Lehigh & Susquehanna Railroad Station (1868): An Italianate railroad station that served Wilkes-Barre for a century before it closed in 1972. The Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad (later known as the Central Railroad of New Jersey) was founded by magnates who conquered the mountains and tapped the Wyoming coal fields.

I’ve been struggling with this location. The reason is this: I often hesitate to reveal locations to the public because their revelation often leads to their destruction. At the same time, there are certain stories that simply have to be told. This is one of them.

In the heart of Pennsylvania coal country at the fringes of a small city is a brewery. The brewery has become a federal building, and its hulking brewhouse still proudly displays the pomp of the Gilded Age. Within the shadows of its countenance is a small, shuttered train station. Like most abandonments of our modern era, this diminutive edifice tells the story of corruption, mismanagement, and the ineptitude of bureaucratic sinecures.

The interior work was top-notch for an era that prided itself on craftshmanship.

The modest Italianate structure facing the railroad tracks along Wilkes-Barre Boulevard was known as the Lehigh & Susquehanna Station (and later the Central Railroad of New Jersey Station). From the outside, it looks like most small-town stations in most rail-towns of mid-19th century America, but looks are deceiving.  Within its walls are awe-inspiring works of original craftsmanship: hand-carved mahogany, hand-laid terrazo, and – perhaps most compelling – a resplendent, curved staircase banister, a spiral exemplar of roccoco. Just look inside this station and you’ll immediately know why it earned its place in, “Great American Railroad Stations.”

The story of this station, however, isn’t told through its beauty. There is a sordid side, too. This station – as it exists in its dilapidated state – is a manifestation of boss politics that still seems to thrive despite the death of the “Tweed” gang and Tammany Hall. Granted, Wilkes-Barre is one among hundreds of cities with rampant corruption. All too often, we pay too much attention to national politics when the true turpitude rests in our local leaders (dare I call them leaders).

Market Street Square, the property in which the railroad station rests, was owned by convicted (and admitted) felon Thom Greco. Greco has been called a real estate mogul by some, but at least one anonymous online comment finds the title humorous. “‘Mogul?’ Really? I’ve sold to that guy 4 times over the last 20 years, and it took threats of all kinds to get my money. I always got, ‘Mr. Greco is unavailable’ from some young woman on the phone.”

But Greco is just a strand of much larger, much more Machiavellian web. Fact is: He was not part of the County Redevelopment Authority, who decided to purchase the station from him in 2005 for $5.8 million. Unlike the commissioners who accepted bribes and extorted flat screen televisions in exchange for Greco’s largess, he wasn’t the guy who had control over taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars. Truth is, to properly tell this story, we have to start in 1868 – when the station was built. Yes, this station has more layers than its recent ignominious decline.

A Product of Pennsylvania’s Coal Boom

When the station was born, the Steam Age was at its apex. Locomotives bombasted their way westward to join the continent by iron rail. The same year that the Wilkes-Barre station was built, the Golden Spike was driven into its Laurel Tie at Promontory Summit, Utah. Suffice to say, the country was hungry for coal – both to power its steam engines, and to cast the increasingly voracious appetite for steel. Wilkes-Barre was conveniently situated between two canals. Getting coal from one canal to another meant that the two waterways had to be connected by rail. These were the Wilkes-Barre station’s inchoate moments.

The rabid enthusiasm of the era was immediately apparent within its original walls and accouterments, but only once I was inside. I was a week into my journey, so it wasn’t easy to elicit any sort of enthusiasm out of me, especially after exploring dozens of awe-inspiring sites-in-decline. The station feigns curiosity with its exterior. Honestly, it isn’t much to look at from the outside. Its embellishments aren’t like a vainglorious wedding cake, but rather like a hollow birthday cake (with opportunity for surprise of course).

Like many cakes, this station also had layers; additions and extensions attenuated its hidden corners and serendipitous potential. In the early 20th century the Central Railroad of New Jersey was the sole leasor of the tracks. Many a luxurious Jersey passenger passed through its hallways. No doubt, the ornate frosting within its walls was spackled on after the fact; fireplaces were later added and aristocratic comforts became prominent. Whereas the early station served the needs of industry, the improved station became the playground of quixotic entrepreneurs, tycoons, and political bosses.

A Grand Train Station in Decline

Those halcyon days quickly came to a halt by the Great Depression. Passenger service precipitously declined while anthracite coal prices plummeted. The CNJ went into receivership for an entire decade, beginning in 1939. By the time it was finally able to emerge from its financial straits, the railroad found itself in the midst of a burgeoning American love affair with the highway. It didn’t take long for the Wilkes-Barre station to receive its final passenger on July 1, 1963. Train NO. 301 feebly rolled into the Wilkes-Barre stop with a single passenger coach in tow; its two passengers exited the car; and, according to railroad historian Ed Gardner, “thus ended a period of passenger service inaugurated 120 years earlier.”

The five decades that followed were largely modest years for the station. Vacant cars – skeletons of an earlier era – stood in a pall-like atmosphere to be eaten away by time. The station itself was painstakingly restored in the mid-70s, and it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 12, 1975. Reading MU cars and Fruit Grower Express cars began to occupy the adjoining lot. Around 1980 it opened as “The Station,” a high-end bar and restaurant. Some of the nearby Reading MU cars were converted into charming Bed & Breakfast-style overnight accommodations.

According to Michael G. Rushton of NEPA Railfan, the place was quite “ritzy” by 1984, and it hosted political functions with expensive, gourmet cuisine. The station was then owned by Marvin Roth, but he passed away and the park was auctioned. A single, lonely plaque bears the Marvin’s (and the station’s?) epigraph: “Marvin Roth, a local entrepreneur, rehabilitated this edifice so posterity may forever enjoy its presence.”

The Choo Choo Inn (the train car sleepers) were phased out, and “entertainment magnate” Thom Greco acquired the property. “The crowd started changing,” Said Michael Rushton. “It was not the college crowd, but thugs from out of town… There were shootings, stabbings, robberies, fights, breaking into cars.”

Its final incarnation was as Banana Joe’s, a restaurant chain with cocktails and American fare. Rushton said nobody really went to it, and for “whatever reasons, it failed.” The nearby rail cars met a similar fate. By this time they had become occupied by the homeless and were the victims of fire at least twice a week. Such was the state of the Station when the Luzerne County Redevelopment Authority considered buying the property in 2005.

Rebirth as Market Street Square and Chess Piece in Corruption

By early 2006 the Luzerne County Redevelopment Authority decided to purchase the building for $5.8 million. By then, it was dilapidated and in need of millions in restoration work. It soon became apparent that the Authority had purchased a white elephant, and it stands to this day an embarrassment to all taxpaying Luzerne County citizens. Even more egregious are the stories of the men embroiled in this controversy.

Thom Greco worked with numerous Authority commissioners in the negotiation for the building’s sale.  Soon after it was sold, Greg Skrepenak asked Greco for $10,000 worth of flat screen televisions, presumably for his father’s sports bar.  Greco complied, but when he asked for payment, Skrepenak alluded to the fact that the televisions were recompense for the county’s purchase of the Market Street Square Station. Unfortunately, Skrepenak is difficult to reach these days… He’s in jail for accepting $5,000 in bribes for another completely separate deal with a developer.

Skrepenak wasn’t the only Redevelopment Authority official to be tied up in legal trouble. Back in 2005, Allen Bellas was drumming up the purchase of the Railway Station in the local newspaper. “It’s going to tie into all the downtown projects. It’s obviously going to help out the passenger rail service.” Of course, five years later, the station is still not helping out passenger rail service and is far from helping downtown Wilkes-Barre. As for Allen Bellas, who was then the Executive Director of the Redevelopment Authority, he’s in jail for a $2,000 bribery scandal that’s unrelated to the Station. Even the owners of the property leased to Big Ugly’s Sports Bar (the Bar that received the tainted $10,000 worth of flat screen TV’s), were ensnared in October of 2009 for paying a $1,400 bribe to Gerald Bonner and William McGuire, both one-time bureaucrats in the Luzerne County Housing Authority.

All of these events transpired so quickly that the Redevelopment Authority had to respond with its own Public Relations campaign. Their first order of business was to verify the accuracy of the price they paid for the station. This is generally done by using two neutral real estate appraisers. Before they purchased the property, they chose Stanley Komosinsky and Alan Rosen, neither of whom appear on the roster of the Appraisal Institute (the nationally recognized professional organization for appraisers). Perhaps not coincidentally, both appraisers valued the property at exactly the same price: $5.74 million. And it gets even deeper: Alan Rosen works for the real estate company owned by the Mayor of Wilkes-Barre, Thomas M. Leighton.

A Dilapidated Symbol of Corruption

These days, the Central New Jersey Rail Station (now euphemistically known as “Market Street Square”) sits in neglect. But the station serves as a very salient symbol of bureaucracy run amok and the loss of accountability in local government. It’s highly likely that the men involved with embezzling the public coffers in various ways will receive nothing more than a few months in jail and a slap on the wrist. They’ll return to their lives agrandized by the lucre from the backs of their constituents.

The fact still remains: It is a beautiful building, filled with wonders, curves, craftsmanship, and symbology. If one spends moments inside of this grand structure, one is easily transported beyond the depressing story of how it came to be what it is. I left the disheveled box cars that line the building and walked back to my car. When I photographed it, I was oblivious to its history; and in those innocent moments I had truly discovered a different world inside of a tiny little train station among the once-prosperous anthracite valley of Pennsylvania.

Sources

http://www.northeast.railfan.net/ls.html
http://www.mtn-top-hs.org/njcrailroadhistory.pdf
http://nepa.railfan.net/articles/mssid.htm
http://www.allbusiness.com/legal/criminal-law-plea-agreements/13223135-1.html
http://purebunkum.com/?p=3352
http://sightsonpennsylvania.blogspot.com/2010/05/great-train-robbery-part-1.html
http://www.trainboard.com/grapevine/showthread.php?t=75059
http://www.allbusiness.com/legal/criminal-law-plea-agreements/13223135-1.html
http://www.timesleader.com/news/2-appraisals-performed-on-station-tracts.html?showAll=Y
http://www.timesleader.com/news/2_appraisals_performed_on_station_tracts_07-28-2010.html
http://citizensvoice.com/news/greco-pleads-guilty-admits-knowing-of-gratuities-1.904564

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2. Saying Goodbye to Neverland and Michael Jackson
3. Abandoned Hotels of the Catskills Borscht Belt

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

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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].

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2. An Abandoned Mansion from Lebanon’s Past
3. Cold Storage Building: World’s Fair at Chicago

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 zenith, 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.

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3. The Lost Mural of José Miguel Covarrubias

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. Highway 101 in a Post-Industrial West
3. Abandoned Hotels of the Catskills Borscht Belt

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 Gary – A Lost Metropolis of Indiana Industry
3. Abandoned: Six Flags New Orleans

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

Byron was not the first to play up the symbolic healing properties of its waters. The belief in waters carries its own cultural baggage, dating all the way back to pre-classical times. The Egyptians believed in the life-giving aspects of the Nile. Their symbol for the Nile was the lion’s head. Not surprisingly Byron included lion head fountains in their advertisements.

An advertisement possibly dating from the early 1900s before fire destroyed the second hotel at Byron Hotel. Note the two lion’s head figures – symbolic images used in Ancient Egypt to represent life-giving water.

Specific to the Christian theology was the spring of Jerusalem, which fed into the two pools of Bethesda. These “life-giving” springs as they were known also cleansed sheep before being sacrificed to God. But, in John 5, their healing purpose was revealed: “In these lay a multitude of invalids, blind, lame, paralyzed, waiting for the moving of the water; for an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool, and troubled the water; whoever stepped in first after the troubling of the water was healed of whatever disease he had.” The fifth chapter of John goes on to describe the parable of Jesus’ healing of the lame man at the pool. In chapter 9, Jesus heals a blind man in the nearby Pool of Siloam.

The caption reads: This stone is part of one of the columns of the balustrade that surrounded the ancient pool of Bethesda (5 John V.21) Brought from Jerusalem by Bishop Gailor, June 1, 1928. Image by Gary Bridgman, creative commons, 2.0.

The pools of Siloam and Bethesda served as a vital image in Catholic theology. In 1916, Hot Springs National Park was formed as a national healing retreat, but not before modern Pentecostalism was founded there at a 1914 convention in the same spot (Faupel). As Dr. Miranda Green aptly says: if water is anything in religion, it is a cleansing healer. Healing is closely linked with purification… The same perceptions caused water to become an integral part of Christian symbolism, an association which has manifested itself very clearly in the veneration of holy wells.”

If any religion venerated water, it was the Greek Orthodox church — and especially spring water. The central reason for this was because of the fact that “Orthodox teaching implicitly denies justification by faith alone by asserting the necessity of the sacramental rites for justification, regeneration or salvation.”

The sacramental rites of the Greek Orthodox church are also known as the seven holy mysteries. Amongst the seven, baptism is the linchpin. According to Chrysostom, “It is through baptism that we received remission of sins, sanctification, communion of the spirit, adoption, and life eternal.” Even more important to note is that, unlike Roman Catholicism, the Orthodox church does not limit sacraments. Anything, from a pomegranate tree to a pillar with a cross, to a hot spring, could be imbued with a sacred, salvatory status.

Sobriety Movement, Cleansing of Sins at Bryon Hot Springs

At Byron, even before the Greek Orthodox occupation of the site, the water’s healing properties go beyond a simple holistic, physical approach. Advertisements for the springs and descriptions of the site regularly included religious allusions. At Byron, “a person could arrive on crutches and walk out completely revived” (Jensen 33). Letters written by previous visitors to the site frequently quoted biblical place-names and scriptures. Letters from visitors to other California springs called such springs a “balm in Gilead” and “pool of Siloam” (Aetna Springs 26,28). Others went so far to say that hot springs gave them a “new blood and new life” (their italics).

The irony of this photo from inside the hotel is apparent when one sees the symbol of Satanism in a building that once housed the virtuous Greek Orthodox Church.

The springs also served a second purpose, as a cleansing from the symbolic and literal “evils” of society. An oral interview by Sandra Kelly quotes John Moody, a past resident of the Byron area as saying, “There were old boys coming in from San Francisco, the drunkards, and they’d get sobered up, straightened up.”

In the Progressive era, this aligned the religiously motivated sobriety movement with the divine salvation offered by the Byron Springs. By 1946, when the Orthodox church looked into purchasing Byron, they no doubt were aware of the past cleansing properties of the waters. Perhaps, they even had read reports like the one mentioned in this 1903 summary: “The unnatural craving for liquor is removed by a general course at the Springs. The nervous system, which has become shattered by long indulgence of bacchanalian joys, returns to its normal condition, and with the aid of restored health, the patient finds himself able to cope with his former adversary” (Byron 7)

Looking out the window of the dining room at Byron Hotel. Note the water feature at bottom. This was the main fountain that greeted visitors as they entered the hotel.

In such a way, Byron had become a spiritual retreat, not only for healing, but also for escape from the trappings of urban life. It was a rural “temple on the hill,” isolated from any evil influences and modern distractions. It was nestled amongst an alkali flat, below the ironically named Diablo Mountain range, surrounded by symbolically evil place names and landscapes. Thus, when bishop Athemagoras I dedicated the property in 1948 as Mission St. Paul, he envisioned it as a spiritual escape, a bishop’s see, and the center for Greek Orthodox activity for the entire western United States. The vision was big, but the outcome not so.

In 1956, the property was sold, and the icons and equipment scattered to other churches across the West Coast. The grand Byron hotel reverted to a desolate, decaying vestige of the past. For forty years it sat, until in 2005 it suffered a fire and began to melt in the rain and elements. Fire seemed to claim victory over the waters once again — the Victorian cottages burned. Only a few remnants of the spring headwaters remain, and ocassionally a religiously motivated element of the landscape appears in the most unlikely of places

An abandoned grave site at Byron Hot Springs Resort. This photo is an orphan work, and I am not aware of who took the photo, nor am I aware of where exactly the grave is in the Byron Complex.

Further Research

• “Aetna Springs, Pope Valley, Napa County, California, The” Napa City: Napa County Reporter, 1879.
• “Byron Hot Springs, California.” San Francisco: G. Spaulding & Co., 1903. 32 pages illus. incl. plans
• Faulkner, William B. “Faulkner’s Handbook and Directory of Murray Township, Alameda County, Cal.” Livermore: The Livermore Herald Steam Printing House, 1886.
• Kelly, Sandra. “Unpublished, Taped Interview with John G. Moody.” April 25, 1977. Available from the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.
• Saucy, Robert L., John Coe, and Alan W. Gomes “Eastern Orthodox Teachings in Comparison with the Doctrinal Position of Biola University.” Biola University, May 1998. < http://faculty.biola.edu/alang/EO/Summary.pdf >
• Jensen, Carol A. “Byron Hot Springs.” San Francisco: Arcadia Publishing, 2006.
• Faupel, D. William. “The Restoration Vision in Pentecostalism.” Christian Century. October 17, 1990. < http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=818 >
• Green, Miranda. “The Religious Symbolism of Llyn Cerrig Bach and Other Early Sacred Water Sites.” January, 2000. < http://people.bath.ac.uk/liskmj/living-spring/sourcearchive/ns1/ns1mg1.htm >.

Related posts:

1. The Religious Significance of Byron Hot Springs
2. Abandoned Hotels of the Catskills Borscht Belt
3. Fleishhacker Pool – A Strange Journey Through S.F. History

The symbolic meanings of springs are undeniable. From ancient times, to antiquity, to the Romantic era, and even the beginning of the 20th century — in all of these times, springs were given as restorative sources of “curative powers.” Just as Moses tapped his rod on bare rock and quenched the thirst of Israelites, so too did William Mulholland turn the spigot at the Cascades to provide a figurative “spring” for a thirsty throng of Angelinos in California. “Here it is,” Mulholland said. “Take it.”

The aim of this overview is to focus specifically on the religious connotations of a localized collection of springs for the Greek Orthodox Church. Though the period of the Orthodox’s presence at Byron Hot Springs is from 1946-1956, Byron still served as a spiritual pilgrimage point as far back as the pre-Spanish era of California.

Byron reached its height in the early-1900s, declined during the Great Depression, served as a temporary top secret military prison camp, and then finally became consecrated for the Greek Orthodox Church. Much of my analysis will involve sources from the resort’s pre-Orthodox era; however, the sources and quotations drawn from this era further solidify the symbolic definition of the site and will lead credence to its selection as a religious pilgrimage point that suited the needs of the Church perfectly. The following claims will be drawn from a variety of primary sources and will be divided into two thematic headings. Visual evidence will be cited with a link to its corresponding item.

Architectural Embellishments and Landscape Design

As one enters the landscape of Byron, it becomes an obvious natural oasis in a grassy, alkali and sagebrush-covered landscape. The plot has seen three different hotels, two of which burned down — the third, and current hotel, is made entirely of brick. Fire hydrants surround the edifice — a testament to the architects getting smart to fire hazards.

Around the hotel are the vestiges of the past Edenic garden that surrounded Byron. The architect spared no expense in turning the land into a lush landscape reminiscent of a Mediterranean retreat. He ensured that the alkali dirt would not hinder the garden’s progress by trucking in tons of soil. Non-native Indian pepper trees, pomegranate, and palm trees dot the landscape. Of course, the springs themselves, the very centerpieces of this retreat, required an effort no less exorbitant. Originally, these places were simple watering holes, embellished with hand-carved stones that resemble the natural landscape. In its early Era, the springs were an undeniable Romantic-era notion of beauty.

But hidden beneath the symbolic surface of these Romantic-era creations are a number of religious and spiritual undertones. The extent to which these features of the Byron landscape played into the Greek Orthodox church’s purchase of the site may not be readily apparent, but my intention is to highlight the very real elements that may have made it a desirable site for the Church and its activities.

I had earlier noted the Mediterranean influence of the landscaping. Pomegranate, pepper, and palm dominated the landscape — all three very much reminiscent of the Greek Orthodox’s own Mediterranean mecca. The Greek Orthodox Church was — and still is, to a large degree — very much a new immigrant denomination. Its members during the Church’s purchase of Byron were overwhelmingly first-generation Americans who carried their own affinities for the flora of their homeland.

Beyond the ecological aspects of the site, the human-built aspects also had their own symbolic connotations. The dining area contains its own subtle, subliminal icons. Note the cross-like woodwork, integrated in the pillars. Also note the early image of people drinking from the Liver and Kidney springs — in an eerie, foreboding of this site’s future religious purpose you can see a faint shadow of a cross above the woman’s Progressive-era sun umbrella.

Perhaps most striking, however, is the now-demolished Liver and Kidney Spring structure. On top of this spring, the widow of the early proprietor of Byron built a memorial to her husband. The Mead Memorial was “long, spacious, cool, and light-filled. It held a combination medical room, sanctuary, and baptismal quality for its visitors. The concept of ‘drinking at the well’ had religious overtones to some.

Jensen goes on to write in her caption for this image, “Perhaps for this reason, the Greek Orthodox church sanctified the building into the ‘life-giving spring’ during the resort’s tenure as Mission St. Paul” (Jensen 40).

The “Zothohou Peeyee” — a moniker given to the Liver and Kidney Spring when the Orthodox Church dedicated the resort as their own — was not only religious, but it also featured seemingly secular paintings akin to John Constable, Thomas Cole, and Thomas Moran. Even these paintings, which included mountains, valleys, and streams, all had their own transcendentalist religious notions. The Church added to this ambience by placing their own altar and religious icon.

Finally, it is worth mentioning the craftsman-style cottages that adjoined the main hotel, built more than six decades before the church bought the resort. Though the craftsman style is generally not aligned with religious use, the cottages at Byron had something that set them apart as peculiarly religious: stained glass windows in the verandas, a common theme among Greek Orthodox cathedrals and churches — undoubtedly an influential quirk that the church may have found familiar.

Next week we’ll conclude this two-part series with a wrapup of the other religious artefacts of Byron. I hope this first part was enjoyable and please feel free to comment with your own input!

Related posts:

1. Symbolism, Icons at the Abandoned Byron Hot Springs
2. Abandoned Hotels of the Catskills Borscht Belt

Top Floor of the Key System Building

About two years ago, when I began going into old, run-down buildings simply to photograph them, I had more than my share of fear of being caught. Now, after dozens of dashes into the spaces of historic structures of all shapes and sizes I can say with confidence that I no longer pump quite as much adrenaline as I once did.

It’s been replaced largely with a confidence and a brazenness that sometimes scares even myself. For in my day-to-day life I rarely possess such confidence. To reflect back, 30-seconds after making a mad dash across razor wire and security cameras – it all just seems so insane. For what? A few snapshots?

But when I question these things; when I think to myself how incredibly useless (and often stupid) it is, I think back to the day that I first found myself possessing that confidence.

I was about a year-and-a-half out of college and somewhat lost – as I still am – in the great confusing whirlwind of post-college soul-searching. It was only a few months after I entered my first sanctuary of sorts, but I had never tasked myself to what I was about to do that night.

Key System Building – Daytime

Earlier in the day I had scoped out a grand, Beaux Arts building that first housed Gianninni’s famed Bank of America, eventually becoming the headquarters of the Key System (the pre cursor to all of our modern mass-transit systems in the U.S.) Her tall, imposing hulk stood guard – like a spectre of the past – over the modern high-rises and hotels that surrounded her.

Interior of 1100 Broadway in Oakland

Her windows were littered with a chromatic representation of 30 years in Graffiti history. I’m sure many of the artists are long gone from this world. From the street, the Key System Building is not just imposing, but also a subject of curiosity. Sit down across the street from 1100 Broadway and you’ll find that passerby glance momentarily at the 8-story brick tower. Cars reduce their speed. Kids on skateboards take a quick detour for a better view.

I myself took 20 minutes to admire its horshoe-shaped positioning, the ornate, carved frieze. I took notice of its weathered brick. All of it began to look like a giant birthday cake that was a photographer’s dream.

The unique situation with the Key System Building was its difficulty to infiltrate. Most places that urban explorers tend to frequent are easily accessible. In fact, parking in front and squeezing between the bars of a fence is often all that’s necessary. But the Key System Building – she was well secured and well-watched.

Getting inside of her meant being noticed. The front door was layered behind a fence, and even the door itself was locked. On the western face was an opportunity – a small opening in a second-story window with a decent-sized water pipe protruding from the wall below it. Still, I’d determined it to be impossible – even with the assistance of the pipe.

Two hours later, a friend and I returned. I had bought a ladder at Home Depot. My heart was racing. We walked straight up to the window as 30 onlookers (soon to be bus passengers) watched us from across the street. “Are You Crazy?” One of the passengers shouted from across the street.

My fellow explorer and I paid no attention. We scampered up the ladder and looked out from the dark recesses of the window to see the crowd boarding the bus. But there was someone else – an Oakland police officer walking straight towards our lowered ladder. His eyes were gazed intently in the distance, and then he suddenly turned away. We peeked out the window to see that he was frantically trying to put out a fire in a trash can. We took the opportunity to pull the rope attached to our ladder into the platform.

As we looked down into the lobby of the Key System Building our eyes widened in amazement. The explorer next to me was an archeology major. Before us was detritus buried under a century of soggy asbestos and drywall. The quietness of the space was only punctuated by the dripping of a leaky ceiling. Below us stood a classic 1940s-era desk with a swivel chair, covered in dust. The pillars in the center of the room – thin columns of concrete – were frosted like a cake on their top 15 feet by broken and cracking plaster in ornate design.

Pillars in Lobby

Luckily, we had the ladder, because there was no way down into the lobby from our high platform. After descending, we walked to the grand entrance. The remnants of what was once a crystal chandelier (but had morphed over the years into a thin wire hanging from a rusty chain) hung ominously from the ceiling. The address – backwards – read 0011 yawdaorB. Pedestrians walked by,  paying no attention the two dark figures photographing in the shadows of the building.

Grand Entrance to 1100 Broadway

I would like to say that the building was filled with all kinds of trinkets and bric-a-brac from the 1920s. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. Despite the fact that the wrought iron staircase remained intact and as beautiful as it ever could be – there wasn’t much to see within the building.  On the top floor, however, were fliers from an 80s rave . I could only imagine college kids and recent high school grads, sneaking into this dark building without being noticed. The top floor windows were covered with black plastic – perhaps to prevent people from noticing the flashing lights, lighters, and glow sticks spasmodically gyrating inside to the beat of the music.

We made the final ascension to the top of the building and looked out towards the Tribune Building. We could see the movement below us – out – far into the distance of the Bay. It was such an eerie feeling to be in the middle of it all – yet so separated. All around us was activity. And there we were, in a building forgotten by bustle and resistant to modernization – a quiet building that had lived her days in glory only to see them end as a silent, graffiti covered bone of a time-gone-by.

I stood my camera on a tripod and set the timer. The two of us got in position for a final photo, looking out from the darkness of the Key System roof towards the bright Tribune Building lights. Descending, our steps were slower, and a bit more contemplative. We exited the window when nobody remained on the city streets. I tossed the muddy ladder into the back of my truck and bid farewell to my fellow explorer.

Tribune Building, Oakland

When I returned home, the sun was rising in the East and I could hear birds outside. My eyes were bloodshot, but I couldn’t sleep until the photos were imported into my hard drive. The final photo appeared on the screen. Because my camera’s shutter had been open for a few seconds before the two of us took our positions, our bodies had appeared semi-transparent. Ironically standing on a ghost of her own merit, We looked like two living ghosts considering the threat of modernization ahead of us – with its lights, and progress, and fearful-yet-mesmerizing technological breakthroughs.

There was something to be said for the simplicity and the raw idealism that the Key System Building represents. I couldn’t quite make out why it had such a profound effect on me. For me, it was a turning point. I may still not understand who I am, or what I plan to do from here. In fact, I probably know less about that than I did when I graduated from college. But at least I feel a bit more comfortable knowing that’s okay, because if there’s anything that’s worth celebrating it’s the absurdity and beauty of life, no matter how forgotten or dark it may become, and how bright and promising everything outside of you may seem.

Related posts:

1. An Abandoned Skyscraper: The Pac Bell Building
2. Detroit’s Historic Farwell Building
3. Frank Lloyd Wright and His Forgotten Larkin Building