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.
history under ground
doors
Office manners dictate that one must tip their file drawer back upright once it is knocked through the wall.
Hip bump girl.
The last time the city sealed this door, they must have been changing out old road signs.
A view of the hallway outside of the auditorium.
The modern morgue, a replacement for the original morgue which has since been turned into a kitchen area.
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.
This bedroom built for a tuberculosis patient has been converted into a safe room.
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.
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.
The license plate reads “Farm Truck”.
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.
A warped mirror in the rock crusher at the rear of the complex.
The side of the maintenance shops, still home to several disassembled electric carts.
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.
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.
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.
A big sliding fire door opens onto a train dock.
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 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.
Miscellaneous math and strange instructions remain all across the shipment section walls. Sadly, this section likely fell into disrepair before the others.
A single metal emergency slide rusts away at sunrise.
An automatically closing door, in case of fire or flood in the engine compartment.
The only door into a large windowless concrete room, probably a storage bin. Kodak Portra 160/Mamiya 6.
Rubber dock boots still sits under the desk in the dock office, near keys to rusted locks and files of fired employees.
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 side of Stelco and its scrubber-stacks. This is demolished now.
A bunk room, minus the bunks.
Part of the unremodeled hospital, above the Service Building, where employees would stay sometimes.
On the second floor of the kettle building where corn mash was boiled, holes where tanks once sat were everywhere.
Devan setting up his 4×5 camera.
This building cleaned the barrels that transported ingredients through the plant.
Kodak Tri-X 400/Leica M7. The office (first floor), laboratory (second floor) and mill behind it. Everything was clean and pristine.
The end of the new elevator. Line of bird droppings follow the fire sprinkler pipes and wires in the room.
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.
Sleeping bags mark this former courtyard as a crash pad for the local homeless.
This dock goes between loading bays (see glass brick walls) and the railroad.
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.
Gloves hang in the basement of the former quality assurance labs.
A portrait of the second school of McConnell, built in 1937.
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.
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.
Aaron by the concentrator.
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.
Looking across the catwalk attache to the elevated control room, in charge of the train dumping part of the operation.
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.
The entrance to the area where staff could sleep.
An unplanned skylight. It’s unclear why some parts of the building had wooden roofing, while others were highly reinforced with brick.
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.
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.
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.
A wimpy crane by most standards, only suitable for moving around parts of steam turbines.
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.
A corner of the addition is lined with glass cabinets, formerly filled with beds.
A Merrill Piano from Boston, in the Recreation Room of the Front Dorm.
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.
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
A rare door left on the workhouse. The stairs to the left led down into a flooded basement. Kodak Portra 160/Mamiya 6.
One of Martinsdale’s defunct businesses perpendicular to the depot. Recall that Martinsdale is a T-town.
A side door on the rear of the castle that let guests out into a small stone courtyard below a tall turret.
The mostly-empty distilling room is easy to spot from the outside because of the distinctive round window.
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 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.
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”.
I can confirm the existence of the long-rumored Federal Rectangle Research Institute labs.
The first floor hallway between conference rooms and the diesel lab at the center of the facility
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.
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.
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.
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.
There’s a roof problem above the surgical suite.
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.
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.
The roof could be vented when locomotives were running inside.
The pits have long since been filled so the roundhouse could be used for storage.
Call me angsty, but I like it. Found in the Auxiliary Hospital.
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.
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.
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.
A small wood-paneled office for the on-duty keeper to use.
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?
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.
When ‘men’ meant ‘worker’.
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.
It was a strange choice, although I appreciate it, for the firm reusing the shops to brick up the doorways while leaving the doors.
Looking through a secure ward door at the destroyed rooms beyond.
The incinerator’s hardened steel door… useless, but still sexy in a heavy-industrial kind of way.
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!
Almost all of the doors and windows on the ground floor have been boarded, leaving the ground level very dark.
A sizable crane on the corner of the engine house still swings out.
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.
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.
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.
Sunrise in the orphanage… between classrooms and whispers.
A high-ceilinged room where kegs would be delivered for cleaning, before they were refilled with fresh booze.
An insurance office.
A switchboard to control the flow of electricity into the plant from the city and generators.
Pocket door and light switches in the upper control room, at the top of the spiral staircase.
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.
At noon, the lower skylights around the shops glow yellow-green, thanks to the flora blooming on the roof above.
A view of the government presses, with pages of law across the floor covered in footprints.
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.
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
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.
A series of interconnected offices that look like they hadn’t been painted in 40 years.
Beautiful details in the plaster moulding have been preserved by the sheer height of this room between the cathedral and auditorium.
Sliding fireproof doors and an old hydrant at Harlowton’s old yards.
Fire doors separate the buildings.
Heavy wood doors for keeping people in.
It’s pretty unusual to find a fireplace like this in the midst of a factory.
Gary Methodist was a filmset for Transformers 3 in 2010.
The top floor of the Meal Storage Elevator.
One of the few doors.
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 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.
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.
Sharks in the floor.
Note the wood and rubber wheels on this powder cart.
Jef throws open the back door of an alley for the trailing photographers and historians.
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
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 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.
A typical room in Birtle.
Looking toward Mitchell from its last building.
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.
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.
This was a living space for the keepers during storms, when it was too dangerous to return to the houses on the point.
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.
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 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.
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.
Looking into the main workhouse from the skyway into the annex elevator. But who care? Look at the colors!
These houses was built by hard rock miners in the early 1900s.
The truck scale is closed at Lena, MB.
Note the maps still left on the wall.
An ajar car elevator car afar, technically.
The building collapsed except for the back room. The slats of the roof cast lines of light across the floor.
Sawdust is the most classic of insulation materials.
Why the door had to be moved over 2 1/2 feet will remain a mystery.
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 tallest dock structure is an equipment elevator that connects the many dock levels.
The floor IS the machine…
One of the storage bunkers was cracked open. I wonder how effective this heavy door would actually be… I expect, not very.
The steam plant at Nopeming is an iconic (and crooked) smokestack. Kodak Pro 400 on a Fuji GX680.
Inside the main entrance to the depot. Through the ‘To Station’ door, you can see some of the news stands. Look at the floor!
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 blue chair in a blue room
The bathtub fell into the basement, ala The Miller’s Tale. That’s right. Chaucer.
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.
The cold air collided with the sun-warmed water on the floor, filling the ground floor of the Keg House with thick fog…
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.
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.
Looking through the old brewhouse toward the Keg Wash House.
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.
Heavy steel doors to isolate the underground magnetic separation mill from Eagle Mine’s main tunnel.
Hunter and the Hoist House.
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 storage vault for guns and other weapons to protect the base from attack.
On the extended engine bay…
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 big door into the fire pump room.
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.
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.
Taken several years before the tornado story when the weather, and the condition of the buildings, were nice.
A heavy steel rail door to help funnel explosions upward, rather than outward.
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.
Beautiful doors separated the boiler room and the sugar mill. Can you imagine the gracefully curving steps in a power plant today?
As my friend Jonathan would say, “on a human scale.”
A bumper sticker with the usual tagline. Note the detail on the radiator!
This miner locker room has probably never been so clean.
Lost words over the auditorium entrance.
The bottom of the stairs leading from the work floor to the cafeteria.
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.
A look at another “Belt-o-Vator”. I like the sign.
The factory’s first aid room and laboratory. Sure makes me wonder how safe the lab was!
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.
Easier-to-demolish parts of the power plant were torched apart. Catwalks to nowhere meant lots of dead ends.
Looking to the chapel addition from the Chateau.
Outside the locker room without the sandwiches and beer… plenty of glass shards, though, if you feel like it.
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.
I love this original brick archway, near the narrow gauge shop. Gorgeous!
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.
The historical entrance.
Originally, this part of the dock was reserved for the weather station.
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.
A side door for the brick factory.
Dominion was acquired by UGG, which designated the elevator ‘M’. Their offices still have safety signage.
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.
Books in nooks and not getting a look… about the crook with hooks that cooks.
Here, the concentrated gold (and silver, and zinc, I would guess) would be loaded into trucks bound for the smelter.
Inside the main entrance is a whiteboard and mirror, then it branches into discrete spaces.
Stairs and power lines enter the abandoned depot. Shingles slide off the rotten roof. Ektar 100/Mamiya 6
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.
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 Wheeler Rec Center was very nice and included gymnasiums and a pool.
Shag carpet is fabulous, and I hope it makes a comeback.
A typical narrow hallway at Birtle.