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stormdogVisit Gary, Indiana and receive a free Sledgehammer!*
*While supplies last. Offer valid only where prohibited by law.
I rolled out of bed about ten after six on Sunday morning so I could rush down to meet![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
posicat at his place by seven thirty. We got on the road not too long after we'd planned to, and, after a stop at the O'hare Oasis for munchies and gas, we got to Gary about half an hour behind schedule; not too bad for us.
We met up with a largeish group outside the church that we visited previously, including a woman with a really nifty large format camera. Later on, during a lull in activity while we waited for groups to form up, I had a chance to talk to her a little bit about what she was doing and how the camera works. I hope her panorama of the church comes out well; that could look fantastic at the kind of resolution you can get from a 4x5.
We clambered around inside the church again, occasionally acting as defacto tour guides for a few who had never been there before. I carried Posi's movie camera up to the scaffolding outside the tower and, using the great little mount he rigged up for it, held it out over the gap in the ceiling of the sanctuary and got some video of both the view down, and the interior of the tower room. I'm still not going to climb the tower. I'm not that insane.
I explored the basement for the first time. I couldn't believe how big it was. It felt as though it extended out past the church itself and under the yard. In fact, one room seemed to have glass tiles in the ceiling that looked out to daylight. Most of them were entirely covered over by ice, mud, dirt, and possibly boards; it was hard to tell from below. But just a few small squares let light down from above, creating a strangely theatrical spotlight effect.
The boiler room took my breath away. A door lead in to a small ledge that dropped a foot or so to a shelf of ice that filled the entire rest of the room, the rounded bulk of great machinery surfacing here and there like beached and rusting iron whales. Just ahead were twin flat semi-circles formed by ladder rails that came up over the edge and curved back down to where they anchored to the concrete. Suspended over the lake were light bulbs that, judging by the scant few feet over the ice they were suspended, indicated that the ladder I was seeing went down a good eight to ten feet. I immediately began to visualize the bottom of this room that had probably been flooded, continuously, for decades. What was down there, lost forever to the quiet embrace of the unmoving ice?
The stillness of this place was amazing. I'd wandered toward the back with a companion from our group, and from time to time, we stopped in our walk and listened. We were far enough away from the rest of the party that what I found myself listening to was nothing. Nothing at all but for the sound of my own breathing; breathing that the close confines of walls, unseen in the darkness, muffled and filtered into a drab, flat parody of itself that died into nothingness microseconds after each breath.
There was a clear feeling of being surrounded down there; engulfed, held, by the building itself. The sum of the effect was divided by the number of people in our group, thus muting it to something that I could get a conscious handle on and explore. I'm quite certain that, were I on my own, it would have been only minutes before the closeness became oppression and claustrophobia, and the slight unease became terror and madness. I really understand now what is meant by the silence of the tomb.
We moved on to a building that was entirely new to me; a U-shaped apartment block. Standing in front of the ruined marble foundation of an octagonal fountain that once sat centered in the courtyard between the two wings of the building, I was most struck by the height of the place. Sure six or seven floors doesn't hold a candle to the skyscrapers of Chicago, and it wasn't even the tallest abandoned structure I've been inside, but the way the building surrounded me on three sides made it quite imposing.
The window casements were the next thing that drew my attention. They were beautiful, ornate affairs of what looked like yellowed alabaster, though they were probably poured concrete. High above, some of the casements on the top floor were missing entirely, their remains strewn about the courtyard, while the rest contained broken windows and chipped stonework.
In the basement, we explored dozens of nearly empty wooden storage lockers and a maintenance room with shelves full of random screws, bolts, tubes of caulk, and other items that a custodian would find hopelessly inadequate given the buildings present state. In one of the lockers, I picked up a notebook full of notes from someone's music class. Just as good as the contents was the cover; a bright lavender-pink cover with a girl with bobbed hair holding a pencil thoughtfully against her lips. The scripted legend next to her read "Girl Friday Steno Pad". Below that was the corporate logo of the maker, Mohawk Paper Products; a simply rendered head of an Indian, hair down against his shoulders in the classic two braids. I can't imagine that it's newer than the early sixties at the latest, though I could be wrong. How long ago was it okay to describe someone as a "Girl Friday", not to mention use an Indian as a prominent corporate logo?
Several sets of stairs up brought us to the roof, but not without a little bit of exploration on some intervening floors. I had to check out the rooms where I'd seen the missing window casements from outside. Seeing them from the other side, it was clear that someone had purposefully smashed them out of the wall. In fact, amidst the dust and debris, I found three hammers; a small hand-held one, a mid-sized one, and a full sized sledgehammer with a three or four foot handle. I only thought about it briefly before snagging it for myself.
I almost took the mid-sized one too, but decided not to burden myself. Now I kind of wish I had; later inspection of the hammer indicated that it's a lot older than I thought. It's definitely not the original handle, and the head has a really unusual maker's mark and almost looks hand-forged. I'm trying to imagine how a hammer head that belonged to someone who cared enough and knew enough to remount it on a new handle ended up in the hands of someone who was a big enough asshole to go smashing architectural elements of an abandoned building. I also wonder if the other hammers that I left were of a similar vintage; I didn't look too closely at them at the time. I'm going to bring the one I have with next time I visit my grandpa to see what he thinks of it. I'm sure he can tell me whether it's handmade or not and maybe give me a good idea of its age.
The roof of this apartment block was completely unexpected. There were a couple of penthouse suites that opened onto a large flagstone paved terrace full of stonework benches, planters, and paths.posicat has my gratitude for pointing out what remained of a lighting system that I would otherwise have missed. This was a lighted, rooftop garden, full of lush plants and secluded corners. I'm still finding myself imagining sitting there on a beautiful summer night and gazing up at the stars, or sitting on a corner bench with a special someone, high above the city but all alone in the night.... It must have been truly beautiful. Posi, from his reading and talking to other explorers, tells me that the gardens still bloom in the Spring. I'm hoping to get some pictures of that that in the Spring; I don't quite know what kind of emotion I'd like to try to convey with them; I'll have to wait to see it and see how it hits me; but I think there's a potential for some really unexpected beauty there.
After that, we hit a couple places that I've been to before, so I won't offer a full description. It was interesting to me to see the difference that the progression of the seasons made. What was all the whites and grays of ice and snow the last time I was there had been painted with a new palette of earthy browns and tender greens as Spring began its approach. I'm contemplating taking a series of pictures over the coming year to see how the church and theatre and other places look in the different seasons.
You may remember Crazy Dude from my last Urban Exploration story. We had someone who was nearly that crazy with us this time. He climbed the sixty foot ladder up the back wall of the stage in the palace theatre and made it up to the grid over the stage. He also climbed on top of a precarious pile of furniture that had been propped over a stairwell in an attempt to climb up through a trapdoor in the ceiling to get to the fourth floor of the Plymouth dealership (he managed to get his legs and his head up above the lip, but not quite both at once; he came back down after trying for a bit). Both times I was honestly just waiting for some piece of the weathered old structures to fail and to watch him fall to the floor and die right there on the spot. Since I couldn't quite figure out what I would have done had that happened, it's definitely just as well that he didn't. Hats off to a braver, or stupider, man than I. For my part, I climbed up two levels on a ladder to the house left side of the stage and found a sizable exhaust fan (two fans, about four foot in diameter or so, placed back to front to form a sort of tunnel within their ductwork mounting) and a couple of classic, metal-cased neon sign transformers that I may take with me the next time I'm there. As well, there was a way up to what used to be a catwalk that ran out over the auditorium itself. Even had I been crazy enough to go up there, the wooden walk had long since decayed into unusability, missing large sections of itself in multiple locations.
We capped our visit off with a quick wander through an abandoned train station that, for all my fascination with trains, was actually not all that interesting to me. It was basically a big empty room. The fact that it was right next to a functioning steel mill patrolled by rent-a-cops made me a little uneasy too, so we didn't stay there long. And then it was back to the Skyway and home!
Once again, no pictures from me. Hopefully soon. In the meantime, I will scan in the steno pad I have at work tomorrow and throw a picture in here. It's pretty nifty.
*While supplies last. Offer valid only where prohibited by law.
I rolled out of bed about ten after six on Sunday morning so I could rush down to meet
posicat at his place by seven thirty. We got on the road not too long after we'd planned to, and, after a stop at the O'hare Oasis for munchies and gas, we got to Gary about half an hour behind schedule; not too bad for us.We met up with a largeish group outside the church that we visited previously, including a woman with a really nifty large format camera. Later on, during a lull in activity while we waited for groups to form up, I had a chance to talk to her a little bit about what she was doing and how the camera works. I hope her panorama of the church comes out well; that could look fantastic at the kind of resolution you can get from a 4x5.
We clambered around inside the church again, occasionally acting as defacto tour guides for a few who had never been there before. I carried Posi's movie camera up to the scaffolding outside the tower and, using the great little mount he rigged up for it, held it out over the gap in the ceiling of the sanctuary and got some video of both the view down, and the interior of the tower room. I'm still not going to climb the tower. I'm not that insane.
I explored the basement for the first time. I couldn't believe how big it was. It felt as though it extended out past the church itself and under the yard. In fact, one room seemed to have glass tiles in the ceiling that looked out to daylight. Most of them were entirely covered over by ice, mud, dirt, and possibly boards; it was hard to tell from below. But just a few small squares let light down from above, creating a strangely theatrical spotlight effect.
The boiler room took my breath away. A door lead in to a small ledge that dropped a foot or so to a shelf of ice that filled the entire rest of the room, the rounded bulk of great machinery surfacing here and there like beached and rusting iron whales. Just ahead were twin flat semi-circles formed by ladder rails that came up over the edge and curved back down to where they anchored to the concrete. Suspended over the lake were light bulbs that, judging by the scant few feet over the ice they were suspended, indicated that the ladder I was seeing went down a good eight to ten feet. I immediately began to visualize the bottom of this room that had probably been flooded, continuously, for decades. What was down there, lost forever to the quiet embrace of the unmoving ice?
The stillness of this place was amazing. I'd wandered toward the back with a companion from our group, and from time to time, we stopped in our walk and listened. We were far enough away from the rest of the party that what I found myself listening to was nothing. Nothing at all but for the sound of my own breathing; breathing that the close confines of walls, unseen in the darkness, muffled and filtered into a drab, flat parody of itself that died into nothingness microseconds after each breath.
There was a clear feeling of being surrounded down there; engulfed, held, by the building itself. The sum of the effect was divided by the number of people in our group, thus muting it to something that I could get a conscious handle on and explore. I'm quite certain that, were I on my own, it would have been only minutes before the closeness became oppression and claustrophobia, and the slight unease became terror and madness. I really understand now what is meant by the silence of the tomb.
We moved on to a building that was entirely new to me; a U-shaped apartment block. Standing in front of the ruined marble foundation of an octagonal fountain that once sat centered in the courtyard between the two wings of the building, I was most struck by the height of the place. Sure six or seven floors doesn't hold a candle to the skyscrapers of Chicago, and it wasn't even the tallest abandoned structure I've been inside, but the way the building surrounded me on three sides made it quite imposing.
The window casements were the next thing that drew my attention. They were beautiful, ornate affairs of what looked like yellowed alabaster, though they were probably poured concrete. High above, some of the casements on the top floor were missing entirely, their remains strewn about the courtyard, while the rest contained broken windows and chipped stonework.
In the basement, we explored dozens of nearly empty wooden storage lockers and a maintenance room with shelves full of random screws, bolts, tubes of caulk, and other items that a custodian would find hopelessly inadequate given the buildings present state. In one of the lockers, I picked up a notebook full of notes from someone's music class. Just as good as the contents was the cover; a bright lavender-pink cover with a girl with bobbed hair holding a pencil thoughtfully against her lips. The scripted legend next to her read "Girl Friday Steno Pad". Below that was the corporate logo of the maker, Mohawk Paper Products; a simply rendered head of an Indian, hair down against his shoulders in the classic two braids. I can't imagine that it's newer than the early sixties at the latest, though I could be wrong. How long ago was it okay to describe someone as a "Girl Friday", not to mention use an Indian as a prominent corporate logo?
Several sets of stairs up brought us to the roof, but not without a little bit of exploration on some intervening floors. I had to check out the rooms where I'd seen the missing window casements from outside. Seeing them from the other side, it was clear that someone had purposefully smashed them out of the wall. In fact, amidst the dust and debris, I found three hammers; a small hand-held one, a mid-sized one, and a full sized sledgehammer with a three or four foot handle. I only thought about it briefly before snagging it for myself.
I almost took the mid-sized one too, but decided not to burden myself. Now I kind of wish I had; later inspection of the hammer indicated that it's a lot older than I thought. It's definitely not the original handle, and the head has a really unusual maker's mark and almost looks hand-forged. I'm trying to imagine how a hammer head that belonged to someone who cared enough and knew enough to remount it on a new handle ended up in the hands of someone who was a big enough asshole to go smashing architectural elements of an abandoned building. I also wonder if the other hammers that I left were of a similar vintage; I didn't look too closely at them at the time. I'm going to bring the one I have with next time I visit my grandpa to see what he thinks of it. I'm sure he can tell me whether it's handmade or not and maybe give me a good idea of its age.
The roof of this apartment block was completely unexpected. There were a couple of penthouse suites that opened onto a large flagstone paved terrace full of stonework benches, planters, and paths.
posicat has my gratitude for pointing out what remained of a lighting system that I would otherwise have missed. This was a lighted, rooftop garden, full of lush plants and secluded corners. I'm still finding myself imagining sitting there on a beautiful summer night and gazing up at the stars, or sitting on a corner bench with a special someone, high above the city but all alone in the night.... It must have been truly beautiful. Posi, from his reading and talking to other explorers, tells me that the gardens still bloom in the Spring. I'm hoping to get some pictures of that that in the Spring; I don't quite know what kind of emotion I'd like to try to convey with them; I'll have to wait to see it and see how it hits me; but I think there's a potential for some really unexpected beauty there.After that, we hit a couple places that I've been to before, so I won't offer a full description. It was interesting to me to see the difference that the progression of the seasons made. What was all the whites and grays of ice and snow the last time I was there had been painted with a new palette of earthy browns and tender greens as Spring began its approach. I'm contemplating taking a series of pictures over the coming year to see how the church and theatre and other places look in the different seasons.
You may remember Crazy Dude from my last Urban Exploration story. We had someone who was nearly that crazy with us this time. He climbed the sixty foot ladder up the back wall of the stage in the palace theatre and made it up to the grid over the stage. He also climbed on top of a precarious pile of furniture that had been propped over a stairwell in an attempt to climb up through a trapdoor in the ceiling to get to the fourth floor of the Plymouth dealership (he managed to get his legs and his head up above the lip, but not quite both at once; he came back down after trying for a bit). Both times I was honestly just waiting for some piece of the weathered old structures to fail and to watch him fall to the floor and die right there on the spot. Since I couldn't quite figure out what I would have done had that happened, it's definitely just as well that he didn't. Hats off to a braver, or stupider, man than I. For my part, I climbed up two levels on a ladder to the house left side of the stage and found a sizable exhaust fan (two fans, about four foot in diameter or so, placed back to front to form a sort of tunnel within their ductwork mounting) and a couple of classic, metal-cased neon sign transformers that I may take with me the next time I'm there. As well, there was a way up to what used to be a catwalk that ran out over the auditorium itself. Even had I been crazy enough to go up there, the wooden walk had long since decayed into unusability, missing large sections of itself in multiple locations.
We capped our visit off with a quick wander through an abandoned train station that, for all my fascination with trains, was actually not all that interesting to me. It was basically a big empty room. The fact that it was right next to a functioning steel mill patrolled by rent-a-cops made me a little uneasy too, so we didn't stay there long. And then it was back to the Skyway and home!
Once again, no pictures from me. Hopefully soon. In the meantime, I will scan in the steno pad I have at work tomorrow and throw a picture in here. It's pretty nifty.
