"Ghost Ships" An Image of the J Row of the Mothball Fleet, with the U.S.S. President at the forefront - © Amy Heiden

Floating in the brackish waters of Suisun Bay is a fleet of decaying ships, many which have outlived their useful lives. Known as the Ghost Fleet, a few of these ladies of the deep have survived long enough to serve in three wars.

Gaining access to these closely-watched vessels is a privilege given to a chosen few. Fellow photographer and friend, Amy Heiden, was one of those few – and her recent story about visiting one of the ships (the AS-32 U.S.S. Holland, a 1960s-era Hunley-class submarine tender) is recounted in vivid detail on her website.

The U.S.S. Holland in Spain - Courtesy USSHolland.org, via Amy Heiden.

Amy’s trip to the Holland holds a special place in my heart, particularly because I’m somewhat obsessed with the history of all things nuclear and radioactive. Just browse around this site, and you will become well aware of my unhealthy obsession. So, it goes without saying that her experience on the ship was a true treat. After all: The Holland carried Poseidon warheads – gigantic, menacing submarine-based rockets that traveled 8,000 miles per hour with a payload of up to 14 reentry vehicles (viz. nuclear warheads!). But let’s allow Amy’s words to speak for themselves, shall we?:

“As we descended down a ladder, I reached up to turn on my headlamp, only to discover that we were immersed inside the mess, surrounded by plastic blue tables and yellow seats. Our flashlights blinded our eyes as the beams reflected off the metal cabinets covering the walls. Across the room, I noticed an old soda fountain, complete with drink labels that appeared to have been typed by a computer.”

Later, as Amy follows a cadre of experienced mothball aficionados inside the Holland, she is showna gigantic cargo hold that vertically spans the entire keel of the ship. According to the interview she conducted with a former crew member, the space she saw once held the radioactive waste-water of nuclear-armed submarines. Of course (we can only hope!), Amy arrived in this space long after its cleanup rendered it safe to explore.

"Vertigo" - the once-radioactive modified hull of the U.S.S. Holland a Vietnam-era submarine tender - © Amy Heiden

Amy’s experience is just one of many she’s had. In all she’s taken nearly a half-dozen journeys out to the mothball fleet. And her important documentation couldn’t have come at a better time. The Obama administration – rightly so – has made the removal and dismantling of the toxic ships a top environmental priority. As a result, MARAD is scrambling to find suitable shipyards that will recycle the ships in the most environmentally benign manner. In the last few months, two of the ships that the Suisun Bay fleet hosted have been cleaned and exported to the shipyards in Texas. It’s likely that – soon – Mare Island Naval Shipyard (an abandoned and mothballed naval shipyard in and of itself) will be another facility equipped for handling this delicate and important task.

This image - generously provided through the exhaustive research of Amy, and courtesy of MARAD - shows the Naval Defense Reserve Fleet (NDRF) in the 1950s, when 400 ships were moored along the shores of Suisun Bay.

At one point soon after the second World War, the NDRF fleet held 2,277 ships. Today, that number has dwindled to 230 ships (between 2003 and 2007 alone, 44 ships were removed from the fleet). I’m honored to know someone who has taken up the important task of documenting these relics of history before they’re gone forever. I hope you will take a look at Amy’s story. Do browse around, too, if you have the inclination; Amy’s dedication to photographing the pieces of the past extends far beyond the fascinating journey she narrates in her story about the Holland – nay, even her trips to the NDRF.

Further Reading

Amy’s detailed narrative of visiting the fleet

KQED’s map with history and citations of ship names and dates

San Francisco Chronicle : NDRF cleanup efforts

Related posts:

1. Mothball Fleets and the SS Red Oak Victory
2. Auschwitz “Death Camp” Blueprints Discovered in Berlin Apartment
3. Inside a Titan 1 Missile Base

It’s easy to forget – at least for me – the proximity with which our current times coincide with one of the most monumental eras of our modern time. What I speak of is the era of the atomic weapon.

It was only 60 years ago that the doomsday machine was set into motion and Oppenheimer had managed to turn a desert experiment into a national source of pride (which ironically also became the very subject of national paranoia). With the atom, we had managed – if only for that brief moment before the Soviets had discovered the same route – to command primacy in the world stage, unfettered by jingoist competition.

An image by LIFE photographer Ralph Crane, from an unpublished assignment on ICBM missile sites in the 1960s.

But what really has me reeling is not the fact that I underappreciate its proximity to my own generation, but the fact that my own generation knows little or nothing about Nikita Khrushchev, Operation Crossroads, Nagasaki, or Hiroshima.

Today we take little note, yet the undercurrents of a post-atomic society are more relevant than they’ve ever been – they manifest themselves in color-coded threat levels, between the margins of network news, and within the very fabric of our modern think tanks. It’s a purely Hegelian wellspring that runs below the surface of American society, but in its seemingly diminuitive nature, it affects every aspect of our politics.

The satellite photo, taken by GeoEye, shows a nuclear enrichment facility at a military site about 20 miles north-northeast of Qum, and 100 miles southwest of Tehran, Iran.

The fact that Iran is about to have one doesn’t seem surprising any more. After all, North Korea is about to have another and it seems to be the modern day mark of Progress for any self-respecting nation. If not a deterrent, it surely is a bargaining chip.

What I saw tonight reopened my eyes to its true meaning. As a collection of ephemera, gathered together from various war department films, promotional spots, talk shows, and propaganda shorts, Atomic Cafe brings you into the mindset of the 1950s – a time when rapid expansion of the federal government led to Eisenhower’s sober warning about the military industrial complex (when a former general – a war-man – decries the unsustainable rise of a state-sponsered defense industry, well, one just has to listen). Isn’t Eisenhower the man who connected all of these atomic bases by a national highway system?

This film is true because it is unaltered and free from the commentary that taints most documentaries these days. It’s not very often that a film simply speaks for itself. Even the modern documentary is rife with shaky secondary sources and personal, impassioned, commentary from the filmmaker. Though Atomic Cafe has no qualms with establishing its strong stance, it’s a very believeable and naturally affinity-inducing stance.

As an explorer, I often find myself in the creations of that era. I did not live through that time. I have no recollection of what it must have felt like – or how my mind would have wrapped itself around the anima in the air. What I do have, as a humble explorer, are my experiences as an observer and analyzer who has catalogued dozens of these places (from the deepest of contaminated ICBM silos to the tallest industrial escalator). In the former, I had stood in front of the 40-foot-wide 150-foot-deep cylinder in awe of its size and demeanor of power; in the latter, I ascended the rusty escalator links to get a birds eye view of where ships contaminated by nuclear tests in the Bikini Atolls were dismantled.

Atomic Cafe reminds me of a project that has special meaning to me: The collection of dying archival materials – many of which are finding themselves vanishing in the midst of the sheer volume of their existence. And two individuals who have adopted this much-needed cause are Rick and Megan Prelinger. The two of them maintain the Prelinger Archives, a collection of ephemera that has recently taken the notice of the Library of Congress.

It didn’t take a nuclear standoff to destroy much our nation’s cultural heritage – much of it simply vanished because of neglect. For example, the Library of Congress says that only 1 in 10 films made before 1928 exist today. Thankfully, what is presented in Atomic Cafe tells us a little about one of the most influential milestones of the millenia. Where we go from here nobody knows. All we can do about these clippings from the past is talk about them, tell the truth, and make sure that these stories don’t die.

Related posts:

1. Marconi, America, and the Monroe Doctrine
2. Inside a Ghost Fleet Ship – AS-32 U.S.S. Holland
3. Auschwitz “Death Camp” Blueprints Discovered in Berlin Apartment

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

Related posts:

1. Forever Haunted: Cheesman Park, Denver
2. An Abandoned Mansion from Lebanon’s Past
3. Nooksack: A Washington Town Left to Decay

In my first few months of ’seriously’ exploring, I formed a personal list of targets. I was pleased to have visited, four years later, the inside of each and every item on that list… With the exception of one building.

The Schlage lock and key factory has a storied history in the annals of San Francisco industry. Walter Schlage emigrated from Germany after completing his apprenticeship at the renowned Carl Zeiss Optical Works in Jena, Germany. After a jaunt across the Atlantic, and a brief foray through Brazil and the West Indes as a ship engineer, he landed on the shores of San Francisco – not much older than myself.

When he arrived in early 1900s, San Francisco’s Visitacion Valley was little more than a railway stop for the Southern Pacific, occupied by a veritable playground for San Francisco businessmen, including lodging, trap & rifle shooting, boxing, drinking, and other forms of “recreation.” Schlage purchased his three-acre tract of land from a local maker of custom mining machinery, the Bodinson Manufacturing Company. He hired Bay Area Architect William Peyton Day to build a Spanish colonial administration building – quite a flourishing design for what was – at the time – a very utilitarian industry. In addition to the four-story office building, Day designed Schlage’s Factory 1, a quintessential early-20th century industrial design, with its trademark sawtooth roof and triangular shape – not too unlike the iconic designs of famed Ford architect Albert Kahn.

Today, the administration building looks exactly as it did over eight decades ago. The same fire escape descends into a dark corner where pigeons have made a roost; where standing water stagnates. Today, this 1926 “spanish colonial” is all that will soon remain of what was once a central hub of San Francisco industry. The rest of the site will be quickly converted into affordable housing and “Green” certified condominiums — surely a boon for the Visitacion Valley neighborhood, but also a sad loss for what had been a prescient reminder of San Francisco’s proud, industrial past.

Schlage’s Toxic Legacy

I wouldn’t pretend to be opposed to such projects. In fact, Schlage was a rampant destroyer of the area’s water table, contributing – at minimum – 3074 pounds of VOCs to the groundwater (and that’s just the stuff that’s been filtered out through remediation efforts). But make no mistake about it: This project’s intention is to cover up and end what has become a legal maelsorm for two big corporations – a developer on one side and an industrial multinational on another (both have claimed that the other should assume responsibility for cleaning up the mess of VOCs).

When I first discovered this site in 2004, I had attempted to go the “legal” route of photographing the historical complex. I contacted the planning commission, who put me in touch with a representative at Schlage, who then put me in touch with someone at the parent company, Ingersroll Rand. In the end, probably because Ingersroll Rand didn’t want a young photographer “snooping around” their industrial trash heap, I was denied access. Little did I know what I would find out later: That the grounds were covered in Tetrachloroethylene (TCE) and Trichloroethylene (PCE) – synthetic compounds that are known to affect the central nervous system and cause acute health effects, even in small amounts.

Development Victory for Paragon leads to “Demolition Celebration”

My final chance came in early 2009, when the approval for demolishment had gone through. Hundreds of millions of dollars were involved in the purchase of land, soon to be followed by a multi-year legal battle between Ingersroll-Rand and Universal Paragon Corporation. It all culminatd in February of 2009 with a “Demolition Celebration” (an oxymoronic phrase, if there is one, to most explorers). It was my last chance, and I had to take it.

Not much remained when I first entered the Schlage complex. Demolition crews graded mechanical components from A1 to A18. Each memo likely indicated the component’s historic merit, because the plan called for “mitigation” of historic industrial components. It’s likely that this meant most of the demo crew would be able to keep whatever spoils remained. As I climbed the balustrades of the historic building, pigeons were alerted to my presence. They fluttered into another room. The main lobby was buffeted by original varnished paneling. Each room contained two of its own, dedicated arched windows, over 8 feet high each — not something that every office monkey could brag about these days. There was an original safe for every floor. On the top floor, a lone, dead pigeon – decayed to its bones – remained. Within a few inches of its contorted corpse, a demo crewman with an astute sense of humor claimed the corpse with a piece of labeled, blue tape — just like other crewmembers had with historic dials and panels downstairs.

I spent all day walking among the corridors and twisting passageways of this Escher-like atmosphere. There were blueprints that contained plans for Ingersroll Rand’s satellite lock operations in Tecate, Mexico — a real relic of its own merits, illustrating the start of America’s move into offshore “maquiladoras” – the very deindustrialization of the American landscape that has put us in the quandry that we find ourselves today.

Ironically, by the time it had been acquired by Ingersroll-Rand, Schlage didn’t even use its own locks on the doors of its own factory. I made this discovery in an upstairs room (one of many rooms in Schlage’s self-heralded “Schlage University,” an in-house learning institution in all things lock and lock-related); on the door of that upstairs room, I looked in shock at a Chinese-produced door lock – its own ominous reminder of what we had become in San Francisco – one of the most marked dichotomies in history. In less than a hundred years, we had gone from a producer of mining machinery, metal locks, and vast naval ships, to a producer of 0’s and 1’s inside of microchips and database-driven social networking sites.

In a way, I’m glad to see a site like Schlage leave the Visatacion Valley. Its contribution had long passed when its counterpart factory broke ground in Tecate. At least now, it will provide homes for people, and maybe contribute a little green space. I only hope that future generations will look at the lone remaining Spanish Colonial building, and wonder why it’s there. I hope they will glance at the mysterious lettering near the Muni stop that says “Safety Subway,” and ask about its origin.

Schlage may have a dirty past, it may have passed its time – but it doesn’t mean that knowledge of its past can’t help us move forward.

Further Research

Environmental Impact Report EIR (with Historical Background)

Developer’s Web Site

Related posts:

1. Flared Mushroom Columns
2. Saying Goodbye to Neverland and Michael Jackson
3. Highway 101 in a Post-Industrial West

There is a cross atop a hill in Waterbury, Connecticut. The cross is fifty feet tall and made of steel. Below it, ten-foot-tall neon letters spell out HOLY LAND U.S.A, a ‘testament’ to the religious amusement park, now closed, that occupies the site. The sign and the cross are still illuminated at night, the electric bill paid by the two nuns who live next to the property. Holy Land was an amusement park, built in the mid-1950s by a local lawyer named John Greco; the park was aimed at educating visitors in Christian doctrine by showing them scenes from the life of Christ.

Holy Land did not have rides or roller coasters — just an earnest desire to teach. This lofty goal was accomplished with simple materials — plaster, concrete, plywood, and tin siding. Since its closure in 1984, the park has slowly crumbled to become a ruin of religious proportions.

The entrance to Holy Land. The wood-and-plaster architecture is found throughout the park, as is the faux-ancient-Palestinian style.

Holy Land is easy to find and easier to access. Drive towards the cross, prominent on one of Waterbury’s tallest hills, or follow any of several road signs that local authorities still — after 25 years — managed not to remove. Then walk around the locked gate, hoping that the nuns don’t see you. (The nuns, part of the Religious Teachers Filippini, do not seem especially vigilant.)

Jerusalem in miniature. Each building is between eight and twelve inches tall.

Just inside the entrance is a set of archways, labeled “Holy Land — Jerusalem.” These lead to the heart of the park, a rocky hill covered in miniature buildings. It feels like the type of thing your wacky uncle might build in his backyard. The buildings, most made of plaster and wood, are meant to represent Jerusalem as it existed during the life of Jesus Christ. The original installation used a crude version of forced perspective, placing larger buildings closer to the path.

This building is about three feet tall.

The park seems to maintain a fine balance between between sincerity and kitsch: A building next to the path, about the size of a large doghouse, has caved in on itself. Across its front, the letters spell out “HEROD’S PALACE,” but the style of the letters suggests something your father might have picked up at the corner hardware store to nail the family name above the front door; really, that describes most of the park.

The tiny buildings are pieced together from plywood. Tin siding has been bent into columns, then crudely covered with plaster. House paints, in mid-20th-century colors, have transformed a motley collection of tiny shacks into a vision of the Middle East. Of the Holy Land.

The stainless-steel cross is different. In a clearing at the top of the hill, beyond the crumbling Jerusalem, it feels clean and no-nonsense, an architecture reminiscent of US military bases and mid-century hospitals. The welds are precise, the angles sharp. It is also new, the second such cross to crown the site. Its predecessor, replaced last year, was six feet taller and made of neon, but both were meant to last. They towered above Waterbury and were visible from the highways–I-84, CT-8–that pass beneath the park. From the top of the hill, Waterbury and the Brass Mill Mall stretch out beneath you.

The Hollywood-style letters were also renovated, by Boy Scouts in 1997. Together, the cross and letters burn bright in Waterbury’s night sky. That’s the paradox of Holy Land. It is abandoned, derelict, and falling in on itself, but still able to summon compassion and care from those around it. Every attempt to demolish the park has brought protests. The cross and letters remain lit at night because they are a local icon, a vital part of Waterbury.

We spent about 40 minutes in the park and left just after sunset. It’s a small park. It is also decaying quickly. The miniature sphinx visible in various photos online has lost its face. A life-size tin statue of Jesus holding a lamb has been lopped off at the shin, the upper part of His body now gone. The concrete rock garden built by Boy Scouts barely a decade ago–HONOR GOD, it used to read–has been vandalized, so that it now reads HONOR COD.

Inside the park, there are few hazards beyond underbrush and pricker bushes. The paths, like the rest of the park, are overgrown, and trash–mostly beer cans–abounds. The park’s existence is no secret, and it seems especially popular with local teenagers.

Holy Land is gone, but not forgotten. People still care about the park–the nuns with the electric bill, the Boy Scouts who replaced the sign, the photographers and explorers who still frequent its grounds. I’d like to be able to pin an adjective on my experience, to summon a word that encapsulates the park. But I can’t, really. The park wasn’t creepy, wasn’t thrilling. It had none of the drama or tragedy of Six Flags New Orleans. Despite the decayed statuary, there was nothing about it that summoned “Ozymandias.” Mostly it felt innocent. It is one man’s loving paean to a religion. It is a material hymn sung to Jesus Christ.

Further Research:

• Roadside America has an entry on Holy Land, including photos and instructions for getting there.
• Two relatively recent New York Times articles, here and here, detail the ongoing plans to save or restore Holy Land.
• Roadtrip Memories has excellent collection of vintage photos of Holy Land, including construction shots.
• More vintage photos and postcards are in this Flickr set.

Related posts:

1. Symbolism, Icons at the Abandoned Byron Hot Springs
2. Abandoned: Six Flags New Orleans
3. Abandoned Gary – A Lost Metropolis of Indiana Industry

Downtown Beirut is full of silent and boarded buildings, which stand between the featureless identical cement apartment blocks that make up the periphery. Most are pockmarked with bullet holes and — in places — red, Mediterranean-style ceramic tiles have fallen away, revealing the woodwork beneath. Still, these damaged, pre-civil war houses, mansions and apartment buildings manage to recall more than a little of the elegance that earned Beirut the title, “Paris of the Middle-East.” It’s a blatantly colonial term, given to the city by the French during their “administration” of the country from the end of the first world war until the end of the second. But the dirtied white facades of these buildings manage to catch the low-slanting light of sunset with a defiant brilliance their sterile replacements just can’t muster. They were designed to catch Mediterranean sunsets.

On Rue Spears, a couple of blocks past the Saneyeh park towards downtown, a prime example of Lebanese pre-war architecture sits mouldering behind a forbidding stone wall. I saw it on my first day of a 2008 winter break trip to Beirut to visit my father, a professor at the Lebanese American University. There is a certain prestige implicit with being the first explorer to hit an important building, and as far as I could tell there were no active explorers in all of Beirut. As such, I was out on the street every day at sunrise, hoping to make the best of my two weeks there.

This building is a standing, contradictory dichotomy — dark and gorgeous at the same time. The 10-foot high wall and chained, rusting gates create an atmosphere of something off-limits yet irresistible; its very demeanor from the outside implicitly suggests a world of secrets to discover.

On my first trip out I circled the block alone to find myself receiving suspicious stares from the urban-camouflaged Lebanese police. These eagle-eyed sentries stand near red and white striped guard houses glowering with their M-16s. Societally, cameras are looked upon with suspicion in Beirut. Tourists fare better than most, but any photographer walking around taking snapshots can expect to be questioned by a security or policeman.

This was especially so around the LAU campus, where I studied in 2003. The LAU campus sits adjacent to Saad Hariri’s palace, a gigantic structure built in the old pre-war Mediterranean style. Every time I walked in or out of the front gate with a giant Nikon hanging from my neck a security guard would run up to me repeating “No photo, no photo,” like a magic, protective mantra. I wonder if it ever occurred to them that a spy would probably use a smaller, less obtrusive camera than a D200. I mean, a DSLR doesn’t exactly fit into a belt buckle or a pack of cigarettes. I wonder how they would react if they knew the entire layout of the grounds is readily available on Google Earth. Still, they have good cause to be nervous.

In 2005 Saad’s father, former prime minister and billionaire Rafic Hariri was killed, along with 21 other people, by a massive car bomb in front of the St. George Hotel in Beirut. A Lebanese man I met told me that the hotel’s owner was one of Hariri’s opponents, and Saad has since blocked any attempts to rebuild the place. It sits vacant on the sea, another monument to violence. Since then, Saad has assumed leadership of the Sunni and Maronite anti-Syrian coalition — Hezbollah’s chief competition. These simmering tensions, amplified by the subsequent withdrawal of Syrian troops from the country and the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, exploded in a mini-civil war in 2007, during which Hezbollah fighters occupied and burned FutureTV, owned by Saad, the mouthpiece of the anti-Hezbollah Future Movement.

I recall speaking to my father on the phone then, me in rural Illinois working my first newspaper job, he in his campus apartment — the roar of gunfire from the street below competed with his voice for my attention. I recall not only the expected, intense worry for his safety, but how disconcerted I was by his own apparent lack of it. He was more upset by the fact that the cable was out than by the rocket propelled grenades aimed at Hariri’s Palace, a couple of hundred feet away.

My father’s relative indifference could have stemmed from a regional adjustment to conflict. The waves of violence in Beirut hit like the seasonal flooding of an undammed river. The waters pull back, the silt settles and the shop keepers on Hamra sweep the dust off their doorways, no longer surprised by much of anything.

The decaying mansion I set out to explore sits across the street from the new FutureTV office, and the guards, manning a checkpoint a block way, stare in that way that always strikes the few American tourists who come to Beirut. It’s simply not considered rude to lock eyes with strangers for extended periods of time. And when the person staring at you is holding a loaded machine gun it sets your nerves on edge. So, after two trips around the block trying to find a way in, I decided to head home rather than have to again explain to a policeman why I had a camera; what I was taking pictures of; why I wanted to take pictures, etc. At first, the only glimpse I got was through a hole in the back gate. I saw an overgrown courtyard, full of trees and bushes that obscured the quiet and vacant mansion.

It wasn’t until a few days later that I went back, this time with Michel, a friend who works in computers downtown. It was his first time exploring; I don’t speak Arabic and figured a translator would be handy if I encountered anyone in the building.

We walked around to the front courtyard and bought local energy drinks from the corner shop that occupies the lower part of what was once the mansion’s guard house. Down the street is a small car repair shop, and we ducked behind it, seeking a secluded place to scale the wall. Walking down the alley between the courtyard wall and what appeared to be another abandoned building to the right, I was reminded of why exploring abandoned buildings in Beirut is a tricky business – you have to be considerate of the people who live in them.

The truth is, despite being home to a great many abandoned buildings, Beirut has very few vacant ones. Look beyond the pristine beauty of the rebuilt downtown area or the ritzy, exclusive dance clubs around Monot street — packed with rich kids going to school at LAU or AUB — and you’ll find a grossly unequal distribution of wealth in Lebanon.

About a kilometer from the giant and gorgeous blue-domed mosque built by Rafic, Syrian day laborers loiter around a filthy, vacant lot hoping for a day’s work. Many of these people choose to live rent-free in the many abandoned buildings of the city, often stealing power and even photo service from nearby lines. Look up in some places around the city and the huge number of pirated electric and phone lines forms a kind of multi-colored spiderweb, intricate and impressive.

This abandoned building, adjacent to the mansion we sought to explore, had a similar life support system jacked in from the city’s power grid. Laundry hung out on balconies and potted plants added a bit of color. Baskets hung on ropes that reached from top floor balconies to the alley below. It’s a general rule — if a building can provide shelter for someone, chances are it does.

We scaled the wall, one at a time; Michel provided me with a boost and I pulled him up in turn. The courtyard of the mansion must have been gorgeous. Giant, old trees of that strange type in Lebanon that throws down roots from the limbs into the ground, creating a miniature forest, dotted the landscape. Garbage was everywhere — old luggage, tires, children’s toys and literally thousands of empty plastic bottles. A dead white rabbit lay in a tree, balanced on a piece of carpet. I have no idea who put it there or why; it might have been one of the army of stray cats that live short, desperate lives in orbit around the city’s dumpsters. I quickly took its picture.

I wasn’t surprised when we saw a power line leading into the side of the building, as well as a garden hose. The doors on this side entrance were nailed shut from the inside, and the hose and power lines were threaded through holes drilled in the wood. Someone was living there, that was certain. I expected Michel to want to turn back, but he’d received an adrenaline jolt from hopping the wall and wanted to find a window to climb through. Fair enough, I said, conscious that I just agreed to go inside of someone’s home. Walking around to the front, I looked back at the side entrance and was really struck by how wealthy the former tenants must have been. Even though it was only the side door, it was flanked by tall, elegantly carved columns. It was an entrance worthy of any mansion, yet before the war it was probably used by house workers to bring in food and take out garbage.

We moved around to the front. Identical sets of white marble steps flanked an empty fountain and buttressed the arched and ornate French doors. It was then, as I turned facing the cobbled entrance road, that I imagined black European luxury cars stopping to disgorge impossibly well-coiffured party guests. We jimmied the door using a long piece of cut marble fallen off the steps to push aside the board that someone had jammed into the door. Michel had a big grin on his face, finding out what more experienced explorers already know and what keeps us coming back: the need to see the forbidden and off-limits is ingrained in our DNA as humans.

The barricade fell with a clatter and we entered the grand hall, silent and accepting. There were no footprints in the deep dust that covered the floor; we walked in a silent, reverent fashion that the building seemed to demand of us. Our footsteps were light and silent; our voices half-whispers.

What immediately caught my eye was the giant pile of papers at the end of the hall. Upon closer inspection many of the papers turned out to be black and white photographs — hundreds of them, all of the same elderly man in a tall, flat-topped Fez-style hat, at what appeared to be political events. In some of the photos the walls were covered in campaign posters bearing his image. Always: Around him were supporters, cheering and clapping. The other documents, Michel told me, were voter registration lists – hundreds of names, addresses and phone numbers. There were also various memos and letters. He didn’t know who the man in the photo was.

Michel went upstairs and I took out my tripod to shoot the photos in the low light. My camera’s timer, a soft beep, beep, beep seemed to echo in the dead, cold hall. It was after the third or fourth shot that I heard the footsteps behind me, crunching the broken glass of a long-shattered window. I turned, expecting to see Michel. Instead I encountered the scowl of a very large and very humorless Syrian man in heavy boots. His shoulders were gigantic, the product of years of manual labor. His eyes had no smile lines.

“I…I’m just taking pictures,” I offered, impotently, not expecting him to understand.

“It’s not open,” He replied, in what my memory holds to have been a deep growl.

“I…noticed.” And we just kind of stared at each other.

I was saved by Michel, who came down to tell me of a desk he found upstairs. A short exchange ensued which Michel later translated to me as:

Syrian: “You’re not allowed to come in here.”

Michel: “Well, we already are.”

Michel’s kind of gutsy like that. Especially considering the man could have easily kicked our teeth in. As it was, he agreed to give us 20 minutes after realizing we weren’t cops. We moved upstairs quickly, deciding to forsake the south wing of the house where we assumed the squatters lived. The clatter of our break-in must have echoed throughout the house.

Upstairs we found more clues as to the political nature of the home. A bookshelf, full of rotting books, sat in a room no longer protected by a roof. They were all political texts, some in French, some in Arabic. A book by Francois Mitterrand; another entitled, “for Lebanon” — books ruined by years of rainy Beirut winters.

In the next room was large wooden desk, of the sort befitting a president or CEO, Michel remarked. It sat next to pointed, arched windows and a balcony with a view of the courtyard and street below. I looked out and saw two bored Lebanese policeman smoking cigarettes and watching the passing cars. One of my favorite parts of exploring is looking out of windows on upper floors and watching cars, cyclists and joggers who pass and don’t look up where I am — a place I can’t help but notice.

There were Bedrooms, too. They were covered in an inch of red sand and colorful, flowered wallpaper. A few televisions, newspapers, some empty cigarette packets. The kitchen had been used by squatters at one point — an unopened can of peaches sported a 1988 expiration date. And they had left behind half-full barrels of cooking oil and a large bag of rice. Photos of female Lebanese pop stars torn from magazines decorated some of the walls.

There were bullet holes in the wall opposite the windows. Someone who had spent his or her mornings making spare breakfasts likely sought an antidote against those bullet holes; they saw in the perfect teeth of a pop star, the rim light and soft-focus photography, something better than the monotonous clattering of gunfire that drifted in like a cold front from the Green Line.

We only explored part of the mansion, content that something was better than nothing. With our presence known and no doubt communicated to whoever else was living there, we decided that overstaying our already cold welcome would be foolhardy, especially if they found out how we’d entered.

“He asked us how we managed to get in,” Michel laughed. “I told him we climbed in through an open window”

“What if he looks at the door and finds we kicked it in?”

“I dont’ think he’d be happy.”

On our way out we grabbed as many of the photos as we could. It seemed wrong to let them slowly decay, falling prey to piss and rainwater. As we re-crossed the courtyard I looked back and saw three windows on the third floor of the south wing filled with men staring at us, these strange intruders. I waved. They did not wave back.

A few days later I dropped in on Bassam Lahoud, photography professor at the Lebanese American University. A man for all seasons, Bassam is an architect, writer and dance instructor. He’s from Amchit, a small, charming mountain village near Byblos, the longest continually inhabited city on the planet. Bassam taught me how to use a camera, a Canon 35mm A1 from the 1970s. He runs a foundation with the modest aim of collecting every single photo ever taken of Lebanon. Any photo. Of anything. I handed him the warped stack of black and white photos from the mansion.

“Takkieddin el-Solh” he said. “He was a prime minister.”

We had broken into the former prime minister’s home. Evidently he had abandoned it when Beirut began to tear itself to shreds in 1975. His time in office had ended a year before. In 1980 he was asked by the president to form a government but was unable to find consensus in a country at war with itself. He died in 1988 in Paris.

“Can I keep one of these? For my foundation?” Bassam asked.

Of course. Of course. I gave him all of the photos, and copied 8 gigs of .jpg files onto his desktop. I wanted to feel like I was contributing something.

He looked at my photos of the mansion, the ones you’re looking at now. “Perhaps we could do an exhibition some time, at my house in Amchit, where we took the field trip.” He had taken his entire class to his home for a day to practice architectural photography. His house is gorgeous, a mansion too, built before the civil war yet free of scars. Yes, of course you can do an exhibition, Bassam. When I put them up on Flickr I set the license to Creative Commons.

I said my goodbyes to Bassam and went downstairs. Outside, there was a campus demonstration against the Israeli air assault in Gaza. Students chanted and burned Israeli flags. In a brief moment of unity, yellow Hezbollah flags waved next to the red and white Lebanese. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and for the moment they had found in war a reason to come together. It’s not sustainable, I thought. I raised my camera and took their picture. Smoke billowed from burning flags, and painted faces cheered, chanted.

Further Reference

• Full Set of Photos from the Mansion
• New York Timse Obituary for Takieddin Solh
  

Related posts:

1. Abandoned Gary – A Lost Metropolis of Indiana Industry
2. Abandoned Hotels of the Catskills Borscht Belt
3. An Abandoned Skyscraper: The Pac Bell Building

The Bus/RV entrance to Six Flags New Orleans. The barbed-wire fence was added after the storm. June, 2008.

Interstate 10 curves up and out of New Orleans, looping out of the Big Easy and chasing the Gulf Coast towards points east. About thirty minutes outside the city, just after the I-510 interchange, a set of faded blue structures rises on the southern horizon. These are the derelict roller coasters of Six Flags New Orleans, which closed in advance of Hurricane Katrina and has yet to reopen.

The park was not so much shut down as abandoned—sacrificed, almost, to the encroaching storm. Merchandise stayed on shelves, electronics remained in place, and the logs in the flume ride were left stuck halfway up their plastic hills. The sole preparation for Katrina seems to be a message on the park’s signboard, still visible more than three years later: CLOSED FOR STORM.

The empty and overgrown parking lot for Six Flags New Orleans, with roller coasters on the horizon.

The property opened as Jazzland in 2000. Rides such as the Bayou Blaster and The Big Easy Ferris Wheel were sprinkled through lands with similarly local-sounding names, including ‘Cajun Country’ and the ‘French Quarter.’ After low visitor numbers forced Jazzland into bankruptcy, Six Flags purchased the park in 2002. The park was rebranded as Six Flags New Orleans and expanded, but the expansion did little to improve the park’s profitability. Since Hurricane Katrina, the park has been derelict, with Six Flags claiming that insurance disputes are holding up the re-opening of the park.

The park as it appeared immediately after Hurricane Katrina. Photos from the online forums of Theme Park Review.

Six Flags New Orleans was flooded by Hurricane Katrina. After the storm, the park sat in water that was between four and six feet deep for several weeks. After the waters had receded, the parking lots were used as a staging area for FEMA trailer distribution. The trailers are still visible in the Google Maps satellite view of the park.

The Gator Bait Air Boat ride.

Since the storm, Six Flags has removed some ride equipment from the park, refurbishing it and deploying it to other Six Flags properties. “Batman: The Ride” has been rebuilt as “Gotham” at Six Flags Fiesta Texas. Awnings, light posts, security cameras, and other salvageable equipment has also been sent to other Six Flags properties, an invisible diaspora of amusement park ephemera.

The park’s Main Street Square, just inside the main entrance.

More interesting than what Six Flags has taken from the park is what they have left behind. The level of preservation is incredible. Parts of the park look as if they were abandoned only hours earlier. Stores, restaurants, rides were all still standing and unlocked when I visited this past summer.

An abandoned restaurant in Cajun Country.

In part, the park owes this level of preservation to its location in a desolate stretch of suburban New Orleans East, about half an hour outside of New Orleans proper. There was some graffiti and some vandalism—coin-operated lockers, vending machines, and cash registers had all been forced open—but overall, there was very little sign of human presence or activity, especially recent activity.

In a merchandise kiosk, Tweety Birds and Scooby-Doos await purchase by children who will never arrive.

Even three years later, Katrina remains the strongest presence in the park. The remaining merchandise approximates how high the waters rose: Everything still on shelves was above the waterline. The surrounding bayou has started to reclaim the park, and plants are encroaching on walkways and threading themselves through rides. This part of New Orleans is sinking, at up to 2 inches per year. In 10 years, Six Flags New Orleans may again be underwater.

I spent about an hour inside the park and covered most of the south side. What I found most interesting is how the park is historically flat: Most places, especially in New Orleans, have layers upon layers of history, capturing decades of construction, demolition, change, and reuse, each layer with its own story.

Six Flags has none of those layers: The park is so young—barely 10 years old, and derelict for the last three—that it has very little history. There was nothing before Jazzland but swamps; the park came from the swamps and to the swamps it will return. The ersatz theming of the amusement park heightens that feeling of emptiness. Not only is there nothing here, but what is here isn’t even real.

An abandoned photo kiosk, with computers, receipt printers, and sample photos still there.

The future of the property is complicated by the ownership arrangement between Six Flags and the City of New Orleans. The land is owned by the city, and Six Flags is committed to a 75-year lease requiring it to operate the park. Both Six Flags and the City owe money on a $25 million construction loan from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The Joker continues to survey his overgrown domain.

The city is loath to allow Six Flags to exit the lease, because it would have to assume the full burden of the HUD loan. Other companies have approached Six Flags about buying the property, with grand ideas about a water park or a full-scale resort, but none of these ideas have solidified.

A look across the park’s central lagoon, formerly Jazz Lake.

For the time being, the park remains caught in a post-Katrina catch-22: it is both too expensive to rebuild and too expensive to abandon.

Further Research:

• The official Six Flags New Orleans website has carried the same message for three years.
• Six Flags New Orleans has an unofficial fan site, SNFO.com. The website has maps, forums, a comprehensive photo archive, and ongoing updates about the future of the park.
• Recent Times-Picayune coverage, here and here.
• The park has spawned several tribute videos on YouTube, which show the park when it was active.
• A collection of photos on Shutterfly, likely taken by a Six Flags employee, show the extent of the flooding.
• A high-resolution satellite photo shows the park during flooding.

Related posts:

1. An Abandoned Amusement Park in Berlin
2. Holy Land: Religion Abandoned in Connecticut
3. An Abandoned Mansion from Lebanon’s Past

Interior of Castro Theatre image by Katie Spence

Movie Poster Passion of Joan of Arc

The Passion of Joan of Arc is consistently given the laurels as one of the greatest movies of all time. Maria Falconetti’s performance as the 19-year-old Saint, Joan of Arc, has been called the 26th greatest performance in cinema. Sight & Sound’s top ten films poll listed Passion three times (in 1952, 1972, and 1992). But Passion itself is not the remarkable story, despite its revolutionary cinematography and film editing techniques.

No, the real story is that of Director Theodore Dreyer, who spent $9 million in 1928 dollars on the Passion of Joan of Arc only to see its destruction by fire a year later. Dreyer died in 1968 believing that his uncut, 86-minute opus in its original format was lost forever. History, however, has strange ways of creeping back into notoriety.

When Dreyer passed in 1968, there were only a few rudimentary cuts of the film remaining (whatever wasn’t consumed by fire was censored by religious leaders for its harsh portrayal of Joan’s inquisitors who – let’s not forget – were men of ‘religious esteem’). Dreyer painstakingly tried to piece together fragments in a 1933 release that was 61 minutes long (the original was 86). The film circulated for some time in its less then perfect format until the second original was destroyed once again, annoyingly enough by fire once again.

Still, in pure, poetic justice to the film’s namesake and Joan herself (who was given sainthood by the Catholic Church just seven years before the film’s release) an uncut, original release re-emerged in 1981. It appeared in the most unlikely of places: Deep in the bowels of a closet within the maze of passageways of an abandoned psychiatric hospital in Oslo, Norway. An unknown doctor had ordered the film – perhaps intending to show it to his troubled patients as an example of Christian virtue (or maybe even to show his mentally ill patients that divinity is sometimes perceived wrongly as “insanity”). What mattered was that history had rediscovered something it never should have lost — and all because someone forgot to throw away something in their closet.

Falconetti as Joan of Arc

The warm November night I sat admiring the Castro Theater’s Spanish Colonial embellishments and the deco sconces, I imagined the original screening of the film in the very place I was sitting. The Wurlitzer Pipe Organ started the show with verve. The curtains separated. And the lights dimmed. Maria Falconetti’s face appeared, in dramatic close-up. Her tears were palpable, and hundreds of strings heralded the beginning of the oratorio created specifically, and inspired by, the film. Richard Einhorn’s “Voices of Light” could not have been a better match for the dramatic images of Joan of Arc’s final days alive.

As it turned out, Passion would be Falconetti’s final performance as a film actress. After a stint as a stage actor, she escaped from France to Argentina at the height of World War II and lived her final days in peace (no doubt from Dreyer’s authoriatarian style of directing). But the re-discovery of The Passion of Joan of Arc will always be considered one of the great blessings of modern cinema. Chances of its survival were slim – the Library of Congress estimates that only 10% of films made before 1928 exist today. But in its 1,300 individual shots, its three-dimensional multi-million dollar set, and the painful passion exhibited on the face of Maria Falconetti we see a new purpose in the preservation of history, even for something as ‘kitsch’ as a reel of old film.

Related posts:

1. Frank Lloyd Wright and His Forgotten Larkin Building
2. Auschwitz “Death Camp” Blueprints Discovered in Berlin Apartment
3. Atomic Cafe: America in the Era of the A-Bomb

photo credit: One From RM

It was in January of 1942 that it was widely believed Nazi Germany made the decision to kill 11 million Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses, Roma, political prisoners, and Blacks. Since then, the January 1942 epoch is what all historians have marked the actual beginning of the “purge.” But recent architectural drawings, discovered in a flat in Berlin seem to indicate that the decision was dated much earlier than widely assumed. The newly discovered Auschwitz plans (also known as Oświęcim) contain 28 pages of yellowing renderings – largely drawn by SS technicians, but also by inmates who may have eventually faced the death camp itself. These plans may provide definitive proof that the decision to purge the Jews was made as early as the drawing of these documents: Oct 23, 1941.

The documents, other than the vital evidence they provide in the way of dates, also point towards the systematic and deliberate understanding of most SS officers and high-ranking German officials: Hitler’s plan was not a secretly carried out attempt, but rather a well-recorded and deliberate effort, of which even low-level officers were well aware.

The gas chamber architectural drawing for Auschwitz, recently discovered.

The blueprints themselves reveal chilling details.  One area, boldly marked the “Gaskammer,” or gas chamber, shows a 11.66 metre by 11.20 metre room where prisoners were tricked into entering by believing they were communal showers.

“The documents disprove beyond all doubt that which Holocaust deniers claim…” said Hans-Dieter Kreikamp, head of the federal archives office in Berlin, “… That Auschwitz was nothing more than a labour camp where no gassing took place.”

Kreikamp even affirms that a portion of the blueprints, drawn in distinctive green ink, are from the pen of none other than SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Still, speculation is swirling about the potential authenticity of the documents. Prof. Robert Jan van Pelt, an expert on the planning and construction of Auschwitz, believes that the plans are not Auschwitz, but rather plans for a forced labor camp meant to house 130,000 prisoners. He said the plans have been acknowledged for years, and that they may exist in the Polish National Museum at Auschwitz and in an archive in Moscow.

These blueprints show a building whose basement contained a gas chamber.

Even though the plans that were in the SS offices in Berlin during the 1944 bombings by Allied forces were said to be destroyed, it’s possible that they survived, but unlikely. Van Pelt believes that the “gas chamber” room in the drawings was likely a room meant to disinfect clothing, and that Heinrich Himmler, as such a high-ranking official, would not be found scribbling on the plans of a camp, despite how large. Van Pelt speculates that the document itself is likely a forge, likely copied from the Polish National Archives record, considering the large interest and market for Nazi memorabilia online.

Further Research

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1035958.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/3411647/Auschwitz-plans-found-in-Berlin-flat.html

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2. Inside a Ghost Fleet Ship – AS-32 U.S.S. Holland
3. Abandoned Hotels of the Catskills Borscht Belt

Indoor Pool at Grossinger's

I had first read about the Catskills in an Art Spiegelman graphic novel. It was – perhaps satirically – depicted as a place of rest for the father in the story of Maus. The significance of the Catskills is not to be overlooked. Its history, its culture, and what it represents to our changing attitudes about the world, and our relationship with place — all of it could be made into a novel.

In fact, more than one novel has made its central subject the Castkill Mountains. It was the Borscht Belt. It was where Jewish Northeasterners sojourned. It was even where the Hudson School of Art began, and where Thomas Cole found his inspiration. What was its draw? What made it appealing to the rising class of Jewish immigrants who had finally achieved success in the shores of the Eastern Seaboard?

The Grossinger Terrace Room in its Hey-day

Today, such escapes can’t exist. They are no longer relevant, nor are they economically sustainable. When a JetBlue flight to Las Vegas costs about the same as a drive to the Mecca of early 20th-century Jewish leisure, one can easily assume that one or the other will fall by the way-side. Chances are, it’s the one that is closer to home that becomes disposable.

By the mid-90s, the vast majority of the 1100 Borscht Belt hotels had become history. Jerry Seinfeld, who was once a regular in the comedy clubs of the area’s resorts, had moved on to network TV. The areas of Sullivan County that were once the centerpiece of Jewish-American leisure could not compete with Florida, Hawaii, The Caribbean, or California.

It was at Grossinger’s Hotel that the very representation of this tragic loss became all-the-more-apparent. Today, the only thing being maintained on resort that dates back to the 19th century are the greens of the golf course. The sprawling complex of 35 buildings, 1200 acres, and once host to 150,000 guests a year, has become an eyesore of the past after closing in 1986.

The Outdoor Olympic Pool at Grossinger's in the 60s

The Grossinger Outdoor Pool Today

There is no longer an active hotel; no outdoor olympic-size swimming facility; no lounge that hosts the high-dollar comedians of their day. There is only a 1/4-full green moss-ridden pool, surrounded by invasive indoor ferns. The burgundy and white tiles are merely a vestige. Fern and freezing-and-melting water become the centerpiece of a once-grand swimming facility. Only the lounge chairs remain as they were 20 years ago, when Grossinger’s had closed its doors once and for forever.

Maus, Catskills and Spiegelman

An Abandoned Desk at the Jennie G Building in the Catskills

Reconstructing the Catskills

I have always held a high reverence for the Catskills. Few people I know had heard of the place. Perhaps it was the single frame that Spiegelman sketched of the place that attracted my imagination. There was something in the fact that it was a destination of escapism, and it was also a place – fantastical as it had become – that was the very antithesis of the horrors and the atrocities of Nazi Germany.

Drawing from old postcards, and trying to reconstruct in my mind the joy and the memories of these Catskills is a poor substitute to actually being in the place at its nadir. My journey to these mountains was limited to a few hours – for my jet flight back to the West was leaving the following morning. But the few hours I was there bended my mind and fractured my own notion of any sort of dimension.

Deep under the boiler house of Grossinger’s, for example, one of the largest of the Borscht Belt resorts, I discovered an intricate system of man-made tunnels that snaked and kitty-cornered under the grand dining room of the hotel. It seemed to be a massive, underground refrigerator or cold-storage area, but it literally occupied a football field’s worth of underground space. Walls collapsed into each other. Ceilings succumbed to the enormous weight of the hotel above me. In certain places, the floors above me had turned into empty holes where one could stare high into the empty spaces of the higher floors after emerging from the dark recesses of the cavernous cold storage room underground.

The Hidden Tunnel at Grossinger's

Walking up to the remains of the skating rank, I encountered a left-behind pair of ice skates, children’s mittens, and a cap – all of which looked to be at least 25 years old. And in the grand wood-paneled lobby, I saw the opulence reduced to a decaying mess of soggy drywall and mossy cement.

Grossinger’s was certainly a headliner among the Catskills hotels, but the Tamarack Lodge came in as an interesting mid-tier alternative.

Experiencing Grossinger’s Hotel After its Decline

There is nothing that will ever match my experience at Grossinger’s. I’m sure that I will never again see anything quite like it. Ironically, these resorts declined as a result – in part because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Before the landmark declaration, many Jews were either implicitly or explicitly not allowed in upscale resorts outside of the Catskills. By the time this occurred, rail service began cutting service to the area, and the jet era was about to begin. A younger generation of Jews had chosen other destinations for vacationing, and the old generation found themselves largely retiring to Florida.

Video Documenting the End of the Catskills Era

And, as a final farewell, just this last spring one of the greatest hotels of the regions was demolished. The Concord was the largest hotel in the Borscht Belt region, and had closed after serving “sumptuous kosher dining” in its 3,000-seat dining room for five decades.Today, many hotels are slated to become Indian gaming casinos – ironically serving another culture just as they once had for half a century.

The Catskills Tamarack Lodge Pool

The Catskills may no longer attract sweeping artistic movements; these mountains my no longer be the sojourn of a post-WWII community battered by the horrrors of bigotry. Downtown, in Liberty, or East Falbrook, Kiamesha, or Bethel – you won’t see the glowing marquee of a matinee or the bright lights of kosher restaurants. But underneath the branches of pine and ash trees, you might just be walking on the old remains of a skating rink or olympic swimming pool. If you do, just imagine what it was like years ago, when this place was a seasonal escape from the crowded hustle of New York City.

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3. Symbolism, Icons at the Abandoned Byron Hot Springs