Van Dorn Don't

When the sun started to get brighter and brighter, we headed for the dark and cool places.

For a while we were safe in the manufacturing caves. The shadows were dirty, but they didn't burn your eyeballs out, or give you melanoma, or make you look like your skin was made of hot dogs.

We stayed away from the edges of the building, which seemed to get edgier and edgier with every passing day.

Eventually we noticed our cave was castling, our castle was caving in. We retreated into other, more interior rooms. The light took over more and more territory, an invading photon army, but we couldn't do anything about it. There wasn't a lot to patch the holes up with. The once nice and cool concrete steamed , and we blockaded doors. We were stuck in the center of a burning piece of paper.

We realized we were definitely, for sure losing. We sort of gave up. It was only a matter of time before the tar of the roof completely melted away. The sunlight pooled like lava lakes around us.

Even the steel walls started to get little deadly holes in them. They might as well have been made of sandstone or salt. Stupid metal walls. Stupid rust.

We sat in the middle of tinderblock floors, and stared at the crumbling glass and mortar above us. We sweat silently. We took off our clothes and pressed our burning skin to the non-sunny parts of the floor. We fanned each other with old user manuals.

I went to the very center of the machine, to the Brain. And I asked the Brain why the ceiling and walls were abandoning us, leaving us as refugees in the brightening gloom. Why was the machine falling apart? How could we put it back together? The Brain said nothing. It never said anything. It was solid and metal too, magical and floaty, but it knew it's time was coming, even if that time came way after ours. It didn't concern itself with soft little fleshies living in its corners. I threw shards of floor metal at it, chips of concrete, old pens and chairs. I spit my very last piece of gum in the whole world at it, which stuck on it's stupid shiny belly. Then we sat down in its shadow, which was the darkest place, and waited.

More Van Dorn pics can be seen here.
The End.

Warner Swasey Had a Baby, and They Named It Rock and Roll. Or Spacewatch.

Warner & Swasey sittin in a tree
K I S S I N G
First comes love, then comes marriage
Then comes a telescope that can see into the dark folds and crevices of the universe
Also your soul.

You tell me what had more imagination: Democracy or the invention of the telescope. In this building, they built things that let you look into the stars. In this building, they carefully crafted glass, bending it in just the most precise way as to allow you to magnify light coming from billions of years ago, to feed it into your eye and convert that starlight into electrical impulses that will live on in the hallways of your neurons until you die.

And now all that's left of the Light Farmers are some reams of insulation, a few old filing monsters, and a very very sturdy building of concrete and steel and brick. They built this factory to last beyond them. Good solid poured reinforced concrete, with the shells of wood floors curling off them like dried glue.

This is a building that gets friendlier and friendlier as you get to know it. It's starts off terrifying, walking into a pitch black hole, into a pitch black loading dock. But as you make the decision to go up the stairs (well, you make your friend go first), your excitement grows with the level of light. There are giant vistas all around you of Cleveland, out of every punched out window a new source of smiles. Trains and industry, churches, the ice cream factory, Downtown, other abandoned warehouses in the distance and far far away maybe more smoke stacks.

The metal roofs are laid out in front of you like puzzles, hangers for giant diesel trucks, hauling shipments of sand to be burned into glass. The vent stacks stand like soldiers, lookouts at attention. You search recklessly through the rooms looking for industry, and finally brave being spotted to explore across the empty concrete dance floor, to find the place where the chemicals used to be. The staid, inherently useful machinery filled with intriguing switches and burnt out lights. You can hit as many buttons as you want now, but the machinery would be offended.

Parts of this building are begging for people. Other parts, in their hurt and rejection, are laying themselves open like a girl who likes her boyfriend to hit her.

The graffiti should get up off the wall at night, and have parties, where they decide important issues like our mayoral primary, and healthcare. The graffiti knows whats up, America. It scoffs at you. It says "no pet squid here mother, we don't stand for that kind."

If someone were smart and had more money than me, they would buy this telescope factory and turn it into a looking glass.

They would lead groups onto the roof and force people to see the relationship between cities and those model train sets their uncle was really into. They would make them stare at the street below until they understood the flow of traffic and the fragile timing of it. People would come away inspired to spend their lives always at least 5 stories in the air, counting boxcars and viewpoints. They would start kite factories, and commercial space travel, and hot air balloon tours.



more pics here.

Westinghouse: They used to make lamps? Or chairs. Whatever.

When you start to actively search daily for places to trespass, it becomes clear pretty quickly that there are certain places everyone has gone to. These are like the novice levels, the wading pools of decaying civic gawkery. Westinghouse, for instance, will come up on everyone's Flickr page. It's like, the easiest place in the world to get into to. There's like, big open loading docks and no doors.

What the hell, I'm a novice. J. and I were going to try to get into this recently boarded up middle school first, but the only entrance was between some bars, walking a narrow ledge, then down a scary looking ladder, between some broken glass, into the pitch black basement. That would be what I would call intermediate level. I might have made the leap if I was wearing long sleeves and boots. But for now, maybe next time. For now I'll stick to the obviously open.

I love walking in these places. I feel like, with all this other stupid horrible crap going on in the outside world, nothing is going to touch me here. Except maybe a hobo. And I'll shank them if they try. It's so quiet and still. I mean, they are ruins. People go visit ruins all over the world. People pay lots of money to stare at buildings left behind. That particular sense of history you get from being in and around disuse and abandon, it's better than valium. I calm down instantly, but my heart also starts to race. J. called it "afterglow".




Architecture is marvelous to me, all exoskeleton and steel. The bones of the structure that poke out as the soft stone starts to peel away. And rust. Rust is amazing. I feel like if I get it on my body, it will eat me away too. It's looking to kill me with every step I make, I'm being hunted, I have to be careful. The rust is all around, a predatory fungus, winning. I'm the stupid bumbling thing in its lair.


And its great to run across good graffiti. Funny graffiti. It's a flag in the alien landscape. It reminds you to be braver. It's an important reminder to get every once in a while.


More photos can be found here.