A portrait of the second school of McConnell, built in 1937.
history under ground
doors
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.
Books in nooks and not getting a look… about the crook with hooks that cooks.
The Wheeler Rec Center was very nice and included gymnasiums and a pool.
The shed in the front was full of worker supplies–namely goggles and heavy leather gloves. Molten copper isn’t a friendly thing to handle.
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.
Pocket door and light switches in the upper control room, at the top of the spiral staircase.
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.
Beautiful details in the plaster moulding have been preserved by the sheer height of this room between the cathedral and auditorium.
Before each warhead was crated, it was inspected.
A side door on the rear of the castle that let guests out into a small stone courtyard below a tall turret.
This “pit” would allow workers to crawl below locomotives to service them.
The historical entrance.
The steam plant at Nopeming is an iconic (and crooked) smokestack. Kodak Pro 400 on a Fuji GX680.
Standing where the Standard Oil’s boiler used to sit; the coal room is on the right, and would have been filled from trackside.
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 skyway 100 feet above this office crumbled one day. This is what happened when those two met. High-impact love.
It was a strange choice, although I appreciate it, for the firm reusing the shops to brick up the doorways while leaving the doors.
Dominion was acquired by UGG, which designated the elevator ‘M’. Their offices still have safety signage.
The portal facing Taconite Harbor (at a healthy distance) is mostly closed. Some kids put bullet holes in it. Shooting down a long tunnel is extremely dangerous, and you should not do it, obviously. Mamiya 6/Portra 160
Glowing observation windows–and someone forgot to lock a patient’s door…
In most places, it may seem off for there to be a tunnel door on the top floor of a building, but Ford was that kind of place. This door from the steam plant led into a skyway and tunnel that connected to the main assembly floor.
Sliding fireproof doors and an old hydrant at Harlowton’s old yards.
Note the severed skyway–that led to a set of grain elevators that have since been demolished.
Easier-to-demolish parts of the power plant were torched apart. Catwalks to nowhere meant lots of dead ends.
The sluice room was surrounded in fine grating. The company would want to finely control when the doors would be opened so the gold could be removed under supervision. No yellow bonus for the working man…
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.
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.
Looking at the ghost sign from a rust-locked cement conveyor that linked the silos with a packing warehouse.
The curving corridors flanking the Administration Tower are especially ornate, though the prison-like door betrays the real purpose of the building.
Hunter and the Hoist House.
The gauges on left of frame are the steam pressure indicators for the various steam-powered components around the ship, like the steering engine and windlass motors. Below the gauges are a case of tiny wooden parts drawers… note the ancient oiling can on the locker near the upper-right corner of the frame.
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.
Jef throws open the back door of an alley for the trailing photographers and historians.
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.
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.
A small wood-paneled office for the on-duty keeper to use.
A dead work truck rusts near an outbuilding. Everything is marked with a code. Modernity.
A warped mirror in the rock crusher at the rear of the complex.
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.
The roof compromised, rain water rolls down the main stairway.
The third floor corridor is not so welcoming, as it requires visitors to walk along the support breams without the luxury of a floor. I didn’t mind, but I can’t see the family with young children that was also exploring Noisy doing the same.
One of the occupied buildings in Nevadaville.
Inside the main entrance is a whiteboard and mirror, then it branches into discrete spaces.
No ambiguity here… miners, check in at this office.
After climbing the elevator shaft to the illusive second level, a new pallet of colors were revealed.
These houses was built by hard rock miners in the early 1900s.
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.
This picture tells half the story about the size of half of the complex. For Port Arthur, it’s average, but this would be a fantastically large elevator if it were anywhere else!
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.
Kat’s pretty cool.
The elevator tower seems to have been built with expansion of the dock in mind.
The tallest dock structure is an equipment elevator that connects the many dock levels.
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.
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
I believe this is the push car, meaning it would push the charge in the oven out the opposite side into the train car.
Lost words over the auditorium entrance.
From the bottom of the skyway I looked back, my eyes tracing the vines from the marsh up the smokestacks to the perfect Midwestern sky.
The top floor of the Meal Storage Elevator.
The big door at the bottom of the concentrator was where a tram once connected to lower the (pre-) processed ore into the river valley, where the railroad was. It’s unclear whether this ever connected directly to Eureka’s Sunnyside mill, although it’s possible.
Old parts catalogs litter the floor. The office overlooks empty shelves. Graffiti glue peeling paint in place.
Expanding foam provides some textural contrast to the wood floors, worn smooth over a century. This building dates to the 1890s and was built as the coffin plant.
Looking through a secure ward door at the destroyed rooms beyond.
As my friend Jonathan would say, “on a human scale.”
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.
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.
An unintentional skylight makes the inside of the office glow, showing the inside of the front door and its strange lock.
I love this original brick archway, near the narrow gauge shop. Gorgeous!
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.
The last time the city sealed this door, they must have been changing out old road signs.
Bayard Sugar Mill, as seen from the old power plant
Looking across the catwalk attache to the elevated control room, in charge of the train dumping part of the operation.
A comrade lights-up where so many workers apparently congregated to do the same.
A small bunker and blast wall between shell-loading buildings would have provided shelter during disasters, such as tornados, accidental explosions, and perhaps even enemy attacks.
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.
A door covered in pen graffiti.
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.
A look at another “Belt-o-Vator”. I like the sign.
When I moved from the roof back into the upper floors of the distillery, the plants growing out of the masonry caught my eye. It’s 60 feet up, but looks like it could be an old wall.
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 bottom of the stairs leading from the work floor to the cafeteria.
Shag carpet is fabulous, and I hope it makes a comeback.
A bumper sticker with the usual tagline. Note the detail on the radiator!
The blacksmith shop is pretty rugged looking. Through the door you can see the collapsed walkway that might have once connected to a building covering the Santiago Tunnel adit.
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 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.
A bathroom in the rear of the ballroom that overlooks the Rose Garden.
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 machine shop today.
This building cleaned the barrels that transported ingredients through the plant.
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.
The end of the new elevator. Line of bird droppings follow the fire sprinkler pipes and wires in the room.
I can confirm the existence of the long-rumored Federal Rectangle Research Institute labs.
An unplanned skylight. It’s unclear why some parts of the building had wooden roofing, while others were highly reinforced with brick.
A view of the hallway outside of the auditorium.
I am not sure, but I think this section was a storehouse; it has two ramps that connect the rail yard outside and the blacksmith shop. On all of the historic doors that face that part of the yard, signs caution workers to look out for cars…
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 truck scale is closed at Lena, MB.
Not ghosts. Slow-moving explorers’ shadows create a ghostly effect in the ‘Old Ward’–the second floor of 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.
Presumably, in a nuclear blast the antenna would be blown flat and pop back up, allowing communication even after a near-direct hit.
In the back of the warehouse is the old incinerator, probably used to destroy kegs that could not be reused.
Raab
Numbers on a pillar counted tank capacity for a removed water container; an unhinged door in an unhinged factory beguiles those looking for an exit.
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.
Looking into the main workhouse from the skyway into the annex elevator. But who care? Look at the colors!
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.
Fire doors separate the buildings.
Rubber dock boots still sits under the desk in the dock office, near keys to rusted locks and files of fired employees.
Typical bunk rooms in MS-20.
“Place Tripod Here” my friends would say. But for me, it’s the money shot. Note the painting around the inside of the skylight.
This train shed was later converted to load trucks with concrete from the silos.
These racks lined many of the floors, although I couldn’t decipher their purpose. Tastes like duotone…
There were a few large houses on the Old Crow property where employees would live. The glen had little housing.
Gaskets still organized on nails beside the power plant. This used to be a maintenance room, but since its roof and walls were torn down, it’s not any kind of room.
The modern morgue, a replacement for the original morgue which has since been turned into a kitchen area.
The old way to get to the elevator from the mill.
A series of interconnected offices that look like they hadn’t been painted in 40 years.
2016. A section of the third floor that has changed a lot over the years. Compare to 2006 shot.
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.
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.
Unloading boats had the option to take on fuel at Taconite Harbor. This building, among other things, pumped fuel to the dock.
Here, the concentrated gold (and silver, and zinc, I would guess) would be loaded into trucks bound for the smelter.
Camera: Pentax 67. Film: Kodak Ektar 100.
Outside the locker room without the sandwiches and beer… plenty of glass shards, though, if you feel like it.
A broken window looking through the First Aid Room and into the Control Room in charge of directing grain into ships. You can see one of the large conveyors on the right, clad in green. Chutes and staircases intertwine seemingly randomly through the big empty spaces.
One of the cupola air intakes, rattled loose by the demolition downstairs, hangs stranded on the second floor. You can see that the floor I’m standing on in this picture used to extend all the way to the right wall. The blue paint on the wall made the climb absolutely worth it.
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 Blacksmith Shop (right) was connected to the Bunk House (left) via this narrow walkway. This is likely due to the fire risk in each building. The left building had a cooking stove and furnace for heat and the right building had a small industrial furnace to repair mining equipment. A little walkway would mean that a fire on one side would be easier to fight from the other.
Everything is texture.
Many of the higher floors were more or less demolished–usually more. These would have been condos had ‘The Arcade’ project come to fruition. Now there are simply wide open floors punctuated only by pillars and meaningless hallways.
The building collapsed except for the back room. The slats of the roof cast lines of light across the floor.
A view of the government presses, with pages of law across the floor covered in footprints.
Sharks in the floor.
Almost all of the doors and windows on the ground floor have been boarded, leaving the ground level very dark.
The grain-centric buildings had automatic fire doors.
What I make out to be the dining room or great hall of the castle, as seen through of the side rooms, which appeared to be a very ruined library. Teenager graffiti looks cooler in French.
A steel powder keg serves as a door prop on the static-proof wood core floor. Note the ‘XXX’ marking to the left of the double door.
In the corner of most of the factory floors, freight elevators flanked restrooms to leave more central space for machines and their masters.
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.
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.
Looking through the old brewhouse toward the Keg Wash House.
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.
Miscellaneous math and strange instructions remain all across the shipment section walls. Sadly, this section likely fell into disrepair before the others.
A wimpy crane by most standards, only suitable for moving around parts of steam turbines.
Hip bump girl.
Note the wood and rubber wheels on this powder cart.
The first floor hallway between conference rooms and the diesel lab at the center of the facility
Sunrise in the orphanage… between classrooms and whispers.
Dr. Muchow’s offices stand near his ‘new’ mill, but they show evidence of vandalism.
A better look at the rails in the floor, installed to help move heavy equipment around the building.
Mold creeps up the walls of the offices that housed the Closing Team of the TCRC – Twin Cities Research Center – as water damage pulls ceiling tiles down.
A side door for the shop area with ivy crawling toward it.
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.
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”.
A bunk room, minus the bunks.
Call me angsty, but I like it. Found in the Auxiliary Hospital.
A sheik mustard-yellow paint scheme across the roofless engine house goes great with the industrial moss and rust.
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
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.
Perhaps this office was for a film studio or music producer.
A blue chair in a blue room
An insurance office.
Before the gold could be extracted, the rock was turned to powder. Depending on the size of the steel balls inside the mill, the rock would be reduced to a certain size. So, multiple mills were usually used in stages.
2013. A perfect summer day meets a beautiful old roundhouse on the edge of town.
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.
A typical narrow hallway at Birtle.
Beautiful doors separated the boiler room and the sugar mill. Can you imagine the gracefully curving steps in a power plant today?
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.
Heavy wood doors for keeping people in.
Originally, this part of the dock was reserved for the weather station.
The incinerator’s hardened steel door… useless, but still sexy in a heavy-industrial kind of way.
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.
This bedroom built for a tuberculosis patient has been converted into a safe room.
This dock goes between loading bays (see glass brick walls) and the railroad.
The moon highlights the contrails over the engine house in the middle of the night. Foreground light painted.
Looking out at the abandoned neighborhood around the house.
This was a living space for the keepers during storms, when it was too dangerous to return to the houses on the point.
“Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian writer and historian.
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.
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.
The floor in this building (now demolished) was very rotten. This picture was taken through a window from very firm ground.
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.
The license plate reads “Farm Truck”.
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.
The old men’s ward is an example of what the hospital resembled before part of the complex was modernized. Small rooms, light switches outside the door, small observation windows set into heavy wood. If you ask me, though, the tile work across the floors is the most spectacular.
The small door leads to the offices, the large door leads to the shop. My back at this time is to the corrugated steel wall. At the time I wondered why there was just one steel wall, not knowing that 40 years before there was another spot for an engine here. This section of the roundhouse has become a sort of town dump–car seats, cans of paint and tires are piled into its corners.
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.
Aaron by the concentrator.
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.
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.
The floor IS the machine…
The mostly-empty distilling room is easy to spot from the outside because of the distinctive round window.
David Aho pictured.
S&X seen in the background through the fog.
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!
The only door into a large windowless concrete room, probably a storage bin. Kodak Portra 160/Mamiya 6.
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.
A rare door left on the workhouse. The stairs to the left led down into a flooded basement. Kodak Portra 160/Mamiya 6.
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.