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.
history under ground
doors
A series of interconnected offices that look like they hadn’t been painted in 40 years.
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.
A side door for the shop area with ivy crawling toward it.
This “pit” would allow workers to crawl below locomotives to service them.
I love these heavy rolling doors in the old tobacco processing building.
A wimpy crane by most standards, only suitable for moving around parts of steam turbines.
The bathtub fell into the basement, ala The Miller’s Tale. That’s right. Chaucer.
The machine shop today.
While the maps name this the compressor house, I believe, based on its size and number of heavy machine mounts, that it also housed the pumps to drain the mine.
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.
Looking through a launcher doorway at an outbuilding… the fire truck garage, if I recall correctly. Fomapan medium format in Pentax 67.
I love this original brick archway, near the narrow gauge shop. Gorgeous!
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 elevator tower seems to have been built with expansion of the dock in mind.
The floor in this building (now demolished) was very rotten. This picture was taken through a window from very firm ground.
Note the severed skyway–that led to a set of grain elevators that have since been demolished.
Camera: Pentax 67. Film: Kodak Ektar 100.
Raab
Beautiful details in the plaster moulding have been preserved by the sheer height of this room between the cathedral and auditorium.
These houses was built by hard rock miners in the early 1900s.
The bottom of the stairs leading from the work floor to the cafeteria.
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
Old boathouses near the dock.
The moon highlights the contrails over the engine house in the middle of the night. Foreground light painted.
The floor IS the machine…
A typical room in Birtle.
This door used to open at river level, but it has since been built up and sealed with a steel grate. Still, the original doors (with original paint?) stand in the same place. Once they opened to the fresh air, now they are permanently sealed in the tunnels. This is the official entrance for inspecting the mine, hence fiber optic and ladder. Shortly after the plant was demolished, this entire area was resealed and alarmed.
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.
Note the pit is filled in here.
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…
A bathroom in the rear of the ballroom that overlooks the Rose Garden.
On the second floor of the kettle building where corn mash was boiled, holes where tanks once sat were everywhere.
At noon, the lower skylights around the shops glow yellow-green, thanks to the flora blooming on the roof above.
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.
The incinerator’s hardened steel door… useless, but still sexy in a heavy-industrial kind of way.
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.
Heavy wood doors for keeping people in.
These tubes would bring cement to the top of the plant for storage in the silos.
A warped mirror in the rock crusher at the rear of the complex.
Devan setting up his 4×5 camera.
This used to be one of the office doors, but it’s been removed (apparently without malcontent) and placed in the shop area.
Perhaps this office was for a film studio or music producer.
Here, the concentrated gold (and silver, and zinc, I would guess) would be loaded into trucks bound for the smelter.
A single metal emergency slide rusts away at sunrise.
A big door into the fire pump room.
In the back of the warehouse is the old incinerator, probably used to destroy kegs that could not be reused.
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 entrance to the area where staff could sleep.
One of the few doors.
The pits have long since been filled so the roundhouse could be used for storage.
A bunk room, minus the bunks.
The side of Stelco and its scrubber-stacks. This is demolished now.
Looking across the catwalk attache to the elevated control room, in charge of the train dumping part of the operation.
Offices above the labs. Note all the air handling equipment. I love the utilitarian design.
A switchboard to control the flow of electricity into the plant from the city and generators.
These racks lined many of the floors, although I couldn’t decipher their purpose. Tastes like duotone…
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.
David Aho pictured.
Hunter and the Hoist House.
This bedroom built for a tuberculosis patient has been converted into a safe room.
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.
The truck scale is closed at Lena, MB.
The roof could be vented when locomotives were running inside.
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.
A door covered in pen graffiti.
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.
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!
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.
2013. A perfect summer day meets a beautiful old roundhouse on the edge of town.
A sheik mustard-yellow paint scheme across the roofless engine house goes great with the industrial moss and rust.
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.
Glowing observation windows–and someone forgot to lock a patient’s door…
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.
The Wheeler Rec Center was very nice and included gymnasiums and a pool.
The lower door is where the rocket exhaust would flow into the blast pit during initial launch. The upper doors would vent the rocket so the erector and other equipment in the building would not be (as) damaged.
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 small wood-paneled office for the on-duty keeper to use.
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.
Presumably, in a nuclear blast the antenna would be blown flat and pop back up, allowing communication even after a near-direct hit.
This dock goes between loading bays (see glass brick walls) and the railroad.
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.
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.
A view of the hallway outside of the auditorium.
Tunnels interconnected all of the complex, carrying power, steam, laundry and food throughout the hospital. This is a typical causeway that would have been very busy when the hospital was operating. In some places, signs still point to defunct areas of the hospital.
The grain-centric buildings had automatic fire doors.
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.
Sliding fireproof doors and an old hydrant at Harlowton’s old yards.
Looking at the ghost sign from a rust-locked cement conveyor that linked the silos with a packing warehouse.
Like many mill-style buildings of the time, the Twohy’s loading doors (in this case, the delivery wagon doors) opened to an elevator shaft. This design cut down on loading time, as long as the elevator was operational. Of course, if it was otherwise occupied, there could be no traffic through the exterior doors!
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 arches of the Twohy building, before some of the signs and sills were painted in 2015.
Heavy steel doors to isolate the underground magnetic separation mill from Eagle Mine’s main tunnel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This miner locker room has probably never been so clean.
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.
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.
It was a strange choice, although I appreciate it, for the firm reusing the shops to brick up the doorways while leaving the doors.
A common room with a big bay window that overlooked the main entrance of the hospital.
The top floor of the apartment seemed so empty without the furniture that once adorned it. Instead, my eyes were drawn to the worn paths in the floor between the rooms.
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.
Looking through a secure ward door at the destroyed rooms beyond.
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 toward Mitchell from its last building.
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.
Sleeping bags mark this former courtyard as a crash pad for the local homeless.
Inside the main entrance is a whiteboard and mirror, then it branches into discrete spaces.
Call me angsty, but I like it. Found in the Auxiliary Hospital.
I believe this is the push car, meaning it would push the charge in the oven out the opposite side into the train car.
Easier-to-demolish parts of the power plant were torched apart. Catwalks to nowhere meant lots of dead ends.
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.
It’s pretty unusual to find a fireplace like this in the midst of a factory.
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.
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 factory’s first aid room and laboratory. Sure makes me wonder how safe the lab was!
The modern morgue, a replacement for the original morgue which has since been turned into a kitchen area.
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.
In the corner of most of the factory floors, freight elevators flanked restrooms to leave more central space for machines and their masters.
Note the maps still left on the wall.
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.
2006. A section of the third floor that has changed a lot over the years. Compare to 2015 shot.
This spiral staircase isn’t doing Lemp much good–maybe they’ll let me have it! I do love, though, that there is a door going to it–without walls–and it ascends to a second floor that doesn’t exactly exist anymore.
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.
Fire doors separate the buildings.
On the extended engine bay…
A window for light and air pokes above the big arch in the hallway. Most of the interior ceilings were broad brick archways.
Note the wood and rubber wheels on this powder cart.
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.
A rare door left on the workhouse. The stairs to the left led down into a flooded basement. Kodak Portra 160/Mamiya 6.
Unloading boats had the option to take on fuel at Taconite Harbor. This building, among other things, pumped fuel to the dock.
A small stage in one of the barracks.
Looking into the engine works from the concrete addition.
The old truck scale sits in the middle of what was Nettleton Avenue Slip.
The historical entrance.
A few of the stalls in the older section of the roundhouse, the noon sky peeking in.
The stone chapel sits beside the main house and received a particularly heavy dose of gothic architectural touches.
This picture shows all three areas of the substation. In the foreground is the transformer room, the tallest space. The darker room in the middle is the motor generator room. The room at the end through the door is the control room and office area.
Taken several years before the tornado story when the weather, and the condition of the buildings, were nice.
Looking into the main workhouse from the skyway into the annex elevator. But who care? Look at the colors!
A skyway 100 feet above this office crumbled one day. This is what happened when those two met. High-impact love.
The side of the maintenance shops, still home to several disassembled electric carts.
Everything is texture.
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.
Paperwork litters the floors of the zinc mine offices.
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…
There were a few large houses on the Old Crow property where employees would live. The glen had little housing.
Sunrise in the orphanage… between classrooms and whispers.
A side door on the rear of the castle that let guests out into a small stone courtyard below a tall turret.
An employee lunchroom with every door and window covered in vented steel.
The piano must have been a nice distraction; there is very little to do in Roberts.
A photo from my first trip, although very little has changed in this area of the building except for the level of graffiti. I love skylights, don’t you?
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.
There’s a roof problem above the surgical suite.
Jef throws open the back door of an alley for the trailing photographers and historians.
One of the occupied buildings in Nevadaville.
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.
A heavy steel security door, taken right off its hinges. This was likely installed after Grafton State School took over the hospital.
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.
One of my favorite photos of the ADM-Delmar #1 skyway, when it stood. Taken at sunset, with the reflection of the overcast sky in the remaining windows.
Between the repair shops and the stock department is this odd little structure. No, the walls are not level–it’s not your eyes. The shops slope left, the structure slopes right.
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.
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.
Kodak Tri-X 400/Leica M7. The office (first floor), laboratory (second floor) and mill behind it. Everything was clean and pristine.
A Merrill Piano from Boston, in the Recreation Room of the Front Dorm.
A better look at the rails in the floor, installed to help move heavy equipment around the building.
After climbing the elevator shaft to the illusive second level, a new pallet of colors were revealed.
The sidewalks are littered with rocks.
A bumper sticker with the usual tagline. Note the detail on the radiator!
Why the door had to be moved over 2 1/2 feet will remain a mystery.
The back wall of the ballroom, showing water-warped floors.
An ajar car elevator car afar, technically.
An insurance office.
These were some of the most attractive shops of all the mines in the area. It’s no wonder Hanna Mining wanted to use them as their center of operations in the Iron River district.
Looking out at the abandoned neighborhood around the house.
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.
Some of the internal staircases were fitted with cages that wound round down the stairs to deter suicidal patients from taking a dive.
Stairs and power lines enter the abandoned depot. Shingles slide off the rotten roof. Ektar 100/Mamiya 6
A view of the government presses, with pages of law across the floor covered in footprints.
The roof compromised, rain water rolls down the main stairway.
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.
“Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian writer and historian.
Almost all of the doors and windows on the ground floor have been boarded, leaving the ground level very dark.
Behind the grand staircase is this beautifully preserved hallway with medieval-style arches and vivid paint.
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.
No ambiguity here… miners, check in at this office.
The top floor of the Meal Storage Elevator.
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
Sharks in the floor.
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.
Vines are finding their way into the roundhouse.
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.
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.
Hip bump girl.
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”)
One of Martinsdale’s defunct businesses perpendicular to the depot. Recall that Martinsdale is a T-town.
Safety signs decorated every floor, machine and, yes, door. This message spoke to me for reasons my coworkers will understand; suffice to say, I need to take this message to heart.