A window for light and air pokes above the big arch in the hallway. Most of the interior ceilings were broad brick archways.
history under ground
windows
A volcano (?) under a window.
Connecting the Administration building’s tower and top floors is this beautiful cast iron staircase. It was probably designed to help service the clock originally planned to be set in the tower, but when the hospital went over budget the state cancelled the timepiece. Now we are left with a gorgeous stair with little or no real purpose–not that I’m complaining. I am a long-admitted spiral staircase fetishist.
Archeologists believe the great house on the mesa was rebuilt shortly before it was abandoned in the 13th Century AD. Tri-X 400 Film, haphazardly self developed.
Wind blew taconite dust against the walls of these suspended control room, making even the glass appear to rust.
The bottom area of the smokestacks house storage spaces. The windows of these rooms that were never completed line up perfect.
West Elevation of the Depot. Ektar 100/Mamiya 6
Looking out the second-floor lighthouse office window. On this visit, the last ice of the season was slowly drifting into the harbor.
Looking toward the Female Infirmary Ward from the long, glass, Conservatory hallway.
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 distance, the San Haven Sanatorium water tower.
The company labs. If you can believe it, this area is even more destroyed today.
The workshop and parts room was full of light and meticulously sorted bolts, nuts, washers, gaskets, and all sorts of specialty hardware.
The copula where molten metal would pour is on the left. It seems the whole floor was covered in ash in front of it.
In its last years, the church had a congregation of only about 100. It opened with 1.700…
A sign facing the city on an exterior wall–a sort of motivational poster.
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 what Studebaker called the ‘Materials Building’ are these giant concrete bins of fine molding sand, there for casting metal parts using the molten metal from the adjoining building. On the far left side there is a train track and once upon a time a gantry crane traced the room under the roof
They left and took their God with ’em. Doesn’t feel too empty without ‘im, though.
Small stained panes and orange brick. I had no idea when I took this picture that the colored glass would turn the insides of the mill into a bright aquamarine. It was a beautiful intersection of nature and industry, in the most unintended way.
Looking at the boarded exterior of the newer area of the orphanage from its 1914 section.
One of the walls of the train shed was growing, thanks to a little bit of sunlight and a constant trickle of rainwater over it. FP-100C.
A control panel that was mothballed, anticipating a time when the plant may be reactivated.
The building on the right was where parts not assembled onto vehicles would be set in crates for shipment.
Looking through Workhouse A from the top of a silo.
Germany’s steel mill city.
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.
I had to search the shelves a while to find this old logbook. The open page lists changes in stock numbers for Cutler Hammer Coils, and one row says that a new coil was installed on the black larry. The larry is the machine that loads coke ovens.
Frontenac’s shaft house is well preserved, compared to all other around it. Leica/Summilux 35/Ektar 100
The stone chapel sits beside the main house and received a particularly heavy dose of gothic architectural touches.
I wonder when fluorescent lighting was added.
John’s wife’s face.
Above the offices is this little section of factory that still has strips of wood flooring. This may be where the upholstery was cut.
The spiral staircase ends in the basement, where two oil tanks (for the lantern) and a freshwater tank (for the Keeper) were stored. The basement consists of two long arched vaults like this.
The power lines follow the street, down to the mineshaft. Everything revolved around the mine, it seemed.
A broken scale in Isabella A, next to an old wood stove.
The Barker turning around before it backed into Tac Harbor to unload coal for Minnesota Power.
On the top floor of one of the old wards, the slanted roofline makes the this group room more claustrophobic. Portra 160.
A bleak double room in what used to be the Receiving Hospital, built apart from the Kirkbride to observe incoming patients before they were placed in a ward.
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.
Looking down at the Port Arthur Ore Dock from Manitoba Pool Elevator #3. The conveyor belts are gone and King Elevator is in the far distance.
At first glance, I thought the center building was a hoist house because of the shape of the window. Now I think this was built as a warehouse and later used as a laboratory.
This building was responsible for storing and drying the barrels. Compare right.
When I looked out of the old mill, I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell was holding it all up.
Energy conserving window plastic does no good when the doors are all open and the heat’s off.
Above my head while taking this picture was the seal of the Department of the Interior.
From Main Street, looking straight up at the A Mill, only the silence makes one think that nobody’s still inside, grinding grain into Pillsbury’s Best.
A small machine shop level.
The service window in the Administration Tower had seen some abuse, even if it wasn’t so old.
This little curled yellow thing is one of the last hints that this adobe building was lived in.
A closeup of one of the winding machines that found itself under a leaky section of roof.
This is one of the modern nurse’s stations where the last inpatients lived in the mid-2000s. The windows are thick shatterproof plastic. I am unsure why the suspended ceiling is missing.
This bay would host boxcars as workers would fill them with the fruits of the factory.
A breeze and broken window has animated one of the few curtains still hanging in Nopeming as of 2015.
Fire doors separate the buildings.
The buildings were level with one another, so one could look through as many as a dozen factory floors from one window.
As if they were planning to move the furniture out of the hospital, it all sits in the main hallway in the ground floor.
The coke plant looked more natural through a grimy window.
In the middle of the foundry, an office is untouched by scrappers, legal and not. Inside, warnings and catalogs for machines that are gone, obsolete, and melted down.
Since this picture was taken, the roof has totally collapsed in this area.
A circular common room in one of the original parts of the hospital. When the asylum was especially crowded, this would be filled with patient beds, too. It’s very strange that this floor was not tiled like the other common rooms. It makes me wonder if especially dangerous patients were kept in this ward; those who could not be trusted to not extract and sharpen the ceramic tiles. Portra 160.
Another perfect Indianan sunset alights like a bird on the tops of the vent houses and tree-packed smokestacks.
This building looked like some sort of office.
The screen and mineral stained window cross-processed the sky.
…somebody get the number of that truck! Near the Day Rooms in the Paying Patient ward.
This side of the mill, which abuts the Great Miami River, is much older than the other side of B Street. You can tell it went through many revisions.
When block glass shatters, it looks like ice.
The headquarters for the plant was in the middle of it. It’s abandoned but well preserved–a strange sight in Gary, Indiana.
This is where the transformers were housed. Note the steel tracks in the floor for moving equipment around the building.
Looking out of a door to nowhere at the fiery sky above.
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 picture is lit by a direct lightning strike of the building. It’s impossible to describe the feeling of being in this giant open building the moment it channeled an electric explosion into the earth.
Looking above the altar.
Looking from one workhouse at another, with the other residents of Mill Hell falling into place as the distance grows. Across the rail yard you can see Froedert Malt elevator and Calumet.
Tarpaper telling time-
Wood wittling weather-
Rust rot ruins.
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.
Found in one of the rooms that hosted an inpatient chemical dependency unit in its later years. Connect the dots yourself.
What time is it?
Fluorescent lights peel back from the walls like caterpillars, rearing up and away from the glare of the sunflower-fans.
A bedroom, from the basement. The Dog Days are Over.
The skylights with geared-to-open windows were massive and quite functional.
The interior of one of the curved corridors that connect two wards. Note the original floor’s hand-laid tile pattern. Portra 160.
The topmost roof of the hospital is covered in antennae and includes a star that faced the rest of the complex, now demolished.
Different colors stained the small panes on the top floor. For once, it seemed more ridiculous to not be inside an abandoned factory.
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 dirt-brick building hasn’t fared well.
Judging by the bed, this room was used by employees in its later years.
Looking from the rail shipping building through pigeon-proofing chicken wire at another manufacturing building in high Fall.
Imagine with yellow window guards are eyebrows and the open windows are the eyes. This headframe seems a bit curious.
Everyone loves water towers.
In a now-demolished building, a skylight begins to separate.
Birch shadows on stone walls… have you been looking at my Christmas list?
The seminal architectural feature of the old hospital–the parts built by Illinois Central Railroad–was this staircase. Wide and graceful, adorned with paint chips and fire extinguishers, and leading from offices to surgical suites to the cafeteria.
A cottage for masons infected with TB to live together.
HDR matrix panorama. Looking from the grain elevators, now doomed, toward the city between the flour mill’s water tower and tile elevator’s neon sign, the old and new economies seem almost united. Yet the financial centers rise in reality to shadow the now-abandoned industry and manufacturing. The way of things, I’m told.
A bunk room, minus the bunks.
This seemed to be the newest building on the property.
Taken in the last few minutes of the day. You can tell by the way that the wall is deteriorating that the windows using to have an arched top!
The view from the larry, looking out at the overgrowing coke oven top. Papers listed the order of the charges for each oven, noting the sticky doors and persistent leaks. Emergency respirators and rescue gear was stored close, as long exposure to emissions from the rusty hatches could make worker pass out on the top of the ovens.
The backdrop has become the pallet for water damage and graffiti.
These stairs connected some small main-level offices with one of the main sewing rooms above. Because the roof on this building was strong, it was pretty well preserved–look at those colors. Through the open fire door on the left, though, you can see that the roof has given out.
In an old ward, two men would have shared this room.
The common rooms bulge out of the institutional geometry of the wards.
Negative twenty looks much warmer in retrospect, wouldn’t you say? Taken through the window of a gantry crane cab.
The clock, which was sold after Amtrak dumped the building, was returned to the Waiting Room in 2005.
A typical room in the barracks, reinforced from mortars and light shelling, possibly.
2005. A skyway connecting two Which tube carried the beer? I hope it’s the big one!
Looking through the hole where a glass pane once was at the Columbus Mine ruins, just south of Animas Forks. It was quiet when I took the picture, but for the gurgle of the nearby Animas River.
Shadows of the trees from the materials yard.
The trees were so overgrown, it was difficult to see the hotel at all from the road.
One of two control towers that reached over the lake. The control panel here was used to move the conveyors over the ship’s hold doors, adjust flow of the taconite, and so on.
Sheet metal over the windows. A red boot sole in the tumbleweeds. Is it inside, or outside?
One of the few windows that escaped steel plating the last time the hospital was sealed tight to let nature roam within.
Part of the Laundry Building with an ugly archway between rooms. Note that even this building had a nurse’s station with shatterproof windows. Laundry was done by supervised patients as part of their Occupational Therapy and the staff took no chances.
I love the big old industrial windows.
A crack in a window in a wall. What’s this doing here?
The roof has been replaced since this was taken. Hopefully, that will stem the water damage.
A different kind of tree fort.
The State School stage, taken as it was getting scrapped.
The sun was setting outside, highlighting the textures and lines that made the form of the power plant take a fourth dimension–time.
Looking into the tunnel system from below the Women’s Ward. The tunnels were used mostly by staff to move food and laundry.
Heavy industrial looks good in cotton candy pink.
Peering into a remote office at Manitoba Wheat Pool #3. Someone left their to-do list behind.
The power gauge showed… broken.
A long exposure in the crane cab at sunset throws a bit of color into the bleak yellow glows between the windows and car shaker.
Looking from the shaft room into the room where an electric hoist would be.
Standing atop the dust collector, the factory breaks down into diverging patterns, processes.
The Sun Rooms, or Common Rooms, reminded me of the Panopitcon turned inside-out.
Looking through the old brewhouse toward the Keg Wash House.
This “pit” would allow workers to crawl below locomotives to service them.
Even without the kettles the Hamm’s brewhouse is beautifully lit, ornamented architecturally and begging for photographers to remember it.
Outside the Chateau, where the fuel oil tank blocks the chapel.
A familiar scene in Control Tower B, though the microphone has not been used for years.
Some of the rotting clothes were in boxes, split long ago from moisture. Others were just heaped in piles.
It’s a small world… look at it.
The office building was fancy compared to the utilitarian factory behind it. My favorite part was the logo crown.
The corner of Clyde on Michigan Street looked like it had been sealed a long time.
One of the only extant assembly line tracks in the body painting department. No photographer leaves Fisher 21 without capturing some version of this spot; hope you like mine.
In the barracks.
A white star marks the landing between the Keeper’s Quarters (Second Floor) and the radiobeacon and furnace rooms (First Floor).
The world’s biggest paper machine was installed here about a century before this photo was taken. The orange in the windows is the brick building across the street–the new part of the plant.
A cloud moves across the attic in front of the window. How? A photographer’s secret.
One of the pair of motors that powered this mine shaft. In the 1950s, this shaft was designated a rescue shaft, and was only maintained for emergencies. One reason that Cheratte built Shaft 3 nearby was because these motors and infrastructure did not have the capacity that the giant mine below called for.
The sidewalks are littered with rocks.
Stairs and power lines enter the abandoned depot. Shingles slide off the rotten roof. Ektar 100/Mamiya 6
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.
This room on the top floor of one of the oldest buildings has seemingly not changed since it was adapted for employee use. Some sections of the hospital were adapted for staff to live in. Paying Patient Ward–where capable patients were separated from wards of the state.
The old boilers of the steam plant have been mostly gutted to remove loose asbestos.
The barracks are being reclaimed by nature.
Looking up at the most conspicuous graffiti in the city on ADM #4.
A skyway 100 feet above this office crumbled one day. This is what happened when those two met. High-impact love.
A 1960s style TV set in a sun room at the back of the poor house. The concrete room survived the roof collapse and was full of rotten children’s books and toys. Perhaps it was where donations were sorted, or perhaps it was a nursery/orphanage area.
This part of the roundhouse was being brought down by rain and gravity.
When not running 24 hours a day during a campaign, the plant was being repaired. Every sugar mill has a large shop and parts room for those times.
A rusting disconnect gangway. The smokestack is for a boiler, if I recall.
The sun unzipped the clouds. Mist blew across the harbor.
The organ and bits of glass that have lost their way. Try not to see the upside-down wooden cross dangling from the stained-glass-crown on the church’s front side. Of course, it’s to keep the loose panes from falling out onto the road in wind, but at the same time…
The sun shining through one of the buildings; everything was overgrown.
This is what the complex looks like today to the bare eye. Dull, monochrome, quiet.
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.
This section of the production floor was constantly dripping. Someone had laid down giant plastic sheeting to attempt to protect the lower floors, but it hasn’t worked.
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.
The walls are separating on the adobe house…
A staircase threads between the top floor and the sluices, which are in the middle of the dredge-mill.
The engine room.
In the modern control room at the base of the white elevator tower are the electronics that ran the newer building, its rail components and boat-loading component. The superstructure permeates all spaces here, as can be seen with the crossing I-beams in the main office.
One of my favorite shots of the headhouse at the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool #4, with one seagull threading the needle. The socket holes on the frame got blown out thanks to my bad developing, but I like the effect. Arista 100.
The grand staircase with little balconies leaning over it. All the stone stairs are broken and graffiti marks every wall.
The fences helped discourage patients from throwing themselves down the stairs.
A back-lit tree with the silhouette of a roof spire in the background.
One of the generators, weeks before it was taken apart to be shipped to another power plant somewhere else.
Note the maps still left on the wall.
These long curved corridors connected the wards. Locked doors on both of their ends were a security and comfort feature. Sounds and people would be sealed in their respective wards, as the hallways would act like beautiful airlocks; they were so long that it was unlikely that doors would be open on both sides at the same time. Portra 160.
The arches of the Twohy building, before some of the signs and sills were painted in 2015.
“See anything?” “No, just more of it.” “How much to go?” “Oh god–we’ve only seen about 10%.” “Guess we should keep moving then…”
Originally, this part of the dock was reserved for the weather station.
Mill Hell before the University of Minnesota began developing the area. Now many of the buildings are gone, there are new roads and even bike paths.
The old hotel doesn’t like to show its age. Indeed, if it had a few paint job and soft remodel it would be fit to open–that is, if there was a need for it in this tiny rural New York town.
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.
In some places in the mine shops, you can still make out narrow gauge track in the floors.
A tower above Minneapolis that few people see.
The office was redder than the rest of the building.
I really like the way this high-ceilinged room is decaying. Well, decayed. It’s demolished now.
The side of the oldest building on the property, the former casket factory.
Ultimately, it was the bad roof that doomed these buildings.
The front of the power plant (right), the distillery itself (center), and the regaling house (left).
The east side of the boiler shop sported a platform with a control booth and heavy machine mounts. Note the door that replaces the lower section of stairs for explorers.
Much of the circa-1950s buildings remain with few alterations, such as these long boring sheet metal ruststicks.
A walk-up service window on the side of an administration building of some sort. I have a feeling the buildings were color coded.
There were a few large houses on the Old Crow property where employees would live. The glen had little housing.
Grimy windows and the other half of the complex trade interests and stares.
After crushing, these machines would float lighter material to the surface of the water, where it would be skimmed and discarded. Gold and silver laden stone would sink to the bottom, where it was collected for the next stage of processing. Leica/Summilux 35/Ektar 100
After a little rain, the roof took on the color of the bright pink letters.
The north side of the plant is modern 60s industrial architecture, meaning massive open spaces with no personality. This mirror is the most interesting thing I could find.
Dust explosions were a real risk for grain mills. These funnels helped to filter the air in the mill.
Part of the plant has been reused as a scrap metal yard.
Taken while standing on the torn outline of a scrapped altar. With my back to the faded outlines of men, books and the Holy Grail, the room seems much lighter.
Copper poured from this furnace and was cast by the autocaster on the right into billets.
The old offices for the Oberon Elevator are defunct, but seem to be holding up to the brutal prairie snows and winds. Medium Format.
Noontime light, long criticized for the boring shadows it grants photographers, comes into its own sometimes.