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David Bowie Appreciation Thread

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Posts

  • PantsBPantsB Fake Thomas Jefferson Registered User regular
    edited August 2009
    Mortal Sky wrote: »
    Apparently the island of Saipan , since its economic crash a few years ago, is prime UE territory. If anyone has spare vacation time and cash, we should mount a PA expedition or some shit.

    Like, shit, apparently there's an abandoned mall.

    And de facto slavery, systematic pedophilia and forced abortions!

    Saipan = not a nice place and not a place I'd try to pull off shenanigans.

    PantsB on
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  • JAmp5JAmp5 Registered User regular
    edited August 2009
    I am a huge fan of urban exploration and loving this thread. Thought I'd contribute with some stuff that I've posted in the AC before but not as a complete series.

    A little history of the location:
    "A quarry Has been on this site since 1851 finally ceasing production in 1991 with final closure of a distribution center in 1997. The owners had no obligation to demolish the buildings or restore the landscape to its natural state, so production was simply stopped. The site now stands abandoned while officials attempt to determine its fate."

    Dubbed the cement works this place is god damn faba to take pictures in but a bit sketchy to get in to and around without being spotted, I think the place is in some kind of use all the time (mostly for dropping off huge truckloads of rubble) and seems to only be deserted and locked up tight every other Sunday. The plan is to go back on this day and get in to the main complex (which is far larger than these little control rooms). Also worthy of note is the sheer awesomeness of being a foot away from a 200ft drop. I’m not sure how sturdy the suspended walkways are but the buildings seem pretty dilapidated and when you're not choking on concrete dust you're in constant fear of being impaled on rusty paint covered metal girders.

    There is a lot of history in this place when you are shuffling through the debris (including hundreds of empty spray cans) there is even a rusted punch card machine for the start and end of your shift. More than taking pictures though I love the excitement of exploring and being somewhere you shouldn't be, I learned a valuable lesson today also that I shouldn't carry too much when I go there, I had a tripod, film SLR and 3 lenses, digital SLR, flash and 3 more lenses as well as my other kit and a film compact. Made getting around the tight spaces a real bitch. Anyways I have tonnes more to get through as well as a lot of stuff taken on film.

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    Here's the story of the days shooting (awesomely re-written by Razza from these here forums)
    I slowly moved my leaden feet up the decaying steel stairs; looking downward through the metal mesh, two floors, straight down. I inched my feet on to the dusty concrete with my senses completely on edge, my mouth open, listening for any sound other than footsteps of the person in front of me and the clink of my camera case on my hip.
    View from the top of the stairs:

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    Through a gap in the broken fabricated tile wall I see two guard dogs prowling round the site occasionally standing frozen, listening, looking, smelling.
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    As we shuffle forwards my feet disturb the inches of concrete dust and debris, it seems to me like no one has walked this way for an age, or that maybe we are the first. We notice one or two dead birds, then as our eyes attune to the murky darkness, we see more, dozens more, lying still in the gloom.
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    Creeping up the next flight of stairs avoiding the gaping holes in the floor and the missing banister rails we reach a dead end. Heavy machinery hulks across our path, blocking us, turning round we gain a better perspective on the ground below through a rent in the wall. Seeing one of the guard dogs below i line the camera up to my eye, firing the shutter. The animal’s head moves instantly looking up and straight at me, straight through me. Unnaturally freezing in this position it stares into the darkness at the people it knows are there. It was dark where we stood, barely breathing, and after a stalemate of two or three minutes the eyes of the dog moved and the pulse subsided in my ears, and the hammer in my chest slowed.

    Here's a long range shot of the dog wandering around the site. At first we had no idea what it was and who it belonged to but we stayed clear of it through the mist until we reached the buildings:
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    And a view through another hole in the wall on the third floor of the building:
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    I have many more shots of this place and many more locations which I may post in the future. Enjoy!

    JAmp5 on
  • cooljammer00cooljammer00 Hey Small Christmas-Man!Registered User regular
    edited August 2009
    I'd love to get into it, but it appears that there aren't many UE sites in NYC.

    Although they apparently found a fallout shelter in one of the bridges here. Sorta cool.

    cooljammer00 on
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  • RocketSauceRocketSauce Registered User regular
    edited August 2009
    I'd love to get into it, but it appears that there aren't many UE sites in NYC.

    Although they apparently found a fallout shelter in one of the bridges here. Sorta cool.

    Are you fucking kidding me? NYC has got to be one of the UE capitals of the world.

    RocketSauce on
  • real_pochaccoreal_pochacco Registered User regular
    edited August 2009
    I bet my girlfriend would be into doing this with me, I wonder where I could go in Portland...

    It looks like there's a group of people who meet up every month, I bet they could point me to some cool places that a noob could try.

    btw Spectre, I just read this entire thread, and I wanna know what happened with the rope ladder and exploring those tunnels

    real_pochacco on
  • TaranisTaranis Registered User regular
    edited August 2009
    I want to do this. I can't imagine doing it in Atlanta without at least having a knife on me though.

    Taranis on
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  • TehSpectreTehSpectre Registered User regular
    edited August 2009
    I bet my girlfriend would be into doing this with me, I wonder where I could go in Portland...

    It looks like there's a group of people who meet up every month, I bet they could point me to some cool places that a noob could try.

    btw Spectre, I just read this entire thread, and I wanna know what happened with the rope ladder and exploring those tunnels
    It ended up being somewhat too dangerous (no sure spot to latch the ladder to) and I also found out that the building is littered with motion detectors.

    =/

    TehSpectre on
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  • real_pochaccoreal_pochacco Registered User regular
    edited August 2009
    TehSpectre wrote: »
    I bet my girlfriend would be into doing this with me, I wonder where I could go in Portland...

    It looks like there's a group of people who meet up every month, I bet they could point me to some cool places that a noob could try.

    btw Spectre, I just read this entire thread, and I wanna know what happened with the rope ladder and exploring those tunnels
    It ended up being somewhat too dangerous (no sure spot to latch the ladder to) and I also found out that the building is littered with motion detectors.

    =/

    Damn, so now you have a rope ladder and nothing to do with it, eh?

    real_pochacco on
  • TalleyrandTalleyrand Registered User regular
    edited January 2010
    So at this point I think I've explored 6 different abandoned buildings all together. The latest one has been the most interesting by far. A friend of a friend of mine is from Kingsville, a small town a couple hours from the city that I live in, and apparently there's a burnt down old hospital in Kingsville that was being used as a storage facility at some point. Since we're all students we have a couple weeks before the next semester of classes start and decided it was the perfect time to check out this haven of exploratory goodness.

    After getting lost in one of the smallest towns ever we discovered this infamous hospital where two friends of one friend of mine were born. It's a somewhat inconspicuous old brick building sitting in the middle of a typical neighborhood. The one person in the group that's a major photo-phile had just gotten a fish-eye lens, which I apologize for, but here's a couple snaps from around the outside.
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    An area that's kind of outside and inside at the same time. Used to be inside but now, after the fire, it's outside.
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    You can notice all the old records lying around, leading us to believe that the place was a storage unit before the fire.
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    The window right behind my friend Justin was how we got into the place. One of the window panes was broken and so you could climb in over a giant pile of junk.
    19049527281951341760009.jpg w604.png

    I have a couple pictures from one of my friend's camera phone, once again, apologies for the shitty quality.

    This is one of the first views into the inside of the building. The first floor was in pretty terrible shape but for some reason some of the lights were still on.
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    Here you can see some of the strange fire damage. Gives the whole place a kind of Silent Hill feeling.
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    Parts of the second floor were in much better condition but also had a lot more locked doors meaning there was less light getting in.
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    Here's some higher quality pictures for comparison.
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    There's a lot more to talk about but I think I'll cut it off here for brevity's sake and because we plan on going out again tomorrow but this time I'll have my own camera and tripod and there'll be a couple more people accompanying us so it should be pretty interesting.

    Talleyrand on
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  • THEPAIN73THEPAIN73 Shiny. Real shiny.Registered User regular
    edited January 2010
    This is one of my favorite topics on here.

    Glad to see it revived.

    I am at work and will view your photos when I get home.

    THEPAIN73 on
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  • FalxFalx Registered User regular
    edited January 2010
    Oh man nostalgia. I still wish I could go exploring without getting murdered by crazy drug addicts.

    I checked out the shell of my old high-school's hostel that burned down, though, was quite interesting as you could clearly see the fire had started in the kitchen and spread to the bathrooms and dining room from there. Luckily the bedrooms were last as it was still occupied when the fire hit.

    Falx on
  • CycophantCycophant Registered User regular
    edited January 2010
    So I recently took a photo journey through an old abandoned gold mine and then remembered about this thread so I figured I'd share some of the photos. I brought my DSLR with me, so most of these shots are pretty detailed if you follow the links to the large photos.

    The mine had been abandoned for about 10 years after the company had gone bankrupt, and the government was still deciding how it wanted to deal with the site. I figured I'd check it out while things were still intact. I chose a Sunday morning, figuring it would be the most isolated. Unfortunately it also happened to be a morning where the temperatures hovered around -40.

    I really wished I could've gotten some better photos, including some more close-ups and shots from inside the headframe building. But these places have a lovely tendency of having deep holes all over the property covered up by a 30-yr-old piece of rotted plywood. So I was incredibly wary of where I stepped. In fact just last year someone had died in an old mine by falling through some wood into a frozen tailings pond and drowning (or succumbing to hypothermia, I can't remember). I had no desire to have this happen to me.

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    A sign near the front of the property.

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    A shot of the headframe for the mine itself, and one of the storage buildings.

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    Close up of the headframe. Those two hoist cables were still attached to two huge spools with motors.

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    The other side of the headframe building. Appears to be a loading dock for material. I wanted to get up closer, but the base of the loading dock was covered in plywood and snow, and I had no idea if the plywood was covering up a deep hole or not.

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    I thought this was some kind of bunker access, until I got up close and realized it was just a loading ramp. Oh well.

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    A shot of a small workshop, and an old 70's Ford truck that hasn't moved in years. In the distance is the processing plant, complete with a large hopper off to the left there, and a conveyor system up to the processing building on the right.

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    A closeup of that hopper and conveyor belt system. This building was pretty creepy - all sorts of old rusty equipment and tools scattered about. And the entire building shook and creaked in the wind, to the point where I thought that huge steel hopper was ready to collapse through the building at any moment. Needless to say I didn't stay long.

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    The conveyor belts led to a separate building that housed this huge drum hopper. I wish I'd included something in the photo to give a sense of scale; to give you an idea though, the bolts you see that attach those girders together were about the size of my fist.

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    The processing building that houses the drum hopper, which is hidden in the shadows inside the building at the back of the photo. I was standing in a section of the building that was stripped down to the frame. On the right hand side was a bank of old 60's-vintage electronics. I wanted some closer pictures, but again I had no idea on the condition of the floor.

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    Better view of the processing plant and stripped-down section of the building.

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    An old crew quarters building that had burned down. I'm unsure whether the fire was recent or not, but it was pretty neat to see the remnants of the building all covered with snow.

    This was around the time that I discovered that someone was squatting in one of the other old crew house buildings. It's pretty typical around here; illegal squatting happens all over the north. But since no one was home, I kept snooping around.

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    An old ambulance left on the property. There was something quite spooky about this as well, but I couldn't put my finger on what.

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    One of the old mining loaders.

    And at this point I ran off to my truck and got off the property as quickly as possible. Right after I took this shot, I looked off to where I'd noticed the old crew shacks that had been taken over as housing, to see a squatter yelling obscenities at me and shaking either a broom or a shotgun at me. Since I was cold and almost done anyway, I decided now was as good of a time as any to leave.

    Cycophant on
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  • TehSpectreTehSpectre Registered User regular
    edited November 2011
    [

    TehSpectre on
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  • PerpetualPerpetual Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    Next time someone says an abandoned building is haunted, we can just say, "Nah, it's just TehSpectre."

    Perpetual on
  • TehSpectreTehSpectre Registered User regular
    edited November 2011
    ]

    TehSpectre on
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  • VeritasVRVeritasVR Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    That place must be the fucking Shalebridge Cradle at night.

    VeritasVR on
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    Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
  • bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    I'm kind of sad that you didn't get a chance to go back tehspectre.

    bowen on
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  • Mostlyjoe13Mostlyjoe13 Evil, Evil, Jump for joy! Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    I've been debating exploring around the endless dead stripmalls here in Florida. There are some old places that are maximum creepy.

    Mostlyjoe13 on
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