Beautiful doors separated the boiler room and the sugar mill. Can you imagine the gracefully curving steps in a power plant today?
history under ground
doors
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.
A heavy steel rail door to help funnel explosions upward, rather than outward.
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.
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.
The side of the maintenance shops, still home to several disassembled electric carts.
There’s a roof problem above the surgical suite.
When ‘men’ meant ‘worker’.
To move air around the non air-conditioned buildings, may of which date to the 1920s and 1930s, fans were mounted above the high door frames.
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 historical entrance.
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!
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.
A view of the government presses, with pages of law across the floor covered in footprints.
Almost all of the doors and windows on the ground floor have been boarded, leaving the ground level very dark.
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 Merrill Piano from Boston, in the Recreation Room of the Front Dorm.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
A rare door left on the workhouse. The stairs to the left led down into a flooded basement. Kodak Portra 160/Mamiya 6.
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 sidewalks are littered with rocks.
A corner of the addition is lined with glass cabinets, formerly filled with beds.
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.
Gloves hang in the basement of the former quality assurance labs.
Here, the concentrated gold (and silver, and zinc, I would guess) would be loaded into trucks bound for the smelter.
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.
Office manners dictate that one must tip their file drawer back upright once it is knocked through the wall.
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.
Shag carpet is fabulous, and I hope it makes a comeback.
I love these heavy rolling doors in the old tobacco processing building.
An insurance office.
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.
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.
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 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.
This “pit” would allow workers to crawl below locomotives to service them.
Lost words over the auditorium entrance.
Miscellaneous math and strange instructions remain all across the shipment section walls. Sadly, this section likely fell into disrepair before the others.
The factory’s first aid room and laboratory. Sure makes me wonder how safe the lab was!
Dominion was acquired by UGG, which designated the elevator ‘M’. Their offices still have safety signage.
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.
On the extended engine bay…
Looking at the ghost sign from a rust-locked cement conveyor that linked the silos with a packing warehouse.
A dead work truck rusts near an outbuilding. Everything is marked with a code. Modernity.
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 bathroom in the rear of the ballroom that overlooks the Rose Garden.
Looking through a launcher doorway at an outbuilding… the fire truck garage, if I recall correctly. Fomapan medium format in Pentax 67.
A big sliding fire door opens onto a train dock.
This dock goes between loading bays (see glass brick walls) and the railroad.
A look at another “Belt-o-Vator”. I like the sign.
Old boathouses near the dock.
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.
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.
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.
One of Martinsdale’s defunct businesses perpendicular to the depot. Recall that Martinsdale is a T-town.
A common room with a big bay window that overlooked the main entrance of the hospital.
Note the maps still left on the wall.
Sawdust is the most classic of insulation materials.
Looking into the engine works from the concrete addition.
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 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
Presumably, in a nuclear blast the antenna would be blown flat and pop back up, allowing communication even after a near-direct hit.
One of the storage bunkers was cracked open. I wonder how effective this heavy door would actually be… I expect, not very.
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.
On the second floor of the kettle building where corn mash was boiled, holes where tanks once sat were everywhere.
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.
“Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian writer and historian.
The large domed rooms were surreal.
In the back of the warehouse is the old incinerator, probably used to destroy kegs that could not be reused.
The moon highlights the contrails over the engine house in the middle of the night. Foreground light painted.
I love this original brick archway, near the narrow gauge shop. Gorgeous!
Dr. Muchow’s offices stand near his ‘new’ mill, but they show evidence of vandalism.
In the many-windowed metal building, the lumberyard buildings and the abandoned starch works buildings are separated by a thick wall of pallets.
The pits have long since been filled so the roundhouse could be used for storage.
The tallest dock structure is an equipment elevator that connects the many dock levels.
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.
A storage vault for guns and other weapons to protect the base from attack.
Originally, this part of the dock was reserved for the weather station.
The grain-centric buildings had automatic fire doors.
Outside the locker room without the sandwiches and beer… plenty of glass shards, though, if you feel like it.
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.
This bedroom built for a tuberculosis patient has been converted into a safe room.
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.
Before each warhead was crated, it was inspected.
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”)
A typical room in Birtle.
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”.
At noon, the lower skylights around the shops glow yellow-green, thanks to the flora blooming on the roof above.
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.
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.
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
The cold air collided with the sun-warmed water on the floor, filling the ground floor of the Keg House with thick fog…
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.
The end of the new elevator. Line of bird droppings follow the fire sprinkler pipes and wires in the room.
This building cleaned the barrels that transported ingredients through the plant.
Looking through a secure ward door at the destroyed rooms beyond.
This was a living space for the keepers during storms, when it was too dangerous to return to the houses on the point.
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.
Call me angsty, but I like it. Found in the Auxiliary Hospital.
This train shed was later converted to load trucks with concrete from the silos.
Pocket door and light switches in the upper control room, at the top of the spiral staircase.
Sunrise in the orphanage… between classrooms and whispers.
These racks lined many of the floors, although I couldn’t decipher their purpose. Tastes like duotone…
Sleeping bags mark this former courtyard as a crash pad for the local homeless.
Paperwork litters the floors of the zinc mine offices.
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 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.
“Place Tripod Here” my friends would say. But for me, it’s the money shot. Note the painting around the inside of the skylight.
The back wall of the ballroom, showing water-warped floors.
After climbing the elevator shaft to the illusive second level, a new pallet of colors were revealed.
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.
A big door into the fire pump room.
These tubes would bring cement to the top of the plant for storage in the silos.
The modern morgue, a replacement for the original morgue which has since been turned into a kitchen area.
Upper Prize Street in Nevadaville earned the nickname ‘dogtown’ when a pack of dogs took over the abandoned houses.
Aaron by the concentrator.
A few of the stalls in the older section of the roundhouse, the noon sky peeking in.
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
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 warped mirror in the rock crusher at the rear of the complex.
A view of the hallway outside of the auditorium.
Some of the internal staircases were fitted with cages that wound round down the stairs to deter suicidal patients from taking a dive.
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.
The truck scale is closed at Lena, MB.
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.
Rubber dock boots still sits under the desk in the dock office, near keys to rusted locks and files of fired employees.
The piano must have been a nice distraction; there is very little to do in Roberts.
A door covered in pen graffiti.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Unloading boats had the option to take on fuel at Taconite Harbor. This building, among other things, pumped fuel to the dock.
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.
Inside the main entrance to the depot. Through the ‘To Station’ door, you can see some of the news stands. Look at the floor!
The roof could be vented when locomotives were running inside.
Devan setting up his 4×5 camera.
I believe this is the push car, meaning it would push the charge in the oven out the opposite side into the train car.
A comrade lights-up where so many workers apparently congregated to do the same.
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.
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 on the rear of the castle that let guests out into a small stone courtyard below a tall turret.
Note the wood and rubber wheels on this powder cart.
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.
A side door for the shop area with ivy crawling toward it.
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 mostly-empty distilling room is easy to spot from the outside because of the distinctive round window.
An unintentional skylight makes the inside of the office glow, showing the inside of the front door and its strange lock.
The substation has definite structural issues. Pictured is the sidewalk that connected the plant to the company housing.
The side of Stelco and its scrubber-stacks. This is demolished now.
A switchboard to control the flow of electricity into the plant from the city and generators.
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.
Books in nooks and not getting a look… about the crook with hooks that cooks.
Standing where the Standard Oil’s boiler used to sit; the coal room is on the right, and would have been filled from trackside.
Sharks in the floor.
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.
Hunter and the Hoist House.
In the corner of most of the factory floors, freight elevators flanked restrooms to leave more central space for machines and their masters.
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.
This building would store and maintain warheads. It was right next to the launch pad, but the two were separated by a high mound.
Looking to the chapel addition from the Chateau.
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.
This used to be one of the office doors, but it’s been removed (apparently without malcontent) and placed in the shop area.
Camera: Pentax 67. Film: Kodak Ektar 100.
Beautiful details in the plaster moulding have been preserved by the sheer height of this room between the cathedral and auditorium.
The machine shop today.
I can confirm the existence of the long-rumored Federal Rectangle Research Institute labs.
A better look at the rails in the floor, installed to help move heavy equipment around the building.
Easier-to-demolish parts of the power plant were torched apart. Catwalks to nowhere meant lots of dead ends.
The only door into a large windowless concrete room, probably a storage bin. Kodak Portra 160/Mamiya 6.
S&X seen in the background through the fog.
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.
The bottom of the stairs leading from the work floor to the cafeteria.
Offices above the labs. Note all the air handling equipment. I love the utilitarian design.
Redlining is the practice of shutting certain races out of neighborhoods, and it is still a big problem today. Such behaviors were a big factor in creating the need for these projects.
2016. A section of the third floor that has changed a lot over the years. Compare to 2006 shot.
The roof compromised, rain water rolls down the main stairway.
Looking toward Mitchell from its last building.
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 Wheeler Rec Center was very nice and included gymnasiums and a pool.
A bunk room, minus the bunks.
As my friend Jonathan would say, “on a human scale.”
Not ghosts. Slow-moving explorers’ shadows create a ghostly effect in the ‘Old Ward’–the second floor of the Service Building.
An automatically closing door, in case of fire or flood in the engine compartment.
Note the pit is filled in here.
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 elevator tower seems to have been built with expansion of the dock in mind.
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.
Looking out at the abandoned neighborhood around the house.
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.
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.
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.
The last time the city sealed this door, they must have been changing out old road signs.