Belcher Stage

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”)

Note the pit is filled in here.

This building looked like some sort of office.

A burned and rusted control panel in the corner of the new hoist room.

The buildings were level with one another, so one could look through as many as a dozen factory floors from one window.

In this old repair shop, vines fall from the rotting roof to meet mossy concrete. Even though it had been dry for days, water dripped in from the roof to make permanent puddles between workstations. It was full of color and sound and industry and nature.

Somewhere there was a hoe left on the ground. Given that we had read articles about photographers being mugged around the abandoned projects, we felt it wouldn’t hurt to carry this around. I am glad we did; it made a great musical drumstick against the warped Wheeler Rec Center floor.

Some of the ruins are way off the beaten path… foundations of tank stands and pillars of buildings that never had walls or roofs.

A ruined culvert near Oregon Creek, behind Old Main, the predecessor of the University of Minnesota-Duluth.