Abandoned buildings come back to life on the Internet

Strickland’s, a Pennsylvania resort once reserved for couples, sits rotting on a wooded hillside. The rooms with heart-shaped tubs are vacant. Rows of neatly arranged ice skates line shelves beside the cavernous rink, waiting to be checked out. The nightclub is empty, its stage still decorated with glittering streamers, as if preparing for a final show.

Beneath the buzz of Cincinnati street life, subway platforms, tracks and stations sit frozen in time, decades after the never-used system was abandoned.

Along the banks of Chippewa Lake in Ohio, three roller coasters rise from a forest. Trees grow through the tracks, and the screams of patrons have been replaced by the silence of decay.

Throughout North America, such monuments to bad planning, hubris or simply changing times sit idle, waiting for the bulldozer, the weather or the passing of years to knock them down.

But they are not ignored by everyone. A devoted subculture of Internet-savvy explorers is dedicated to documenting the haunting existence of these orphaned sites. Drawn by a fascination with the past or perhaps the thrill of trespassing, the explorers act as self-appointed cultural stewards, documenting the odd majesty of their discoveries on the Web and in books.

“It takes a certain type of person to be into this,” said Beth Santore, the founder of graveaddiction.com, a Web site documenting abandoned places around Columbus, Ohio. “Some of my friends get thrilled to go exploring with me, but others don’t see why this is so exciting.”

What draws Santore to the sites is a fascination with the past. “I always wonder, why is this site abandoned? Who lived there?” she said.

Other explorers are attracted by the idea of the unknown lying so close to the everyday. “There are four miles of completely abandoned subway tunnels beneath Cincinnati,” said Andy Henderson, whose exploits entering abandoned buildings are documented on his Web site, forgottenoh.com. “They never ran a single train, but there are four stations, and poured concrete ticket booths and stairs going up to the street. People drive over them and have no idea it’s there.”

Marc Mosher, who operates the Web site oabonny.tripod.com, documents the crumbling structures out of a sense of duty. He catalogs a range of abandoned sites in upstate New York, from lopsided barns to the towering red bricks of a crumbling smelter to something called a cheese storage building. “I wanted to show a little of what we are slowly losing over time, especially with new buildings being put up and old ones torn down,” Mosher wrote in an e-mail interview.

Still other explorers are simply trying to reconnect with their past. Kelly Powell, a schoolteacher in New York City, recently returned to Strickland’s, the dilapidated Pennsylvania resort where she worked as a teenager, fearing it would soon be torn down.

Since abandoned sites are rarely maintained, they can be dangerous. Once the windows are broken and the doors flung open, nature intrudes with harsh effect. “There’s broken glass, wildlife, the threat of homeless people,” Santore said. Other dangers include unstable floors and exposed asbestos. Smashed furniture, graffiti and piles of seemingly random junk often defile the sites.

Most explorers list a flashlight, camera and comfortable clothing as crucial items to bring on any expedition. However, there is one item that they all agree is mandatory: a companion. “I never go alone,” Henderson said. “Never. Not even in the daytime.”

Of little concern, it seems, is the law. All of the explorers interviewed for this article said that they had never been arrested on their hunts. Indeed, they stressed that most abandoned sites were unguarded. Henderson said that several police officers were fans of his Web site and had written to him with their compliments. “One even showed me around an old munitions plant that dates back to the Civil War,” he said.

The explorers have adopted a loose code of ethics that rejects vandalism. Many attempt to obtain permission from the owners before entering a site. Most do not believe in “tagging” a building to leave their mark or defacing it in any way. And they take a harsh stand against those who do.

“Access All Areas,” a book about urban exploration by Jeff Chapman, known as Ninjalicious, a pioneer of the online explorers community, offers the following advice: “If you have nothing to say beyond a messy scribble of your name or your group’s name, don’t say anything at all. If you really can’t suppress your instinct to mark your territory, please just wait until you get home and then urinate on your furniture until you get that weird evolutionary misfire out of your system.”

But taking souvenirs is not out of bounds for some explorers. “If I see something that’s really neat, I’ll take it,” said Henderson, who counts a handmade wooden crucifix, a bulletproof vest and an S-shaped needle--used to sew up cadavers after an autopsy--as prizes looted from different sites. “Mostly these places are piles of bricks, so I don’t feel too bad,” he added.

A few of the explorers refuse to enter buildings at all. “I take all of my pictures from public property (usually a road),” Mosher of oabonny.tripod.com wrote in an e-mail message. “And if I want a closer look I do some research and contact the owners of the property to get permission.”

But to most of the explorers the thrill of entering a forbidden site is a main attraction. “I get a rush out of trespassing. It’s scary, you have to be sneaky,” Santore said.

Sometimes the stories of gaining access can resemble a scene from an action movie. Henderson, who said he has sneaked into the abandoned Cincinnati subway as well as amusement parks and other sites, recounted one particularly daring break-in of a vacant hospital:

“The building was only two-thirds abandoned, and there was a police station on the other side,” he said. “I went in through the crawl space and emerged in a courtyard. On one side was the police station. I ran across the courtyard, pulled the screws off the door and went in.”

There is a sense of urgency among the explorer community these days as more abandoned sites are taken over by developers.

“These buildings are here, but land is valuable, and they can be torn down at any time,” said Santore, who noted that two of her favorite structures, the Linken Hospital, an old psychiatric facility in West Virginia, and the Junction City Prison in Ohio, were razed this year.

Henderson, who has written two books about abandoned sites around Ohio, is more pragmatic. “You get used to seeing them demolished,” he said. “If something never gets documented properly, then it just disappears. That’s why you need to wander in or go through a hole in the fence to record it.”

E-mail: sjw2121@columbia.edu