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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Abandoned Places' InsaneJournal:
| Monday, December 1st, 2008 | |
| 8:34 pm | Abandoned South Bronx As A Muse  By RANDY KENNEDY Published: November 30, 2008 When Ray Mortenson first started taking his cameras through the most wasted of the wastelands that made up parts of the South Bronx in the early 1980s, he devised a helpful subway mantra: Take the 5, stay alive. Take the 4, dead for sure. This was only because the No. 5 line led through a handful of neighborhoods — East Tremont, Mott Haven, Morrisania — that had been so gutted and burned out during the 1970s that whole blocks were almost completely abandoned, meaning fewer chances of stumbling into a mugger or drug deal. As a sculptor and photographer, Mr. Mortenson began making these Bronx trips because he was interested in the purely physical and visual characteristics of a once dense, elegant urban landscape that had come to look like excavated Pompeii or Dresden after the firebombs. Not that he would have ever wanted part of his city to endure the kind of devastation it did, but once the South Bronx reached that state he approached it aesthetically, as a “hard-art project.” “I like being here,” he wrote. “I like the way it looks.” Mr. Mortenson’s rarely exhibited black-and-white photographs, made between 1982 and 1984, are such powerful artifacts of their era that they have always struggled against being pulled into the documentary realm. And now, in a show of the pictures at the Museum of the City of New York called “Broken Glass” — the title is a line borrowed from the lyrics of the Grandmaster Flash classic “The Message” — the pictures have the added resonance of appearing as the nation confronts its most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression, making them feel like a kind of augury. “You hear about this happening now in suburban places hit by foreclosures — empty houses, windows going broken, swimming pools filling up with trash,” Mr. Mortenson said in a recent interview at the museum. When he began taking the pictures, he was working as an electrician and engaged by the ideas of artists like Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark, whose explorations of urban decay and entropy had made America’s crumbling infrastructure into a new canvas for art. In the late 1960s Smithson photographed the industrial ruins around his birthplace, Passaic, N.J., christening them as monuments. In the early 1970s Matta-Clark staged illegal “interventions” in some of the same Bronx neighborhoods that Mr. Mortenson was to visit, slicing whole sculpturelike sections from the floors and walls of abandoned tenements. Mr. Mortenson’s first photographic explorations of this sort took him to the Meadowlands in New Jersey, where nature and industrial decay met in epic combat. Toward the end of the years he spent exploring the swamps he began taking the elevated subway lines through the Bronx and looking out at the rubble that many neighborhoods had been reduced to. As a child growing up in Delaware, he loved spending time alone walking through forests and fields, and he said he thought of the Meadowlands and then the Bronx in the same way. “I could spend hours walking around some blocks without seeing anyone,” he said. He would wander around Charlotte Street, one of the South Bronx’s bleakest, which President Jimmy Carter had made infamous in a 1977 visit. (It is now in a suburblike neighborhood of neat single-family homes built not many years after Mr. Mortenson’s photographs were taken.) He would walk through dozens of buildings that seemed to have been abandoned overnight, with coats still hanging on closet doors and furniture still in the living rooms. But the elements had begun to creep in through the broken windows, peeling the paint and causing ceiling plaster to rain down on the floors. Mr. Mortenson, now 64, began shooting inconspicuously, wearing a beaten-up Army jacket, with a rolled-up New York Post under his arm and a 35-millimeter camera in his pocket. But as he began to learn the neighborhoods, spending sometimes 12 hours a day there during long summer days, he started to lug around a big, boxy view camera. He would set it up on the streets or inside abandoned apartments on a tripod to make exposures sometimes lasting as long as 10 minutes. “I’d set up the shot and open the lens and then just walk around the building, exploring, until it was done,” he said. Occasionally he ran into other human beings. Once he was surrounded by drug dealers, who demanded his film, and in the darkness of some buildings he would almost stumble over scavengers ripping out copper wiring and pipes. “You really had a heart attack when that happened,” he said, “and I’m sure those guys were having a heart attack too.” In contrast to the work of photographers who have concentrated on urban decay from a more sociological perspective, like Camilo José Vergara, or even from an activist standpoint, like Mel Rosenthal, who was shooting the South Bronx at the same time, Mr. Mortenson’s pictures are devoid of people or even cars. Other than notations of the day they were shot, there is no information accompanying them. “I wasn’t carrying a notebook or even a map,” he said. “I was just going where my eye took me.” Sean Corcoran, the curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, said he was drawn to the images in part because of the tension in them between art and history. “The act of framing and capturing an image from the world is inherently transformative,” he wrote in the catalog for the show, which runs through March 8. “Yet the pictures also provide an important record of a moment in time.” Mr. Corcoran writes that they insistently ask the question: “How could things get to this point? What political, economic and cultural shifts could lead to such a collapse?” Mr. Mortenson said he had not returned to those blocks since he stopped taking photographs in the Bronx in 1984. “I’m ambivalent about it,” he said. “There was something about being there alone, about that time, that I guess I want to keep.” “It was kind of like being in a horror movie,” he added. “But that was all part of it.” I swear, though this guy is 24 years my senior and alive, I have been channeling him. Back in the late 80's-early 90's I began to shoot the abandoned places near me. Much of the way he feels and the approach he has taken are mine as well. I plan on taking a trip to the museum to see more of his work. Good stuff. |
| 4:58 pm | |
| 2:58 am | Abandoned tubercular clinic |
| Sunday, November 30th, 2008 | |
| 2:01 pm | Ok, so i really really love this site... But will somebody learn what a frakking cut is for!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! please? |
| 12:30 pm | Light House One day a work crew left the door unlocked and ajar... This place actually has a BASEMENT!!  Just inside the South Door... The right-hand doorway leads to the Basement...  Chain hoist and Iron spiral stair up - 4 floors all told...  Former main doors - facing East, first floor...  Second floor landing...  2nd Floor bathroom - note the 'ghosts' of a sink and toilet on the wall...  West... bedroom?  3rd floor (tower - looking up at light chamber)  Looking South, from 3rd floor  Looking down 3rd floor...  North view from Light chamber...  The fresnel lens of the LIGHT!  |
| 8:55 am | Sharecropper I happened across this old cabin on a dirt road somewhere in northern central Tennessee.
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| 7:25 am | Josset Leigh House, St. Lucia It dawned on me as I was looking through my honeymoon pictures where my affinity for abandoned buildings came from... This house sits on the northern end of St. Lucia, and is actually a seperate island named Pigeon Point. The house and Island belonged to a British actress named Josset Leigh. She lived on the island on and off for 40 years. She was quite the entertainer and her parties legendary. During WWII she ceded her deed to the island to the British, but it was restored to her after. Later, she gave the land to the St. Lucians and retained only her house on the point. She left St. Lucia in 1976 and most of her house was destroyed by the last hurricane to hit the island in 1980.  I'll try to find the other pictures I took of it after work :) |
| 1:46 am | Abandoned Daiquiri joint in Cancun Found this rusted spring break haven in Cancun. It was a former Fat Tuesday's in Playa Tortugas not far from the hotel zone in Cancun. The guard said it was heavily damaged and abandoned after a Hurricane (Wilma?). Some googling also finds mentions of problems with local authorities and that there is a new Fat Tuesday's at Playa Linda a bit north. You could feel the ghosts of drunken beach partying mixed with the rust and sand.       |
| Saturday, November 29th, 2008 | |
| 9:08 pm | Golgotha Fun Park This is an abandoned amusement park I found on KY 70 between I-75 and Mammoth Cave. It's not up to usual 'Abandoned Places' standards and it's not even particularly remarkable - there are a lot of these parks still open, trying to live off the tourists headed to the national park. What grabbed me is the incredibly inappropriate name ... it didn't appear to have any overtly Christian theme, so I have to wonder if the owners knew the association.
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| 2:25 pm | |
| Friday, November 28th, 2008 | |
| 12:02 pm | Unexplained streetcar This old streetcar was abandoned behind a row of stores in some tiny hamlet in western Virginia. I have to wonder how a streetcar even gets to rural Virginia. Who brought it here? Was it in transit when whatever enterprise it was involved in went south? Was it intended to wind up here? Did someone have restoration in mind? Was it going to be part of a museum, or a restaurant?
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| 10:30 am | |
| 2:40 am | |
| Thursday, November 27th, 2008 | |
| 3:49 pm | Trees of steel  This factory was the first abandoned building in which I actually entered; the light was not so good and I didn't have a tripod, so I was a little limited in the photographs. This one turned out quite good, after some processing. Click the pic to see the larger versions on Flickr. |
| 9:01 am | Robert E. Lee Motel I've shot this location before a few years ago, and I think I even posted it here, but I found it fascinating enough to go looking for it again recently when my wandering took me near Bristol, VA. Unfortunately it's now quickly being overtaken by the underbrush and is fast disappearing. It's definitely beyond saving; I would imagine that within another year or so the structure will begin to collapse.
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| 3:20 am | North Carolina Exploration (PART 1) Knowing that because it was a busy weekend, I would likely not find anyone to go with me exploring, so I went alone... I didn't go in any houses because it would be far too dangerous (rotting wood, etc.) , so most of these are going to be external shots. This is a huge post. The light could be better, I went during high noon. There's video too. If you want the unposted photos, or large versions, let me know, I'll zip them for you. This was an old farm house. My mother says that this area of NC was known for tobacco farming. The House:    Fence detail:  I was standing too close to get a full shot, so I took two and stitched them together:   What's left of the porch:  Warning to any criminals:   Left side:   Through the open window:  Love those wooden ceilings:  Cellar:  Right side:   Video!   Shed:     The aluminum foil is still wrapped around the shelf:  The Barn:   (What I think are) The Slave Quarters:     Spine holding up the back of the structure:  Part 2 and 3 to come soon. PS: I took some shots with a Holga, but have to wait until I get home to develop them. |
| Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 | |
| 2:32 pm | |
| Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 | |
| 4:25 pm | Abandoned Power Plant - Dixmoor, IL Cross-posted from my livejournal. On November 16th, I went out to Dixmoor, IL, one of the southwest suburbs of Chicago, to check out an abandoned, coal-fired power plant with </a></b></a> ![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} stormdog and Eric, my source for all things related to Chicago trivia. I had gotten wind of the site from a member of the Chicago Urban Exploration Meetup Group, which is a handy resource for anyone in the area.I took a lot of pictures, which are all posted on my Flickr page. It's an amazing site, but we didn't get to look at as much of it as we wanted for lack of safety equipment. Several pieces of floor were missing from the steel catwalks that basically turn the place into a giant, three-dimensional maze, so we thought it would be best not to explore them without safety equipment. Anyway, here are some highlights of the trip.  This garage looks like it used to be a receiving facility, perhaps for coal arriving by truck or rail.  Exterior shot of the main building.  Exterior of the smokestack.   We found this conveyor belt in an annex to the main building. It leads (or comes from) the partiall flooded basement. I think it was how they got coal from the ground up to the top of the facility where it was poured into giant hoppers that fed the furnaces.   In what looked like a storage room or office, we found all sorts of records and other things, including what we thought was a big fuse, that have been remarkably well-preserved from when the plant was decommissioned.      Shots taken from the ground floor of the building, including the turbines, some controls, and what I think could be parts of the furnaces and some condenser tanks for converting steam back into water.  Interior of a bioler, I think. We found it up on a catwalk. From the outside it looks like the world's most powerful pizza oven.  These gears drive something... I think part of the machinery that feeds coal into the furnaces.   This conveyor belt runs over a series of enormous, concrete coal hoppers. It's located at the top of the building (we accessed the roof through a door off to the right) and I think it feeds coal into the hoppers as it comes up from below. The hoppers were very, very deep and though apparently accessible by metal ladders, we didn't really trust them, especially because there is no way out of the hoppers if a ladder gives out.    Views of the interior of the smokestack.    Exhaust gases from the furnace were drawn down through the floor and into the smokestack through these brick tunnels. I don't know what happened to cause part of the wall to bend inward and partially collapse. I want to go back in the spring when it's warmer and bring some safety equipment so we can try getting into some of the catwalks that have missing pieces of floor. I also think that some of the spaces on the main floor of the building would be great sets for a steampunk photo shoot, if we could figure out how to address issues like getting in lights and electricity to power them, care of costumes, and safety (it's not the greatest of neighborhoods). |
| 2:52 pm | Bouncing Back Haven't posted here for a bit so here we go. "New" location for me the former NRI factory in Toronto's "Junction" closed a couple years ago when they moved to their new location.         As always more can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/axle81401/s |
| 11:15 am | Urban cathedral  Hi all, I just discovered this community and I'm going to post some shots here..any comment is welcome! See my Flickr for details on the place (click on the image). |
