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Jan. 24th, 2007 10:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogOur (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
posicat and my) trip to Gary in one word: Absolutely amazing!
I picked up Posi at about 8:30 and we were on the road to Gary at nine. After getting very minorly off track in Calumet City, we got to our meetup point at just a little after eleven. We parked in a couple places and wandered about, asked one person, who happened to come out of their house, for directions, and finally ended up walking up and down around the church we were meeting up at, wondering if we were in the right place. We were about to give up when an older gentleman came walking down the road toward us and, noting our backpacks, flashlights, and, well, the fact that we were white, accurately guessed that we were there for the meetup. He lead us in to the church through a wide open gap in the fence and took us in to the sanctuary.
Wow. Words can't quite cover what I saw, and to my sorrow, I don't have any pictures of my own to share with you (though I will post some links to those that others have taken at the end of my entry). Built in 1925, the church was an imposing three floor edifice with a tower mounted squarely on top of the sanctuary that stretched up another two floors. Mighty columns formed vaulted arches that leaped upward toward the ceiling along the sides of the room, making the central part, where rows of pews once stood, feel vast, beautiful, and welcoming, even amidst the decay. Looking up, I saw that there were balconies to each side of the room, on the second floor, where would have sat more parishioners if the main floor was full. Looking higher yet, I could see a gap where a small part of the ceiling, perhaps forty feet up, had fallen away, creating a line of sight into the first room of the tower above.
All about the outer walls of the sanctuary were tall, slender windows, the arches at their tops twins to those atop the columns further in, with shards of stained glass remaining at the tops to hint at their original appearance. As I first entered, the orb of the sun was settled perfectly behind one of the larger remaining panes, bathing the center of the sanctuary in golden light through the yellow glass. I think it was at that moment, with the brilliance of day filtering through the remains of man's vision to paint such beautiful colors over the broken and brittle evidence of nature's contrasting plan for what was now nearly hers again; it was at that moment, in the surreal juxtaposition of what once belonged to us and what may soon forever belong to the earth once more, that I most clearly felt the presence of god in this old church.
After chatting with a few of our fellow explorers a bit, Posi and I ventured off to explore the rest of the building. Other groups split off from us and went their own way through the chilled hallways as we wandered briefly through the attached stage and theatre, then proceeded upstairs and into what used to be a gymnasium. We continued up from there until we ended up at the top of a flight of stairs with a few others. I would have gone back down, but one of the other explorers pointed out the tip of the ladder protruding through the rain-discolored ceiling to me. Shame on me; I hadn't even noticed it!
There was a pile of bricks underneath, and with their aid, one could get a hold of the bottom of the ladder and scramble on to the roof. There was another person already up there; I shall from here on refer to him as 'Crazy Dude' for reasons which will shortly become clear.
So Crazy Dude had gone up the ladder and I was waiting for him to come back down. He didn't. After a while of that, I climbed up after him. There, I found myself at the beginning of a catwalk that, I had been told, lead to the tower structure on top of the sanctuary. Looking around in awe at the height I was at and the view down, I proceeded out onto the catwalk. It was just fifteen feet or so out to where it met up with a door on the side of the tower. So I came to the end of the walk and looked in. Serious vertigo time.
I was looking at the exact same hole in the roof of the sanctuary that I mentioned previously, but this time from the other side. I could now see that it was a large missing chunk of the floor of the room at the base of the tower. Right below my feet was at least a forty foot drop to the floor of the church; one which I very much suspect would prove fatal. Conspicuously absent from the scene was Crazy Dude.
Allaying my sudden worry that he had fallen in with the fact that I'd failed to notice any screaming or splatting noises, I held tightly to the edge of the doorway into the tower and looked around it to see inside. There, to my left, was Crazy Dude, who was perched on some of what was left of the floor.
"Hi!" he said.
Apparently, he had inched his body around toward the inside of the door and made it over the gap toward the left side, where there was less empty space. There was no way it was jumpable straight across, but someone who was either confident, or cracked, enough might have been able to squeeze around the side of the doorway and make it to safe ground over that way.
"Were you up there?" I asked, pointing at the ladder on the opposite side of the room that lead, I assume, to the roof of the tower.
"Yup. But would you mind moving back a bit? I have to get back around."
I moved back down the catwalk, giving him plenty of space to work his way back over looming death and onto relatively safe ground. After he'd gone by, I went back to the doorway. I looked around toward the precarious position that Crazy Dude had just vacated and, very briefly, considered. It didn't take me long to decide that, with the way merely looking down through the gap literally made me weak in the knees, that I'd gone about as far as I was going to. I enjoyed the view that I had for a few more minutes, then climbed back down the ladder.
Though nothing quite as dramatic was to be found in the rest of the building, it was still a really engrossing place to walk through and explore. As well as being a church, there was an attached school (which explains the gymnasium I mentioned earlier), so there were a couple floors of classrooms to poke through. In a couple, blackboards now long gone from the walls revealed some hand written notes from builders. "Measurements are taken from molding and are not level. Make blackboard look right if possible."
The roof of one part of the church was originally intended as a garden. Though we were told that that didn't work out so well (steel mills don't smell very appealing it would seem), I thought it was a really romantic idea. I daydreamed a bit about seeing verdant greens piled in planters at the edges of the roof; what an idyllic place that would have been in midst of the grime and industry of the city. Posi, seeing the weeds and saplings rooted in various nooks and crannies, pointed out that it really is a kind of garden now, too. That put a sincere smile on my face as I thought about the new use that nature has found for this place that man seemed to no longer want.
The last thing I should mention about the church was the pictures I found scattered about. There was a circular array of twenty or so on the space where the altar once stood, and scattered through the rest of the building were single glossy images of various abandoned structures and people exploring them. So I asked the gentleman we'd first met, the de-facto leader of our group who I'd found went by KTown, what they were.
KTown sat down with us in the middle of ruined gymnasium on the second floor of the school and explained. The pictures were either of or taken by a close friend who'd been very involved in the urban exploration scene and the church in particular. When his friend died, one of the ways that KTown memorialized him was in these pictures, placed all around the church so others can see his legacy. The images scattered around the rooms of the church brought a tear to my eye as I understood their purpose. I really hope that when my time comes, I am remembered in such a beautiful and fitting way.
I should mention here too that, not only are his pictures memorialized there within the church itself, but they are also to be forever preserved in the Purdue University archives. A number of shots he's taken have been added to the file of information they have there, documenting the church through its entire lifetime. KTown was a professional researcher before his retirement and continues to work with Purdue in documenting some of the area landmarks.
After some time spent in the church, the party of explorers split off in two directions. Posi and I followed KTown's group through a few more interesting places. We went through a building that was once a Plymouth dealership and had three floors of reinforced concrete, all made to hold the weight of cars. A long disused elevator stood in the middle, larger than nearly any I've seen. All along the top floor, a nearly perfectly flat sheet of ice kept the bottoms of our feet a scant centimeter or so from the concrete. Stacked everywhere, seven or eight feet high, were the burned out, skeletal remains of couches, easy chairs, and many more unnameable pieces.
KTown explained that Goodwill owned the building at one point and used it as a furniture warehouse. When they abandoned it, everything was simply left where it was. Three floors of furniture and toys and even some books that were abandoned not only by their owners, but even by Goodwill. Posi pulled a book from a box and, on the inside cover, found an inscription with a date, a name, and the phrase 'From Mom and Dad'. There was something eerie about seeing a personal gift to someone's child just left amidst the ruins, and I left it where it was. I did, however, take with me an intact vacuum tube that Posi liberated from one of the few mostly intact TVs.
From there, we moved on to the Palace Theatre. Now this is a building I intend to come back to and explore more thoroughly. Built in the same year as my beloved Rhode Opera House, 1927, it was nearly three times as big, boasting a capacity of three thousand people, but oddly similar in some ways. There was the same interior construction of clay-fired brick showing through the crumbling facings. The same type of slotted letters to place on its marquee. Even the exact same automatic door closers.
The house had- has, a full balcony and was an atmospheric design, with a ceiling that was made to resemble a night sky with the idea that patrons would feel as though they were in the courtyard of some great European building as they watched the evening's entertainment. Not much is left of that ceiling at this point; even less than is left in the Kenosha Theatre. Just a ragged-edged patch down the middle of the house.
Though the Palace was in worse shape than the Kenosha, seeing her in ruins didn't hit me quite as hard as seeing the Kenosha did. Maybe it's because while the Kenosha still shows signs of life and potential, the Palace simply speaks of death. It's very far gone, and may be beyond saving. Though as I've explained, meeting an abandoned building often feels like meeting a ghost, an entity trapped between life and death, seeing the Palace felt more like the viewing of a body. I hope I'm wrong.
After the Palace, we explored a post office (I got to walk through the enclosed overhead passages where postal inspectors would look down through tiny slit windows at the sorting room) and a two story brickwork structure that was once the entrance to a fairly large auditorium. Now, the auditorium long since burned to the ground, it is merely an ornate and dignified entrance to nothing at all; it's doors lead out into thin air. Posi and I had a couple of sandwiches on the second floor there while we looked around with the others. The surreality of having a bit of a picnic lunch in these surroundings was not lost on me.
Finally, we went back toward our cars and split up for our respective journeys home. It's been a long time since I've had a chance to do something like this; next time won't be nearly as far off if I have anything to say about it. I feel very excited, and privileged, to have seen these places, and I want more. I'm planning on going along the next time the local group plans a meet, and I'm even considering trying to get some of my friends together to visit Gary and see what I've seen, especially the church and the theatre.
As I've said, I don't have any pictures that I took: yet. But the pictures at the link below are fairly representational and will give you a good idea of what we were looking at. Enjoy!
http://www.forbidden-places.be/urban_exploration_gary_indiana_ghost_town
posicat and my) trip to Gary in one word: Absolutely amazing!I picked up Posi at about 8:30 and we were on the road to Gary at nine. After getting very minorly off track in Calumet City, we got to our meetup point at just a little after eleven. We parked in a couple places and wandered about, asked one person, who happened to come out of their house, for directions, and finally ended up walking up and down around the church we were meeting up at, wondering if we were in the right place. We were about to give up when an older gentleman came walking down the road toward us and, noting our backpacks, flashlights, and, well, the fact that we were white, accurately guessed that we were there for the meetup. He lead us in to the church through a wide open gap in the fence and took us in to the sanctuary.
Wow. Words can't quite cover what I saw, and to my sorrow, I don't have any pictures of my own to share with you (though I will post some links to those that others have taken at the end of my entry). Built in 1925, the church was an imposing three floor edifice with a tower mounted squarely on top of the sanctuary that stretched up another two floors. Mighty columns formed vaulted arches that leaped upward toward the ceiling along the sides of the room, making the central part, where rows of pews once stood, feel vast, beautiful, and welcoming, even amidst the decay. Looking up, I saw that there were balconies to each side of the room, on the second floor, where would have sat more parishioners if the main floor was full. Looking higher yet, I could see a gap where a small part of the ceiling, perhaps forty feet up, had fallen away, creating a line of sight into the first room of the tower above.
All about the outer walls of the sanctuary were tall, slender windows, the arches at their tops twins to those atop the columns further in, with shards of stained glass remaining at the tops to hint at their original appearance. As I first entered, the orb of the sun was settled perfectly behind one of the larger remaining panes, bathing the center of the sanctuary in golden light through the yellow glass. I think it was at that moment, with the brilliance of day filtering through the remains of man's vision to paint such beautiful colors over the broken and brittle evidence of nature's contrasting plan for what was now nearly hers again; it was at that moment, in the surreal juxtaposition of what once belonged to us and what may soon forever belong to the earth once more, that I most clearly felt the presence of god in this old church.
After chatting with a few of our fellow explorers a bit, Posi and I ventured off to explore the rest of the building. Other groups split off from us and went their own way through the chilled hallways as we wandered briefly through the attached stage and theatre, then proceeded upstairs and into what used to be a gymnasium. We continued up from there until we ended up at the top of a flight of stairs with a few others. I would have gone back down, but one of the other explorers pointed out the tip of the ladder protruding through the rain-discolored ceiling to me. Shame on me; I hadn't even noticed it!
There was a pile of bricks underneath, and with their aid, one could get a hold of the bottom of the ladder and scramble on to the roof. There was another person already up there; I shall from here on refer to him as 'Crazy Dude' for reasons which will shortly become clear.
So Crazy Dude had gone up the ladder and I was waiting for him to come back down. He didn't. After a while of that, I climbed up after him. There, I found myself at the beginning of a catwalk that, I had been told, lead to the tower structure on top of the sanctuary. Looking around in awe at the height I was at and the view down, I proceeded out onto the catwalk. It was just fifteen feet or so out to where it met up with a door on the side of the tower. So I came to the end of the walk and looked in. Serious vertigo time.
I was looking at the exact same hole in the roof of the sanctuary that I mentioned previously, but this time from the other side. I could now see that it was a large missing chunk of the floor of the room at the base of the tower. Right below my feet was at least a forty foot drop to the floor of the church; one which I very much suspect would prove fatal. Conspicuously absent from the scene was Crazy Dude.
Allaying my sudden worry that he had fallen in with the fact that I'd failed to notice any screaming or splatting noises, I held tightly to the edge of the doorway into the tower and looked around it to see inside. There, to my left, was Crazy Dude, who was perched on some of what was left of the floor.
"Hi!" he said.
Apparently, he had inched his body around toward the inside of the door and made it over the gap toward the left side, where there was less empty space. There was no way it was jumpable straight across, but someone who was either confident, or cracked, enough might have been able to squeeze around the side of the doorway and make it to safe ground over that way.
"Were you up there?" I asked, pointing at the ladder on the opposite side of the room that lead, I assume, to the roof of the tower.
"Yup. But would you mind moving back a bit? I have to get back around."
I moved back down the catwalk, giving him plenty of space to work his way back over looming death and onto relatively safe ground. After he'd gone by, I went back to the doorway. I looked around toward the precarious position that Crazy Dude had just vacated and, very briefly, considered. It didn't take me long to decide that, with the way merely looking down through the gap literally made me weak in the knees, that I'd gone about as far as I was going to. I enjoyed the view that I had for a few more minutes, then climbed back down the ladder.
Though nothing quite as dramatic was to be found in the rest of the building, it was still a really engrossing place to walk through and explore. As well as being a church, there was an attached school (which explains the gymnasium I mentioned earlier), so there were a couple floors of classrooms to poke through. In a couple, blackboards now long gone from the walls revealed some hand written notes from builders. "Measurements are taken from molding and are not level. Make blackboard look right if possible."
The roof of one part of the church was originally intended as a garden. Though we were told that that didn't work out so well (steel mills don't smell very appealing it would seem), I thought it was a really romantic idea. I daydreamed a bit about seeing verdant greens piled in planters at the edges of the roof; what an idyllic place that would have been in midst of the grime and industry of the city. Posi, seeing the weeds and saplings rooted in various nooks and crannies, pointed out that it really is a kind of garden now, too. That put a sincere smile on my face as I thought about the new use that nature has found for this place that man seemed to no longer want.
The last thing I should mention about the church was the pictures I found scattered about. There was a circular array of twenty or so on the space where the altar once stood, and scattered through the rest of the building were single glossy images of various abandoned structures and people exploring them. So I asked the gentleman we'd first met, the de-facto leader of our group who I'd found went by KTown, what they were.
KTown sat down with us in the middle of ruined gymnasium on the second floor of the school and explained. The pictures were either of or taken by a close friend who'd been very involved in the urban exploration scene and the church in particular. When his friend died, one of the ways that KTown memorialized him was in these pictures, placed all around the church so others can see his legacy. The images scattered around the rooms of the church brought a tear to my eye as I understood their purpose. I really hope that when my time comes, I am remembered in such a beautiful and fitting way.
I should mention here too that, not only are his pictures memorialized there within the church itself, but they are also to be forever preserved in the Purdue University archives. A number of shots he's taken have been added to the file of information they have there, documenting the church through its entire lifetime. KTown was a professional researcher before his retirement and continues to work with Purdue in documenting some of the area landmarks.
After some time spent in the church, the party of explorers split off in two directions. Posi and I followed KTown's group through a few more interesting places. We went through a building that was once a Plymouth dealership and had three floors of reinforced concrete, all made to hold the weight of cars. A long disused elevator stood in the middle, larger than nearly any I've seen. All along the top floor, a nearly perfectly flat sheet of ice kept the bottoms of our feet a scant centimeter or so from the concrete. Stacked everywhere, seven or eight feet high, were the burned out, skeletal remains of couches, easy chairs, and many more unnameable pieces.
KTown explained that Goodwill owned the building at one point and used it as a furniture warehouse. When they abandoned it, everything was simply left where it was. Three floors of furniture and toys and even some books that were abandoned not only by their owners, but even by Goodwill. Posi pulled a book from a box and, on the inside cover, found an inscription with a date, a name, and the phrase 'From Mom and Dad'. There was something eerie about seeing a personal gift to someone's child just left amidst the ruins, and I left it where it was. I did, however, take with me an intact vacuum tube that Posi liberated from one of the few mostly intact TVs.
From there, we moved on to the Palace Theatre. Now this is a building I intend to come back to and explore more thoroughly. Built in the same year as my beloved Rhode Opera House, 1927, it was nearly three times as big, boasting a capacity of three thousand people, but oddly similar in some ways. There was the same interior construction of clay-fired brick showing through the crumbling facings. The same type of slotted letters to place on its marquee. Even the exact same automatic door closers.
The house had- has, a full balcony and was an atmospheric design, with a ceiling that was made to resemble a night sky with the idea that patrons would feel as though they were in the courtyard of some great European building as they watched the evening's entertainment. Not much is left of that ceiling at this point; even less than is left in the Kenosha Theatre. Just a ragged-edged patch down the middle of the house.
Though the Palace was in worse shape than the Kenosha, seeing her in ruins didn't hit me quite as hard as seeing the Kenosha did. Maybe it's because while the Kenosha still shows signs of life and potential, the Palace simply speaks of death. It's very far gone, and may be beyond saving. Though as I've explained, meeting an abandoned building often feels like meeting a ghost, an entity trapped between life and death, seeing the Palace felt more like the viewing of a body. I hope I'm wrong.
After the Palace, we explored a post office (I got to walk through the enclosed overhead passages where postal inspectors would look down through tiny slit windows at the sorting room) and a two story brickwork structure that was once the entrance to a fairly large auditorium. Now, the auditorium long since burned to the ground, it is merely an ornate and dignified entrance to nothing at all; it's doors lead out into thin air. Posi and I had a couple of sandwiches on the second floor there while we looked around with the others. The surreality of having a bit of a picnic lunch in these surroundings was not lost on me.
Finally, we went back toward our cars and split up for our respective journeys home. It's been a long time since I've had a chance to do something like this; next time won't be nearly as far off if I have anything to say about it. I feel very excited, and privileged, to have seen these places, and I want more. I'm planning on going along the next time the local group plans a meet, and I'm even considering trying to get some of my friends together to visit Gary and see what I've seen, especially the church and the theatre.
As I've said, I don't have any pictures that I took: yet. But the pictures at the link below are fairly representational and will give you a good idea of what we were looking at. Enjoy!
http://www.forbidden-places.be/urban_exploration_gary_indiana_ghost_town
