I wanted to make this post, not simply to jump on the bandwagon of the media outpouring for Michael Jackson. I’m not here to judge his life or talk about his finances, or his troubled past, or the allegations, or even Bubbles. I’m writing this simply to tell a story. It’s a story that I didn’t really have the inclination to say before. Now that Michael’s “Ranch” no longer exists, and — rides dismantled — it simply stands as a bank-owned shadow of its former self, I wanted say a few things about my experience at Neverland, and the truth behind how I was able to get in.

In many ways, I feel this is sort of a confession. I never saw Neverland as an interesting place. At first, I didn’t understood its potential to tell a photographic story. As someone who finds significance in historic architecture, I neither saw Neverland as significant, nor historic. All of that changed.

In December of 2007, I was on my way down to Ventura for the Holidays. I had taken multiple trips down the 101 before. Each trip, I made it a point to stop at a roadside abandonment to photograph at night. As it invariably is every December, just prior to Christmas, the radios are filled with the repetitious yuletide jingles of yore. Usually, the six-hour drive is bearable if I switch from one station to the next – between commercials. This particular drive down, I grew weary of the music. I’m not exactly sure why Michael came to mind. Part of it probably had to do with the silence and the habit of mine to imagine music in my head in such moments. It’s also possible that I passed the off-ramp for Los Olivos and thought of the place, only to think of it more and more. Whatever it was, the idea of then-abandoned Neverland began to roll around in my mind. The radio was off, and I began mentally turning over rocks in the process. What did Neverland mean about Michael? Then the big one loomed: Why couldn’t Neverland be “historic” in my mind?

I must admit, I suffer from the myopic view, like most historians — amateur or otherwise — that history must always be equated with old. That’s why Graceland was “history” to me, but Neverland never would be — at least not until it was gone. Hours passed, and the desire to see the inside of Neverland grew stronger. I had essentially exhausted all other photographic possibilities down the 101, and I knew this opportunity wouldn’t last long. Then, a day before I began the drive back up to San Francisco, I exited a theater to find what seemed like snow falling on me. I immediately realized they were large flakes of ash from a fire nearby. The sky was dark and orange. It was an eerie, foreboding signal, or at least that’s what I made it out to be. I needed to photograph Neverland, or else — and I had a strong feeling — it would all go to ashes without proper documentation.

Once it was decided, there was no convincing me otherwise. Still, I thought more than once of giving it up altogether and to continue driving North. I tried to convince myself that I had trespassed many times before at other locations — but the implications had never really bothered me until I considered walking into Michael’s private park. As I write this, I still try to justify my actions by thinking how much Michael truly wanted to share his world. It was a genuine wish of his for everyone to understand things the way he did. And the world largely didn’t understand what he was trying to communicate with Neverland, so he abandoned it.

People have asked me over the past year what it felt like to be in Neverland at night, alone. I didn’t want to say anything except that it was the most surreal and incredible experience of my life. Others asked me how I felt about Michael, after seeing Neverland, but I couldn’t completely answer that. I was withholding judgement. Maybe, like all battle-bruised humans, I had the sneaking suspicion that all of my best feelings about the man would be shattered when another allegation would arise. But it never happened, just as I suspected, because everything I saw at the Ranch indicated to me that he was an innocent man.

The night I drove up to the front gates, the security guard was there, sitting in a well-lit pillbox on the side of the road. Neverland itself is up the road about 400 yards from the front gate. It happened to be a dark night. In fact, there was a new moon, and the sky was clear of any clouds. Out in Los Olivos, the stars shone brightly, and there was little light pollution in the atmosphere. I was sure to maintain my speed as I passed the guard, and I drove up the road to small parking area east of the park. The walk to Neverland was about a half-mile through rolling hills in pitch black conditions. I carried a GPS, set to its dimmest level, and continued on a straight click, towards the North end of the park.

I came upon a back road that seemed to have been a utility road for the animal caretakers. By then, all of the animals were gone, save a few dogs in the old aviary. Bursting out from the branches of valley oak, I found myself in a miniature city. I had emerged right at the petting zoo. From there, my adventure began.

Strangely enough, the moment I entered, a howling wind spread across the valley. Trees cracked their massive arms and fell; I could hear the Ferris Wheel creaking; the rope drawbridge waved wild and unpredictable. When I walked up to the deserted bumper car tent, the wind had become so strong, that it was tearing the red, canvas roof. It’s fortunate that the wind also allowed me to roam freely around the park without a single bark from the nearby dogs.

In the midst of all of this wind, the only static elements of Neverland were the frozen, bronze faces of the myriad statues that dotted the grounds. The children’s smiles almost seemed sad, in the context; and other than the occasional jolt of fear that hit me when I encountered a new frozen figure (thinking it was a real person), these statues were the subjects that I found my camera most drawn to. The rides themselves could have been found on any county fair in any state in the country. But it was the psyche of Michael Jackson that drew my curiosity. The statues were a conduit; they were my artifacts to catalog before the time of their eventual liquidation arrived.

I took two more trips to Neverland, each time with close friends. In all, I captured hundreds of photographs of the park. Many of these photographs, I will never publish. Each trip became progressively more bittersweet. I don’t really have any regrets about doing what I did, but if there is one thing I wish I had done at Neverland, it would have been to ride down the Super Slide; I think MJ would have liked that, and I’m sure the friends with me on my final trip would have turned it into a photo shoot.

Despite how kitschy it all seemed; despite the controversy; and the fact that I could only see Neverland from one perspective (that of night),  the times I spent at Neverland are among the most memorable moments of my life. Neverland allowed me to escape the cynical, xenophobic world of a country mired in war, terrorism, and daily reports of suicide bombers.  They may have been only a few nights of escapism, at best, but they allowed me to put myself in the shoes of Michael — moon walking my own way among the soon-to-end dreamscape of a truly magnanimous soul. May you rest in peace, Michael; your dream will live on.

Additional Neverland Sets

• My friend Scott’s set of Neverland Ranch photos
• Another great set from Sean

Popularity: 13% [?]

If you’re one who frequently photographs in your free time, then you’re probably well aware of the dreaded “burnout.” It’s that feeling of stasis that digs in after a long stint of snapping your shutter. It’s a bit like that callous that begins to develop after an hour or so of playing guitar.

I feel there are two solutions to that feeling. One is to stop altogether – take a breather, and recompose. And the other involves stepping it up; finding something new; and rekindling the excitement you once had for taking photos. In the past year, I’ve slowly stepped up the challenges I’ve assumed in my photography, whether it required greater risk, greater physical demands, or ever-deeper preliminary research – each new location has brought with it new challenges, higher potential to “screw up,” and much, much more promising rewards.

Scott Haefner and I have been exploring places for over a year now. The two of us, along with a few others (whom I have grown to trust and rely on for moral and logistical support) have been through thick and thin. Scott was there for Neverland. We were both there when a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle tagged along for a trip deep inside of a defunct sugar refinery. We’ve been nearly a hundred feet underground in scores of missile silos. And we’ve evaded security guards more than once, often to the chagrin and knowledge of said security guards.

So it came to be a few months ago that the two of us decided to explore a Neo-Gothic, 26-story masterpiece in downtown San Francisco. Full credit for discovering the building belongs to Stephen Freskos, who originally scoped the building. I took a few scouting trips in the weeks that followed. Scott and I finally decided to make the leap – underground.

Exploring the Pac Bell

On a Scale of 1 – 10 in exploration difficulty, the Pacific Telephone Building probably hovers between a 7 and 8. The fact is: This building was most recently bought for $118 milllion by a well-known San Francisco investor. Though it has been abandoned since 2005, it remains fully manned in the lobby by a watchful security guard who, unlike most night security guards, actually manages to remain fully alert and awake during his shift.

Scott and I walked up to a pre-determined entry point. We had, just minutes earlier, temporarily borrowed some orange cones from the Museum of Modern Art. Looking as official as two hoodlums could look at night with dark camera bags on our backs, we hopped deep into the basement of the 26-story building, just as drunken revelers a block away squinted in confusion at the two men disappearing beneath the sidewalk. We were in the basement of the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph building. It was there, 89 years ago, that the first pylons were driven into San Francisco mud. At that time, the building was constructed at a cost of 4.8 million, a fraction of its last $118 million sale. One couldn’t help but notice the symbolism inherent in building the West Coast’s tallest skyscraper only decades after the city’s most disastrous moment in history.

As Scott and I peered into the fully illuminated basement (this abandonment was fully powered and seemingly alarmed with motion sensors — an unpleasant surprise to seasoned explorers such as ourselves), we took note of the massive boiler, which provided heat to the entire structure. It stood two stories high and about 40 feet across on each end, the end of its back, receding into the unilluminated portion of the basement. As we climbed the catwalk into the second level of the basement, we heard the faint sound of the guard’s radio. It almost sounded as if he was listening to a baseball game. Really: One could only wonder what he was listening to at 11 at night.

The Pacific Telephone building is probably one of the best preserved buildings we’ve photographed. Designed by James Rupert Miller and Timothy L. Pflueger, it still stands proud in the San Francisco skyline, alongside newer – but less auspicious – spires. After we had ducked in a dark corner in the building’s former underground garage, we spent a few heart-wrenching moments trying to decide whether or not to head up. The guard was, after all, within a few feet of our only way up. Sitting literally six feet beyond a set of semi-transparent double doors, you could hear him turning the knobs on his radio and tapping his feet out of boredom. We had taken considerable risk to get where we already were, so the decision was expeditious and absolute: We would make our way up.

Two Eras, Two Buildings

Exploring the Pac Bell Building is a different universe than Oakland’s own abandoned jewel, the Key System Building. To say nothing of their opposing architectural styles. One exhibits the forward-looking sleekness of an Art Deco, Neo-Gothic hybrid, and the other a Beaux Arts bone of the past with its own elegant curves and pilasters. The true difference between the two is in the experience alone.

I’ve written that exploring Key System is a spiritual pilgrimage. Its meaning – to me – is not in its size, nor the way the light plays on stale puddles of mud that edge their way around the dark reinforced pillars, in a way begging any avid photographer to take a shot, even when all one really wants to do is look. The Key System building is simply a dark place of refuge and an escape into the past. The Pac Bell Building, on the other hand, is gigantic (the tallest abandoned building both Scott and I have explored). Its alabaster walls and perfectly preserved fixtures seem to represent everything that we explorers tend to walk away from — yet the building still drew us both inside, and higher.

We tiptoed up the stairs, one by one, until we reached 26. Bursting silently into the top floor lobby, we poked around the old equipment rooms and emerged outside, high above the rest of San Francisco. Only a single, embellished belvedere stood above us, two stories higher than the top floor auditorium. One could only wonder what it felt like in 1926, when the airplane was a relatively new and untested contraption that only a few moguls and quixotic adventurers had been given an opportunity to try. For a moment, I framed my mind in the world of Proust, imagining myself to be the unknown pilot that Marcel describes when he first sights a plane:

“I felt that there lay open before him all the routes in space, in life itself; he flew on, let himself glide for a few moments over the sea, then quickly making up his mind, seeming to yield to some attraction that was the reverse of gravity, as through returning to his native element, with a slight adjustment of his golden wings he headed straight up into the sky.”

In the distance, 747s skeeted over the bay bridge at half the speed of sound. To the northwest, rooftop bars and revelrous company parties ocassionally startled the eyes with the distant flashes of disposable cameras. We looked ahead to the looming sentries – the eight plastered eagles watching over us. Alarmingly enough, we realized, despite clearly evading the eyes of the guard down in the lobby we were still being watched by these thirteen-foot behemoths. And their own wings were a constant reminder of the heights we had just reached.

Scott and I did the usual long exposures from the top and staggered our way down, feeling all the more zombie-like with each floor. We had managed to make it down to Floor 16 – finding the original board room in the process. When we finally wedged ourselves up from underground and emerged back into the dark streets of 4 AM San Francisco, a lone man from Australia – seemingly unsurprised at our whack-a-mole-like appearance from the ground – started chatting with us and asked for directions to his hotel. He staggered off in search of a bed, any place where he could lay down and let the alchohol evaporate from his system.

Walking back, we arrived at Scott’s truck to find its windows broken. On our final trip a few nights later, his bike was stolen. I’d like to think we were vexed by the watchful eagles from the top, but if that’s the case, I’m afraid of what and when my own recompense will become? Despite these setbacks, we had managed to explore every floor of the building, from top to bottom, splitting up floors between Scott, Stephen and me on our farewell visit. Soon after we visited, PacBell Building had started its own phase of development in full-force. The permits were granted and the building will find a new life as 135 “extra-large” condominium units.

Whatever happens to the building, and its eagles, I’m hopeful that years from now, we’ll look back at our nights on the Pac Bell Building and laugh at all the circumstances: the unwitting guard; the drunken australian; the temporarily borrowed cones from MOMA (yes, they were returned). Oddly enough, we may be in our best times, as explorers in an economic recession. Sure, the good stuff is always going to be risky, but only a recession would make a $118 million building accessible to a few camera-wielding outlaws in search of the next click-fix.

Further Research

• Entire story of the building at Preservation Magazine
• Architectural Information and Future Plans from Urban Bay Properties
• A 1925 Description of the Building
• See the entire set of photos from the excursion here [My own set of photos]and here [Scott's photos].

Popularity: 16% [?]

Making the drive from Chicago to Detroit, along Interstate 90 is a lot like traveling back in time. The modern roadside outside of Chicago slowly seems to recede into oblivion along the way. Factories and coal fired power stations crop up, and suddenly the hulking mass of the Gary Union Station passes your window – a blemished reminder of a once-grand past.

Though Gary is only 30 minutes from downtown Chicago, it could just as well be in a third world country. Drive through downtown Gary, and you’ll find yourself on a barren boulevard, buffeted on each side by abandoned social clubs, theater marquees, and beauty shops. In the span of about 1/2 a mile of Broadway Avenue, once an exemplar of Main Street USA, you’ll find the buildings to be nothing more than decaying time capsules awaiting their inevitable “demolition by neglect.”

I’m a West Coast native. Everyone with us on the drive to Detroit had never been to the Rust Belt before. Was this the American Hestia of steel we had been taught about in our high school History textbooks? Somehow, it seemed these books had become outdated in little more than a decade. Gary soon makes you realize the pitfalls of modern, free-market capitalism, unhindered by checks and balances, a boom-town driven purely by the motive of profit. What’s truly unfortunate is that Carnegie Steel is long gone, but the children and grandchildren of the men who built Gary are stuck in a place that has little in its future, and a rut of steel to try to dig out from.

Today, much of our steel is imported; our manpower is exported. Our unions no longer exist — at least not in the sense that they once did, when over 40% of the American workforce were members of a union. If Gary is our example, and steel work is the epitome of work, then we are no longer the “Workers of the World.” When I myself brood over our post-industrial lot, I often like to reflect on a little-known introduction by playwright Arthur Miller in a book about Cartier-Bresson. Miller says of Cartier-Bresson’s photos of the decaying roadsides of 1950s U.S.:

The very horizon is often oppressive, jagged with junked cars, the detritus of consumer culture, which after all is a culture of planned waste, engineered obsolescence. Whatever lasts is boring, what demands its own replacement energizes our imaginations.

After rolling up to a side street from Broadway, the five us found the mouldering marquee of a hulking theater on the corner. The lettering advertised the appearance of the “Jackson Five: Live Tonight.” Certainly in jest, the marquee held its own ironical ode to the family that made Gary famous — perhaps more famous than its steel moguls. We peeked inside of the theater to find a different world than the one just outside. Orange seats in the trademark hue of the 1970s stank of mold and rotting wood. The seat cushions themselves were strewn all around the theatre grounds, which had turned from wood or cement (whatever may have been there before) into a mass of organic, decaying dirt, all harboring its own garden of tenacious flora. A grand piano, sans legs, lay belly-down in the orchestra pit, and the original tapestry-like curtain still hung from its rods high above on the stage, itself depicting a lively mediterranean scene but darkened by years of decay.

It was no longer a theater of echoes, as it likely once was. Our voices carried off into the many holes that weathering had created. Towards the front lobby, up a set of grand, iron-wrought staircases, I fortuitously stumbled inside one of those holes to find that it was a passageway into a completely different building. The building that adjoins the theater is just as incredible as the theater itself. It’s a hodge-podge of apartments and doctor’s offices, connected by cavernous hallways filled with tumbled bricks and a thick, 30-year-layer of dirt. Trumble beds, long collapsed from their closets in the wall, appeared in the middle of rooms. Chairs and pieces of artwork still remained in the rooms.

Deep inside one of the kitchens of these apartments, hidden beneath a caked layer of dust, I discovered a single seashell, likely left by the flat’s last inhabitant in the 70s. It was perhaps the most eerie artefact I’ve discovered during my life as an explorer, simply because of its minimalist display of a life past lived in a place that is geographically distant from the sea. I was forced to visualize the building at its nadir, when young professionals flocked to these apartments, filled with big dreams and a bright future. The reality is that this building probably ended its life as a slum, only to decline into vacancy along with Gary’s entire downtown corridor.

I returned to the theater and hobbled among the cushions for a few minutes. Emerging out of the exit into the light, I felt as if my whole life’s outlook had been altered by a single, hulking brick structure. Everyone had a look of shock on their faces. But Gary was just the beginning of our trip. We had to find the next place to discover. So, with heavy hearts, we hopped into our rental van and departed for another abandonment, another adventure.

Popularity: 3% [?]