abandoned towns

Now that the economy is in a bit of a free fall (or so it seems), I've noticed an increased number in articles about abandoned towns, cities, and neighborhoods.

In the February 1 issue of The New York Times, there was an article about Braddock, Pennsylvania, a "distressed municipality." Braddock is a former steel factory town.

"Everyone in the country is asking 'Where's the bottom?'" said the mayor, John Fetterman. "I think we've found it."

Braddock's mayor is working to rebuild Braddock, publicizing it as a place to buy inexpensive real estate and build urban farms. He is also personally working to save a handful of buildings.

After reading the article and looking at Braddock's Wikipedia entry, a few factoids stuck out:

The first free library built by Andrew Carnegie was built in Braddock in 1887.

In 1936, the first A & P supermarket opened in Braddock.

Lauren Tewes, the actress who played Cruise Director Julie McCoy on The Love Boat tv series, was born in Braddock. (I loved The Love Boat as a child.)

Braddock will have another moment in the sun when the feature film The Road opens up later this year. (note: The Road was postponed from its November 2008 release after the U.S. financial markets melted, as "they" felt that the public didn't want to see an apocalyptic movie.)

"If struggling communities don't preserve their architecture," Mr. Fetterman said, "there's no chance of any resurgence down the line." Sometime soon, he worries, Braddock will pass the point of no return.

This article makes me want to watch the movie and then visit Braddock and look for locales seen in the film. Perhaps an urban explorer tour guide wants to make some extra money giving tours? I bet the mayor would work with you to set up safe UE tours of Braddock.

Mayor Fetterman's website is at www.15104.cc .
(It's a pet peeve of mine that The Times' "policy" rarely allows for disclosure of websites it cites.)

Here's the Times article and a Pittsburgh City Paper article from 2006.

Image taken from the "Ruins" section of the official Braddock website.

Ars Subterranea at Anthology Film Archives (NYC) on March 24!

Ars Subterranea has several projects planned for 2008, and the first one will be a night at the cinema. We'll have the opportunity to view Tales from the Sanatorium, a graphic novel in-progress. Ars Sub Founder/Executive Director Julia Solis will co-present the evening and show us previously unseen work. Other works both old (Met State is a must see) and new (Julia's collaboration with Opacity.us's Tom Kirsch) will be shown. Co-presenter Ross Lipman will also be on hand to present The Disembodied Theater Corporation's work about the High Line, NO WAY OUT BUT ONWARD. It should be a great evening!

from the Anthology Film Archives press release:

REPORT FROM THE GHOST CITY
video performance works by
The Disembodied Theater Corporation and Ars Subterranea
Monday, March 24, 7:30pm
With Ross Lipman & Julia Solis in person!

Anthology Film Archives presents an evening with The Disembodied Theater Corporation featuring dispatches, news, songs, and fragments from the Ghost City: the skeletal remains of abandoned towns, railways, and graveyards that stand as remnants of a lost society. Filmmaker Ross Lipman and author Julia Solis will present a haunting assemblage of ruins, rants, and shards of memory that paint a collective portrait of dystopia. The evening will feature two distinct presentations: NO WAY OUT BUT ONWARD, an adventure in psychogeography through New York’s High Line, and presentations by members of the arts group Ars Subterranea, DISPATCHES FROM THE WASTELAND: three short imaginary narratives set inside abandoned mental hospitals.

NO WAY OUT BUT ONWARD:
An adventure in psychogeography through New York's High Line
PowerPoint performance by The Disembodied Theater Corporation
Written and narrated by Ross Lipman
Suite for Bass, Viola, and Trombone by Laura Steenberge
Photos by Leigh Evans, Ross Lipman, Nina Mankin

The High Line is the abandoned elevated freight rail that runs through the west side of Manhattan. Soon to be the site of an aerial public park, it for the moment remains a haunted paradise above the city—a verdant wasteland inhabited only by occasional taggers, wanderers, and police. In October 2004 a ragtag group ventured up to explore. As they were to learn, it's a space with its own internal logic, interacting with its visitors in a way unique to each. NO WAY OUT BUT ONWARD is a recounting of that day's events, told in PowerPoint, the modern day equivalent of an old-time Magic Lantern performance.


Scene from No Way Out But Onward.

Presentations made by members of the arts group Ars Subterranea
DISPATCHES FROM THE WASTELAND:

Three short imaginary narratives set inside abandoned mental hospitals

Tales from the Sanatorium
Drawing inspiration from The Canterbury Tales, the graphic novel series depicts an imperious Nurse leading a band of disheveled souls through endless apocalyptic asylum landscapes, occasionally pausing to tell stories. In the first installment, the Nurse recounts her own tale, "Rubber Lullaby." A combination of derelict spaces with mixed-media collage and still photography created by Bryan Papciak in conjunction with Ars Subterranea, Tales from the Sanatorium is a graphic novel set in an abandoned mental hospital – staged like a movie, but photographed as a series of stills.


Scene from Tales from the Sanatorium.

Funeral Play
A surrealistic journey into a hospital bed, based on a forthcoming Furnace Press book by Julia Solis.

Irma
Excerpts from a postmortem diary by Tom Kirsch (http://www.opacity.us) and Julia Solis.

Followed by:

Met State
(Bryan Papciak, 10 minutes, color/b&w, 16mm, 2001)
An award-winning experimental short film by exploring the graphic nature of derelict space through
an experimental study of an abandoned insane asylum.

About the presenting organizations and artists:

The Disembodied Theater Corporation is an amorphous performance entity devoted to the temporary manifestation of non-filmic cinemas.

Ross Lipman is an independent filmmaker, photographer, and writer who has presented work throughout the world at venues ranging from the Oberhausen International Film Festival to the Chinese Taipei Film Archive. His works have been collected by institutions and museums including the Sammlung Goetz in Munich. He is also one of the world’s leading authorities on the restoration of independent cinema, and was recently honored with the National Society of Film Critic’s 2007 Film Heritage award. In recent years he has been designing film, video, and performance works exploring urban decay as a marker of modern consciousness.

Ars Subterranea likes to play inside ruins and is comprised of artists, historians, and urban explorers working to create an intersection between art and architectural relics in the New York City area. Ars Subterranea’s aim is to instigate unique perceptions of New York's history by constructing narratives around the city's forgotten relics.

Julia Solis conducts archaeological parlor games and investigates ruined urban spaces. As the founder of Dark Passage, she started the creative preservation group Ars Subterranea in 2002 with the object of staging scavenger hunts and exhibitions in unusual locations in New York. She is the author of New York Underground: The Anatomy of a City (Routledge, 2004) and an editor of Furnace Press, which specializes in publications on urban decay.

Visit the project’s website: http://www.arssubterranea.org/sanatorium/ghostcity.htm

More about Ars Subterranea: http://www.arssubterranea.org

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES
32 SECOND AVENUE NEW YORK, NY 10003; (212) 505-5181

About Anthology Film Archives: Founded in 1970, Anthology’s mission is to exhibit, preserve, collect documentation about, and promote public and scholarly understanding of independent, classic, and avant-garde cinema. Anthology screens more than 900 film and video programs per year, publishes books and catalogs annually, and has preserved more than 700 films to date.
Directions: Anthology is at 32 Second Ave. at 2nd St. Subway: F or V to 2nd Ave; 6 to Bleecker.
Tickets: $8 for adults, $6 for students & seniors; $5 for members.

for the Oscars tonight

Photo by David Byrne, taken on July 4, 2006 and accessed at http://journal.davidbyrne.com/2006/07/7406.html.

CNN.com ran a story this week about Marfa, Texas and how two films nominated for Oscars this year were filmed in Marfa: No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood.

I haven't seen either movie yet, but I've noted that Marfa keeps getting great press, mostly for its connections to minimalist art and its Prada store, and now for being a thinly-populated town aesthetically friendly to film shoots.

Marfa's on my list of places in the United States to visit, but there are several places ahead of it on the list, including:

Yellowstone National Park - I think this would be a great family vacation, especially if we saw a geyser.

Walter De Mairia's The Lightning Field - I had the opportunity to visit The Lightning Field when I was in art school, and I blew it!

Coyote Buttes North - The Wave - I wonder how old a child needs to be to complete the hike to The Wave....

Applalachian Trail - I'd like to take a day trip to the Trail via the New York Metro-North stop.

The Everglades - I took the Shark Valley tram tour during the dry season, but I'd love to return during the wet season and do a lot of bike riding and spend quality time in the 'Glades.

I went for the abandoned buildings, and I got Iceland and community as well.

I'm a fan of the Icelandic band Sigur Rós' music - I own a few CDs but have never seen them in concert - but ever since hearing raves about Heima, I've been waiting for the opportunity to see the film on the big screen.

First, I heard that Heima was a great rock doc, and then I read the following sentence in press materials for last night's screening at Scandinavia House: They played in deserted fish factories, outsider art follies, far-flung community halls, sylvan fields, darkened caves, and the huge, horseshoe-shaped Ásbyrgi Canyon (formed, legend has it, by the hoofprint of Odin's six-legged horse Sleipnir). Wow! Since I've also been daydreaming about visiting Iceland, well, that's a lot of reasons to see one movie, right?

Heima was astoundingly beautiful and wonderful. The film documents Sigur Rós playing two weeks of gigs across its country. Each show is incredibly different: the concert in Reykjavík is a large, crowded outdoor event; the band plays at a community center in Kirkjubaejarklaustar at a Thorablod meal (extreme foodies take note!); a protest against a dam is the site of another show; etc.

The music was wonderful, and the movie does provide an overall context for the band's sound. At one point, one of the band members talks about the Icelandic need for "space", and SR's music definitely conveys Space (not the extraterrestrial kind, but the one of topological space, distance, area, and volume).

But moving past the music...the two sites featured in Heima most relevant for this blog are the abandoned fish factory in Djupavik and an artist's former home in Selardalur.

The band's tour journal describes the visit to the abandoned fish factory moderately well, and I'm sure that many of this blog's readers can appreciate the desire to crawl through the pipe leading to the site. (Is this how the audience entered the space?)

A detailed excerpt from the tour journal brings some intimate details:

the pipe is too small for the guitar amp to fit through into the tank and it stands outside in the grass pointing towards jonsi some metres distant. occasionally the gulls and arctic terns wheeling overhead outside are audible through an open square in the roof and these will probably be evident on the finished recording being captured by ken and biggi on the other end of the pipe.

once this is over, the band move to the factory for the first time, where they discover their gear is too tightly arranged between decaying and anomalous american automobiles in the dark concrete skeleton of dead building.

The fish factory looks like a hip nightclub in some shots, and the song's churchlike sound ends with a cacophonic burst of energy.


Performing in the abandoned fish factory. (movie still)

An internet search provides little information about the site in Selardalur, except that it is indeed a tourist destination in the West fjords area of Iceland. The concert segment is filmed at an artist named Samuel's former farmhouse. Looking at the site, I can't help but wonder how much longer that farmhouse is going to stand upright, hence GO VISIT SELARDALUR NOW!


This shot was on the screen for about two seconds, and there was no information about where it was located. (movie still)

Besides these two locations, I enjoyed two other things about the movie: the nature and audience shots. The audience at most of the shows was pretty diverse, age-wise. Senior citizens, infants, adolescents, teenagers, young adults...you name it. Everyone looks beautiful while listening to music. These concerts were community get-togethers.

The following notes reflect the nature seen in this film: strong sense of narration with the sea, waterfalls, fields, mountains, birds in caves, birds in sky, iceberg floating in water, footprints drying in the sand, landscapes of houses/boats/communities, fog & mist moving across mountains, stones, a man who makes instruments from rhubarb.

The trailer for the movie can be seen here.

These Sigur Rós videos were screened before the start of the movie:

Hoppipolla; Glósóli; Svefn-g-englar; Viorar Vel Til Loftarasa; Untitled #1 (aka Vaka).

'Echoes of Forgotten Places' DVD

As much as I love looking at urban exploration photo books, I dislike watching urban exploration videos. Or, to put it more succinctly, I anticipate disliking urban exploration videos. Often, the take that I want isn't on the video or DVD (for example, sometimes I'd like for the shot to start with the viewer approaching the building or structure, and the entrance would also be part of the segment as well) and other times, the lack of thoroughness is palpable. I don't experience these shortcomings in still photography related to urban exploration, mostly because I think of the medium as simply showing "snapshots of time".

Echoes of Forgotten Places is an intellectual love letter to urban exploration. The 43-minute DVD has none of the shortcomings listed above, because it doesn't try to recreate the joy of urban exploration firsthand. Rather, it serves as a great introduction of UE, an UE 101, if you will.

There are six chapters, each with a general-sounding title: Forgotten Places, The Record Keepers, Themes and Variations, Places of Work, To Bear Witness, and Endings and Beginnings. Footage of abandoned sites co-mingle with historical black and white film of factory work, modern color film of factory work, and interview segments with urban explorers as viewed on a television screen located in an abandoned site. Many scenes show a person walking around or taking photos as he walks from room to room. There is a lack of exploitation ("Let's talk to the oddballs who like exploring abandoned buildings!"), a rarity in most print articles written on the topic. Even the topic of ethics is addressed directly through interviews with several explorers.

There is a strong message presented, an ode to an industrial time of the past, and a respect for the abandoned sites and slap on society's wrist for not using the sites for current uses respectful of the buildings' history and aesthetics. ("We bury the evidence and build on top of it." "...saddest, most profound places I have ever explored") A historical context is provided but not really expanded upon.

I really appreciated the statement "Being undergound in a place like this tends to focus your attention rather than let your mind wander." This idea is really intriguing and important to me.

Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins provides the score, and Leesa Beales plays solo piano. The music is thoughtful and evocative, unlike the horror film music that could accompany the work.

The American-centric 1936 steel industry PR film Steel: A Symphony of Industry is one of the bonus features. (Note that this film is in public domain and can be accessed and viewed here via the Internet Archive.)

The second DVD extra is the "more typical" inclusion of an image gallery, this one including the work of 8 artists from around the world.

Urban explorers might find this video to be too much of a survey to be of much interest, but I highly recommend it for the UE novice or as an overall documentary. International urban explorers might get a kick out of identifying the unidentified places both in the doc and in the image gallery.