The offices for the Five Roses elevator have long been boarded. To the left you can see the Manitoba Pool Elevator slogan, “Service at Cost”, meaning they would not make profit off farmers and dues.
history under ground
doors
I wanted to see the third floor to get a better view, but the third floor had already been demolished. The old walls had cascaded down the staircases. This building is gone, now, as you can expect.
Taken on a short trip where the whole floor of the roundhouse and engine shop was covered in fresh snow–thanks to the holes in the roof and open windows.
Dr. Muchow’s offices stand near his ‘new’ mill, but they show evidence of vandalism.
One thing I like about the oppressive globalist-wrought future is the idea of numerically subdividing spaces; my geek side sort of wants to live in a flat that can be sorted by as Dewey Decimal-like code.
Prize Mine has been the victim of erosion. Its north wall is pushed in by rockfall and its south side is far from ground level.
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.
A skyway 100 feet above this office crumbled one day. This is what happened when those two met. High-impact love.
Looking from the ‘crack’ that shows a collapsed tunnel into the dry house, in the direction miners returning home would walk. Note smoke lines above door.
A common room with a big bay window that overlooked the main entrance of the hospital.
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.
This is what I believe to be the Masonic Cottage, where infected Freemasons would be treated together and enjoy some simple luxuries because of their social connections. Freemasonry is still popular in North Dakota.
Looking toward Mitchell from its last building.
Note the wood and rubber wheels on this powder cart.
A view of the hallway outside of the auditorium.
Connecting the Administration Building to the wards fanning out. Historical photos show cots lining this hallway when the hospital was severely overcrowded. Lit by lightning outside the grounds during a huge thunderstorm.
Office manners dictate that one must tip their file drawer back upright once it is knocked through the wall.
These racks lined many of the floors, although I couldn’t decipher their purpose. Tastes like duotone…
When ‘men’ meant ‘worker’.
This building cleaned the barrels that transported ingredients through the plant.
The factory’s first aid room and laboratory. Sure makes me wonder how safe the lab was!
Not ghosts. Slow-moving explorers’ shadows create a ghostly effect in the ‘Old Ward’–the second floor of the Service Building.
From the 1909 addition, it’s obvious how much water it takes to carry a single wall to, into and through the cracks between the floor tiles: exactly one roof’s worth.
There were a few large houses on the Old Crow property where employees would live. The glen had little housing.
After demolition in the mid 2000s, this interior door became exterior. I remember walking through the car shed as a teenager. It was a shortcut, if I didn’t get caught.
Watching the comings and goings of doctors, nurses and new patients was a mainstay of asylum routine; one can find it easy to imagine pale faces pressed against the block glass windows, staring out at the world moving past them.
A sheik mustard-yellow paint scheme across the roofless engine house goes great with the industrial moss and rust.
Looking through a secure ward door at the destroyed rooms beyond.
The large domed rooms were surreal.
A series of interconnected offices that look like they hadn’t been painted in 40 years.
Different doors for different vehicles, I would guess. White Pine Mine used tire-based vehicles, rather than track-based, making it pretty different than other mines I’ve been to.
An automatically closing door, in case of fire or flood in the engine compartment.
An interesting crane in the back of the machine shop. It seems very light duty, so I am not certain what it was used for.
The nurse’s station on this floor, a ward still in its original design, featured a half-door where patients could get their medicine. Portra 160.
Aaron by the concentrator.
2016. A section of the third floor that has changed a lot over the years. Compare to 2006 shot.
Books in nooks and not getting a look… about the crook with hooks that cooks.
Gloves hang in the basement of the former quality assurance labs.
The bottom of the elevator which seemed too modern for the building. The top of the elevator opens into open air, as the second floor has long since collapsed.
Before each warhead was crated, it was inspected.
Rubber dock boots still sits under the desk in the dock office, near keys to rusted locks and files of fired employees.
I can confirm the existence of the long-rumored Federal Rectangle Research Institute labs.
A facade that tells the story of demolition and neglect. The sign on the garage door indicates that if one finds themselves there, that they enter the buildings at their own risk. If only property owners in the US took this philosophy!
This ornamental stair is cast iron and used to connect all floors of the Administration building. Now it connects the first and second floor, then the third and fourth floors, with a strange cinder block and drywall barrier separating the new and old sections of the building. Note the insulation on the floor to seal heat into the lower floors that were used as offices until the hospital closed. On the corners of the staircase are lions, on the corners of the suspended section of stair are down-hanging pineapples. Set in the stairs themselves are shield motifs with slate tops.
A side door for the shop area with ivy crawling toward it.
Some of the doors had sliding plastic windows, but most of the older ward doors simply had these peep holes drilled through them. The inside was always marked and worn more than the outside.
This is one of my favorite images of the year because of the color, light and textures. Someone told me once that the medium of photographers is not film or digital sensors, but rather shadows. This photo is evidence of that.
Here, the concentrated gold (and silver, and zinc, I would guess) would be loaded into trucks bound for the smelter.
When Nopeming was affiliated with local farms, it often slaughtered its own livestock. This is the part of the hospital where food would be prepped, below the stage in the Service Building.
In the power house corner is this gratuitously gigantic doorway. It used to be even bigger, too, as indicated by the brick arch another foot over the top windows.
The shaft house, where hydraulic steel doors allowed or denied entry into the mine shaft. Overhead is a light and alarm. If it sounds, the mine is being evacuated, and you best not go in and best stay the hell out of the way. Locals dump tires here, now.
The old way to get to the elevator from the mill.
Left: A medium storage chamber with access to an interconnecting steam tunnel at ceiling height. This room also has various smashed toilets. Why? Because dead toilets–all of them–always find a home in a cave. Center: Steps go past a +-intersection, left goes deeper, right goes to utility tunnels for the brewery, forward used to go to the brewery basement… it’s now backfilled. Left from the backfill is a small hallway; see ‘Backfill Self Portrait’. Center-Right: Utility tunnels tie knots between the brewery’s demolished basement and its caves. Right: Most of the storage volume is in large chambers down this causeway.
2006. A section of the third floor that has changed a lot over the years. Compare to 2015 shot.
Beautiful doors separated the boiler room and the sugar mill. Can you imagine the gracefully curving steps in a power plant today?
Looking down into the lunch building of an Atlas D, near the motors for the retractable roof. In this design, the roof separates to allow the missile to be erected into launch position.
One of Martinsdale’s defunct businesses perpendicular to the depot. Recall that Martinsdale is a T-town.
The right passageway is a carved staircase that winds upward to an old entrance. The left portal is one of the bigger and well-carved rooms… I would guess it’s part of the original caves.
A Merrill Piano from Boston, in the Recreation Room of the Front Dorm.
The stonework was done by a local handyman of sorts, who was also a guard at a nearby insane asylum. He did a great job, it seems to me.
The first floor hallway between conference rooms and the diesel lab at the center of the facility
When I first visited the chapel, it had a projection TV, two organs, Bibles, and more. Now these are mostly ruined, except for the tapestries, which have somehow survived.
Miscellaneous math and strange instructions remain all across the shipment section walls. Sadly, this section likely fell into disrepair before the others.
The wings of the church had a lot more water damage than the rest. The organ on the balcony was in decent condition when I arrived.
The last time the city sealed this door, they must have been changing out old road signs.
My favorite time to be in the brewery was sunrise. That’s the kind of light that made the brewhouse glow.
Miners would sit in this room before going into the mine. The boards on the right indicated whether every single miner was “in” or “out”.
Stairs and power lines enter the abandoned depot. Shingles slide off the rotten roof. Ektar 100/Mamiya 6
You can tell from the marks on the wall that there used to be pipes running the length of this square hallway, which connected a loading dock with explosive mixers.
The substation has definite structural issues. Pictured is the sidewalk that connected the plant to the company housing.
Sunrise in the orphanage… between classrooms and whispers.
Beds line a basement room that is part way between the concepts of inside and outside. Boards and bricks were falling while I was photographing it—stay out.
These houses was built by hard rock miners in the early 1900s.
Beautiful details in the plaster moulding have been preserved by the sheer height of this room between the cathedral and auditorium.
An unplanned skylight. It’s unclear why some parts of the building had wooden roofing, while others were highly reinforced with brick.
There’s a roof problem above the surgical suite.
One of the occupied buildings in Nevadaville.
Between the Old Crow and Old Taylor bonded warehouses are some of the fouled barrels, now the only ones left, which were left to rot in the elements. Nearby in a loading bay that has obviously been disused longer than the rest of the property, terra cotta roofing waits in crates.
The doorframes become more askew every year as the buildings slip downward into the gulch at different rates. This seems to be the part of the mine ruins where transients leave their marks. The graffiti dated back to the 1970s, at least.
Glowing observation windows–and someone forgot to lock a patient’s door…
A colorful boiler is a happy boiler! RotoGrate systems remove ashes from the boiler firebox by revolving the bottom of the system to let the fly ash drop into a hopper. This greatly increases boiler efficiency.
At noon, the lower skylights around the shops glow yellow-green, thanks to the flora blooming on the roof above.
The license plate reads “Farm Truck”.
The top floor of the Meal Storage Elevator.
The end of the new elevator. Line of bird droppings follow the fire sprinkler pipes and wires in the room.
This is a room where the actual explosive elements were mixed. In the event of an accident, this glass wall would give way before the concrete and thus direct the flames and shockwave away from the rest of the building. In other words, the glass is not just to get a lot of wonderful natural light into the building.
The modern morgue, a replacement for the original morgue which has since been turned into a kitchen area.
The floor IS the machine…
Offices above the labs. Note all the air handling equipment. I love the utilitarian design.
Looking through a launcher doorway at an outbuilding… the fire truck garage, if I recall correctly. Fomapan medium format in Pentax 67.
A typical shower in the old section of the hospital. It looks a little horrifying in the harsh light of a camera flash on the thousands of little white tiles. One soap holder hadn’t been stolen yet.
Looking into the main workhouse from the skyway into the annex elevator. But who care? Look at the colors!
Looking at the ghost sign from a rust-locked cement conveyor that linked the silos with a packing warehouse.
And I forget just why I taste / Oh yeah, I guess it makes me smile / I found it hard, it’s hard to find / Oh well, whatever, never mind (Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”)
Kat’s pretty cool.
On the extended engine bay…
The west portal of the tunnel is open, and if it wasn’t for the rough track, I would think by looking at it that a train could be coasting up behind me any moment. Mamiya 6/Portra 160
An insurance office.
The roof could be vented when locomotives were running inside.
A window for light and air pokes above the big arch in the hallway. Most of the interior ceilings were broad brick archways.
The bottom of the stairs leading from the work floor to the cafeteria.
The top floor’s old-fashioned hospital ways were too much to pass without a photo or two… with the paint falling off the walls it was as if the building was shedding its skin in an effort to become rejuvenated or useful.
Inside the office was a small furnace and a collection of mechanical belts. You can see “SERVICE AT COST” and “POOL 168” in the background.
A storage vault for guns and other weapons to protect the base from attack.
This skyway, built to help seal off two parts of the complex during an out of control fire, was probably too rotten to burn by the time I saw it.
Typical bunk rooms in MS-20.
Paperwork litters the floors of the zinc mine offices.
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.
A fallen branch smashed out this skylight years ago, and since then the bees have found this tiny toilet a perfect home. This is part of the hotel where employees slept.
The front door to the auditorium.
My first view of the tunnel was in the dead of winter. In spite of being in the middle of the forest, it was totally silent. Mamiya GA645 / Kodak Pro 400
“Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian writer and historian.
A bumper sticker with the usual tagline. Note the detail on the radiator!
The arches of the Twohy building, before some of the signs and sills were painted in 2015.
The individual ovens are skinny to allow even and fast heating of the whole interior. Numbers are cut into signs because no paint could withstand the heat or corrosive emissions from the coking process.
No ambiguity here… miners, check in at this office.
Unloading boats had the option to take on fuel at Taconite Harbor. This building, among other things, pumped fuel to the dock.
A view of the government presses, with pages of law across the floor covered in footprints.
Looking from the main shop into the boiler shop, one of three attached buildings that specialized in certain repairs. One thing that architectural photographers have to work with is an elongated “magic hour” with ideal shadowing and coloring–this photo is a result of that lighting.
The end of one of the scrapped turbines. Judging by the aborted attempt at cutting it in half, the scrappers had some trouble with this one.
An elevator to bring big somethings into the basement, it seemed. Nearby were the plant firetrucks, still ready to go. I hope they were saved.
In one of the hundreds of bunkers across the busy highway from the empty plant ruins. Most did not have doors, but I got lucky on this one.
This dock goes between loading bays (see glass brick walls) and the railroad.
What you see is not a crack in the floor, but a long vine extending ten feet onto the shop floor, as if reaching in to escape the wind and rain.
A single metal emergency slide rusts away at sunrise.
An old nurse’s station (you can tell because of the half-door with table) with torn-up tiles. Notice through the curved doorway that even the ceiling has a curvature.
Inside the main entrance is a whiteboard and mirror, then it branches into discrete spaces.
Behind the grand staircase is this beautifully preserved hallway with medieval-style arches and vivid paint.
The view into one of the asylum rooms of Norwich Hospital. A long time ago, a window broke, letting the vines crawling up the bricks outside to move indoors and across the floor.
A better look at the rails in the floor, installed to help move heavy equipment around the building.
I love these heavy rolling doors in the old tobacco processing building.
This is one of my favorite doorways (yes, I have favorites) for a few reasons: 1.) You can see how the once-arched door has been squared-off for rectangular doors to fit; 2.) you can see one complete historic door and one ruined door, and the chain that used to hold them together before someone kicked-out the security, and; 3.) I like the texture of the bricks and design of the radiators in the room beyond–the blacksmith shop. Just do.
The sidewalks are littered with rocks.
In the ward for the criminally insane, this door was the most-worn. Nail scratches mark the area around the peep hole, the wood is gouged everywhere from thrown chairs and hard kicks, and a ominous blood-colored stain is visible where it dripped in the second inset from the bottom. Aside from the damage, the coloring in this section was very vibrant, though it was probably little reprieve for those who had to work here.
At sunset the light skips from puddle to stagnant puddle across the whole foundry room, playing with the classic sawtooth roof with half-hearted shadows.
Taken several years before the tornado story when the weather, and the condition of the buildings, were nice.
An employee lunchroom with every door and window covered in vented steel.
It’s pretty unusual to find a fireplace like this in the midst of a factory.
The beacon was installed in 1938 and removed in the mid-2000s.
S&X seen in the background through the fog.
Heavy wood doors for keeping people in.
Rocket propellant and coolant were stored underground adjacent to the missile silo. This is the hallway that connects the missile area to the propellant area. Walking in this area was nice because the floor was dry.
As my friend Jonathan would say, “on a human scale.”
Note the maps still left on the wall.
Vines are finding their way into the roundhouse.
Pozo Mine, the most menacing mine building I’ve ever seen. Black and white film, shot with the Fuji GX680, a beast of a camera.
This miner locker room has probably never been so clean.
The new steel door of the diesel car shops, built in 1948 and used through the 1960s, as seen from the service pit. On the top of the photograph you can see the exhaust vent.
The old truck scale sits in the middle of what was Nettleton Avenue Slip.
Some of the internal staircases were fitted with cages that wound round down the stairs to deter suicidal patients from taking a dive.
The top floor of the Chateau was the original surgical suite. Later, hydrotherapy took place here. When Nopeming was converted to a nursing home, it was a place where residents watched movies. Portra 400 on Voigtlander Bessa.
On the second floor of the kettle building where corn mash was boiled, holes where tanks once sat were everywhere.
The side of Stelco and its scrubber-stacks. This is demolished now.
These tubes would bring cement to the top of the plant for storage in the silos.
The truck scale is closed at Lena, MB.
Looking across the catwalk attache to the elevated control room, in charge of the train dumping part of the operation.
The grain-centric buildings had automatic fire doors.
In the middle of one of the outlying cottages, perhaps the Masonic Cottage–it was too damaged to tell, really–are these pair of skinny doors that led from patient rooms to a common area with rotting shag carpet.
A side door for the brick factory.
This is the former air compressor house–one of them, at least–which turned steam power into air power to drive machinery across the production line.
This building would store and maintain warheads. It was right next to the launch pad, but the two were separated by a high mound.
A few of the stalls in the older section of the roundhouse, the noon sky peeking in.
The city has taken steps to prevent the curious and the desperate from going into the elevators, including piling rocks against the doors and windows.
The moon highlights the contrails over the engine house in the middle of the night. Foreground light painted.
Almost all of the doors and windows on the ground floor have been boarded, leaving the ground level very dark.
This train shed was later converted to load trucks with concrete from the silos.
The side of the maintenance shops, still home to several disassembled electric carts.
The piano must have been a nice distraction; there is very little to do in Roberts.
Heavy steel doors to isolate the underground magnetic separation mill from Eagle Mine’s main tunnel.
The historical entrance.
This corner of the building was the coal room, used to feed the two big boilers inside. The steam equipment has been replaced with electric, so this section may not have changed much in the past decades.
An ajar car elevator car afar, technically.
This old ward, not a victim of remodeling, still has metal screens over the open windows of the doors. It should be obvious why glass were not used.
The stone chapel sits beside the main house and received a particularly heavy dose of gothic architectural touches.
In the ward for the criminally insane, this door was the most-worn. Nail scratches mark the area around the peep hole, the wood is gouged everywhere from thrown chairs and hard kicks, and a ominous blood-colored stain is visible where it dripped in the second inset from the bottom. Aside from the damage, the coloring in this section was very vibrant, though it was probably little reprieve for those who had to work here.
A big door into the fire pump room.
A side door on the rear of the castle that let guests out into a small stone courtyard below a tall turret.
The back wall of the ballroom, showing water-warped floors.
This used to be one of the office doors, but it’s been removed (apparently without malcontent) and placed in the shop area.
Lost words over the auditorium entrance.
These stairs lead to the balcony.
The side of the church, taken from a grungy sidewalk.
The largest room was the diesel laboratories, which tested various devices and fuel additives to make it safer to mine underground with diesel trucks and other machinery, such as at White Pine Mine, Michigan.
This wide skyway connected two of the inner factory buildings, where parts would have to be transported to keep the operation moving, which is why it is much wider than other bridges in the plant.
Sliding fireproof doors and an old hydrant at Harlowton’s old yards.
Presumably, in a nuclear blast the antenna would be blown flat and pop back up, allowing communication even after a near-direct hit.
Looking out at the abandoned neighborhood around the house.
Note the severed skyway–that led to a set of grain elevators that have since been demolished.
A comrade lights-up where so many workers apparently congregated to do the same.
An unintentional skylight makes the inside of the office glow, showing the inside of the front door and its strange lock.
The bathtub fell into the basement, ala The Miller’s Tale. That’s right. Chaucer.
This is one of the biggest warps I’ve ever found in a wooden factory floor hasn’t broken yet. When you stand on it, it make a very loud popping sound as the boards shift. The poster on the pillar near the left side of the frame advertises recreational boating, presumably to the factory workers who left this floor in the early 1980s.
Pillars painted red indicated firefighting supplies. Fire was a very common enemy of early rail facilities, and many roundhouses burned down because of a combination of dry wood, hot, fire-breathing machinery and countless oil-saturated surfaces.
A decaying door of the Medical Director for the unit. Because this is from one of the outbuildings and not Administration, I doubt that this was the Medical Director of Norwich State Hospital’s office.
The only door into a large windowless concrete room, probably a storage bin. Kodak Portra 160/Mamiya 6.
The cold air collided with the sun-warmed water on the floor, filling the ground floor of the Keg House with thick fog…
A sizable crane on the corner of the engine house still swings out.
In this section of the Men’s Ward, sealed by brick from lower floors, the room doors had messages painted in their inside–some motivational, some not. I would be interested to hear if anyone knows the backstory of this section. Lighting is natural; it was just after sunset.
On the top floor of the former casket building is the finishing line for the coating section; on this section the final spray of plastic would hit the wood before a small furnace would seal the plastic permanently to the surface, making it more resilient, I assume.
Part of an ongoing series on found American flags in shuttered factories.