood around the house.
The crane on Dock 2, as seen from Dock 4 right after sunset. Notice the old light tower is warped.
A row of security lights line the roof of the power station.
Looking out from a hallway on the third floor where a ceiling and roof should be. I could not stand in the room, as the floor had collapsed into the basement, but I could put my camera out at arm’s length and fire a few pictures upward, which is how I came away with this image!
A gymnasium, if I recall. The last building before the road dead-ends.
The school (hospital) campus was expansive.
HDR matrix panorama. Looking from the grain elevators, now doomed, toward the city between the flour mill’s water tower and tile elevator’s neon sign, the old and new economies seem almost united. Yet the financial centers rise in reality to shadow the now-abandoned industry and manufacturing. The way of things, I’m told.
Near the old slag dump there are the remains of the pouring buckets that received the molten steel from the US Steel blast furnaces, filled to the brim with pig iron. They must be incredibly heavy!
The complex was so big that trains could make deliveries through the middle of it, passing below this striped skyway.
The command building and a coolant tank. In the distance, rain and hail pound Wyoming dirt.
The powerplant and its dedicated water tower supplied steam for heating and mechanical work.
An abandoned house at Tilston, MB.
Giant chunks of cooled slag form an island near Mud Lake.
It would be a shame if this building is not preserved. Word is (as of 2015) that construction may start on this section soon.
Looking at the headframe for Shaft 3 from the tower for Shaft 1. Below is the roof of the Dry House. It was hard to remind myself that these building have been abandoned longer than I’ve been alive.
Short-stack remains of mounts for rod and ball mills, if I was to bet. The concentrator separated junk rock (tails) from the copper and silver ore, to such a point it could be smelted.
Van Dyke Cab Company and Yellow Cab served the terminal in lieu of a streetcar loop downtown, which was planned but never built.
When I first saw Ogilvie’s from the ground, I promised myself to look back when i found my way into this little pitched outcropping which seemed to have the best view of Thunder Bay I could imagine. It turns out, though, that there is no floor in that section; it is just extended machine access! Oh well. Mount McKay in the background in the last light.
Rogers Mine is one of the most structurally sound mines in the Iron River area that isn’t part of a museum.
The first time I saw Buffalo Central Terminal was from a westbound Empire Builder. In the foreground you can see the rows of platforms.
A storm passes over BOMARC’s center row of launch buildings. You can clearly see the tracks on which the roof would retract for launch.
The Harrison flour mill, completed in 1897 and expanded in 1901 and 1902. The tunnel that I am standing on probably transported grain from the elevator to the mill. Medium Format.
This battlement-like tower is the first thing one sees coming to Old Taylor from Frankfort.
One night, I camped behind the sugar mill. You can tell be the clouds that a cold front was moving out—it was a hot day.
A rusting disconnect gangway. The smokestack is for a boiler, if I recall.
Grain is taken from the bottom of the silos through a conveyor in a tunnel. These blowers keep the air in the tunnel fresh.
There is a flipped tram car about a third of the way down the cliff.
One leg of the headframe meets the hoist house. Two cranes are rusted in place.
Pillars among trees… those who inherit the earth will be so confused.
Some sort of materials handling building, judging by the construction.
These concrete blocks were formed to be solid mounts for machinery. All the metal was scrapped in the late 1990s, leaving these modern ruins. Seagulls love them.
Don’t you love the shape of the house on the right?
The truck scale is closed at Lena, MB.
The pitch of the roof is more typical for areas with lots of snow—not the border of Ohio and Kentucky. So, I assume this roofline accommodated some equipment inside for trains—note the tracks.
Looking toward the old power house, right below one of its arteries.
The moon highlights the contrails over the engine house in the middle of the night. Foreground light painted.
Looking out of the Brewery Creek Drain outfall at night, after a storm had pushed piles of rocks up onto the shore.
In the corner of the former school grounds…
Sunrise in SEMI. The shadow of Kurth Malt is cast across ADM-Delmar #1. Clouds behind ADM-Delmar #4 light up. It’s cold and the air smells like train grease.
When block glass shatters, it looks like ice.
A cracked sign at dock-level, where loading boats would be tied below the taconite conveyors. All across the surface of the concrete dock were taconite pellets, like slippery little marbles. One wrong step could put a worker in the water, which is a bad, bad place to be.
A tram that once linked the Sunnyside Mine to the mill in Eureka has been reduced to a single cable. Nearby, an open adit drips water into a tributary of the Animas River.
One of the older buildings on the site, this is an old power house that provided electricity to the plant. I spent some time walking around it and believe it was fired with coal gas but had a diesel backup installed later.
King Elevator sits in the corner of a more recently-defunct lumber mill: Great Western Timber. Perhaps in the future I will write the history of it. Arista 100 in 120.
This ruin was once the Toltec Mine, a producing gold and silver claim that operated into the 1940s.
Coming to an inspirational poster near you… what should it read? ADVENTURE AWAITS? Don’t hang posters. Go outside.
