The Scranton Lace factory operated from 1890 to 2002 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Despite being added to the National Register of Historic Places, it was demolished in 2018, because as we’ve learned before, that resister means fuck all. This is just a gallery post, for more history (and better photos) go to Abandoned America.
To support my work and see new comics, go here. To buy books, original artwork, merch, and more, visit my website store. Follow me on instagram.
Willard State Hospital was an asylum in Willard, New York that operated from 1870-1995. Currently, some of the buildings house a residential drug treatment program, but many have been left abandoned. There have been many efforts to preserve the memory of Willard and its patients, so instead of writing up a history, allow me to direct you to the book The Lives They Left Behind, as well as this amazingly comprehensive PDF of the history of Willard, and a genealogy resource, The Inmates of Willard.
Please note that the photos in this post are (as of 2022) a decade old. The buildings, which were already collapsing in on themselves, are in much worse condition now.
I sell photography prints of Willard and some of the items salvaged from the now collapsed buildings in my online shop.
To support my work and see new comics, go here. To buy photography prints, books, original artwork, merch, and more, visit my website store. Follow me on instagram.
Note- this is a photo gallery post with only minimal historical info provided (unlike my longer posts) For more context, visit After the Final Curtain or Cinema Treasures.
Loew’s State Palace Theatre opened on Canal Street in New Orleans in 1926. Over the decades it saw a number of changes, such as being divided into three separate screening rooms, being temporarily closed due to damage by Hurricane Katrina, and becoming a concern hall in its later years before closing permanently in 2007 due to fire code violations. Demolition plans were made and scrapped, and the theater still sits vacant as of 2022. (The photos in this post are from 2015, unless otherwise noted.)
Disclaimer: If any information is incorrect, if you have more info, or if you’d just like to tell me something, feel free to contact me.
To support my work and see new comics, go here. To buy books, original artwork, merch, and more, visit my website store. Follow me on instagram.
Note- this is a photo gallery post with only minimal historical info provided (unlike my longer posts) For more context, visit the NYT.
St. Paul’s School was built in 1879 and operated as a boy’s school until its closure in 1991, due to bankruptcy. Visit Preservation Long Island for the latest renovation plans.
Disclaimer: If any information is incorrect, if you have more info, or if you’d just like to tell me something, feel free to contact me.
To support my work and see new comics, go here. To buy books, original artwork, merch, and more, visit my website store. Follow me on instagram.
If you used to read this blog, please forgive my nearly seven-year absence. I left NYC, (I did the bulk of my exploring on the east coast) moved home to California, and had a kid in 2020. Exploring abandoned places was sidelined, but I’ve managed to get out there a little in the past few years and I’d like to start posting again. I still have a backlog of dozens of places I haven’t posted, but, well, none of it really matters so here’s a quick little place I went to in 2021, with my partner and kid in tow.
TEPCO beach on Point Isabel in Richmond, California is the west coast’s equivalent of Bottle Beach in Brooklyn, although it pales in comparison to Bottle Beach in many ways. To access Bottle Beach, you must navigate a labyrinth of often overgrown pathways; to access TEPCO, you just park behind a Costco. Bottle beach is filled with all kinds of trash from the turn of the century; TEPCO has only broken dinnerware.
TEPCO is not actually the name of the beach, it’s the name of the ceramics factory that used the beach as a dumping ground for its broken or chipped plates, bowls, cups, etc. The factory (The Technical Porcelain and Chinaware Company) operated from 1930 to 1968 when it closed after a kiln fire. Located in nearby El Cerrito, it was once the largest employer in that town.
Side note: in 2005, artist Casey O’Connor threw thousands of porcelain buddha heads into the American River in Colfax, a two-hour drive from Point Isabell. For a few years, it was common to hear about people finding some of the heads at TEPCO beach.
While TEPCO dinnerware itself isn’t intrinsically worth much, a lot of people do collect it.
There isn’t all that much to explore at TEPCO beach, but it’s fun to poke around and try to find pieces that still say TEPCO on the bottom, and on a clear day you can see the Golden Gate Bridge.
r_leontiev on flickr has an amazing gallery of old TEPCO photos.
Disclaimer: If any information is incorrect, if you have more info, or if you’d just like to tell me something, feel free to contact me.
To support my work and see new comics, go here. To buy books, original artwork, merch, and more, visit my website store. Follow me on instagram.
Although trespassing and other legally dubious methods of accessing abandoned places are half the fun of exploring, it’s a welcomed relief when I occasionally have permission to be in said places. Earlier this summer, my friend Matt Lambros and I got permission to photograph the Paramount Theatre during the last leg of our road trip through the south. I never get tired of exploring, but I do get accustomed to it, which is why I expected the Paramount to be similar to the other southern theaters we’d seen prior to our arrival in Marshall, Texas.
Around 9am, we met up with the owner of the theater, who cautioned us about the state of decay the theater was in but let us shoot wherever we wanted. Structurally, the theater was similar to the previous ones -dilapidated balcony, dark stage, crumbling box seats- but the sunlight streaming in through holes in the roof was really spectacular.
The ceiling gets its blue color from being a simulated night sky. During operational years, when the lights were turned on behind the ceiling, twinkling stars appeared. There weren’t many of these ceilings at the time, and nowadays you mostly see them in shitty, bottle service type nightclubs. There is a working star ceiling at the Tabernacle of Prayer in Queens, NY, which used to be Loew’s Valencia Movie Palace. I’ve seen the church’s working star ceiling in person, and I gotta admit, it’s pretty delightful.
Spencer told us he purchased the theater in the 80s with the intention of turning it into a choir performance space. In the mean time, he used the theater as a recording studio and even turned the projection room into a makeshift apartment for himself.
Texas is part of the Bible Belt, so a choir performance space was viable plan, but it never came to fruition and Spencer eventually moved out and closed the building. He left behind a vast collection of instruments and recording equipment, as well as old movie paraphernalia and props from the building’s short stint as a country western dance hall.
Like many places in the south, the history of the Paramount is one of egregious racism. Opening in 1930, the theater had segregated bathrooms and the balcony was black only seating. There were two entrances, the front being the white entrance while the side doors around the corner served as the black entrance.
screenshot of back entrance c/o Google Maps
The ‘black entrance/exit’ on the balcony.
The theater played an influential role in the founding of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942. James Farmer, co-founder of CORE and patron of the Paramount, cited the theater’s “offending side entrance” as one of the motivations for the movement.
Paramount Theatre, date unknown, c/o www.allacrosstexas.com
Beyond the theater, the town of Marshall was “the epicenter of [the Civil Rights Movement] in Texas.” On March 26th 1960, thirteen black college students conducted a sit-in at the whites only lunch counter at Woolworth’s. They were told the counter was closed, and repeated attempts of more sit-ins garnered the same response.
Students at Woolworth’s in 1960. Photo c/o www.marshallnewsmessenger.com
As racial tension increased in Marshall, some protests turned violent and dozens of black citizens were arrested for unlawful assembly. During this time, many businesses, rather than deal with the issue of segregation, simply closed up shop. Supposedly, the Woolworth’s in now a bar.
When Spencer acquired the theater in the 1980s, the seats had been removed and the front area turned into a dance floor for the dinner theater. Spencer, inspired by the acoustics of the room, used the space as a recording studio for many years. The decline of the recording industry and the economy eventually forced him to close the theater for good. As of June 2013, it was still on the market.
Water damage and the crumbling ceiling and walls made the box seats inaccessible and a bit of ceiling plaster fell while we were taking photos from the balcony. Matt takes forfuckingever to photograph theaters on account of being all “professional” about it, whatever that is, but it works out because my thing is taking forever to look through the piles of junk.
These amazing, hand-painted movie posters lined the dark hall to the main room of the theater. Unfortunately, the owner wasn’t willing to part with anything, including an original Gone With the Wind poster that’s just collecting dust.
Considering the state of the rest of the building, I’m surprised at the near-perfect condition of this statue and facade. By this point, the owner had left us to our own devices so I couldn’t pester him with questions so I don’t know when this was added to the theater.
A shot of the “blacks only” balcony from the main floor, with the racist side entrance on the right.
While waiting for Matt, the owner told me an amusing ghost story that was told to him by a visiting psychic (of which he was skeptical) about the disgruntled ghost of a man who was shot and killed on the main floor. Supposedly his name was Herman. HERMAN! That is the least menacing name for a ghost that never was.
To see more photos, go to the Paramount Theatre Flickr set
History source: The Texas Historical Commission
Disclaimer: If any information is incorrect, if you have more info, or if you’d just like to tell me something, feel free to contact me.
To support my work and see new comics, go here. To buy books, original artwork, merch, and more, visit my website store. Follow me on instagram.
Essex County Hospital was a psychiatric hospital in Cedar Grove, New Jersey. It was demolished and replaced with condos and a park in 2017. It began in 1896 as an overflow for Newwark Hospital but was converted into a mental institution in the 1920s. I’m not delving into more history here, but I will say that Essex was a site a lot of urban explorers derided, but I loved it. However, during one of my trips there, I almost get beamed in the face by a brick being wielded by a scared teenager, which made me stop and wonder why I was in my thirties and dicking around in an asylum basement, but hey, to each his own.
I have photography prints and salvaged items from Essex for sale on my main website store.
Disclaimer #1: All current photos (1998-2018) were taken by me, Julia Wertz. I’ve been photographing the Napa Soda Springs ruins since I was in high school. Many of these photos appear before and after a fire in 2007, as well as the devastating Atlas Fire of 2017. All historical images are from common-use postcard images, the Napa Library, and the Napa Historical Society. All timeline quotes are from Wine Merchant. See the end of the post for direct links. Please do not reproduce any of these images without permission from myself or the proper outlet.
Disclaimer #2: as of late 2019, this property is now for sale! There is a popular article circulating about the sale, but I won’t link here because the original reporter of the piece stole my photos and cropped out my watermark. The article and photos were then sold to a number of other newspapers. After I called it out, I was credited in a few of the papers, but not all of them, and sent a paltry usage fee. The dumbest part of all of this is if the reporter had just asked me, I would have let them use the photos for free.
As teenagers growing up in Napa, one of our favorite pastimes was sneaking up to what we called “the Castle” on the east side of the valley hills. No one knew much about the ruins, which were (and still are) on private property. It wasn’t until over a decade after high school when I decided to do some research and discovered Castle was actually the Napa Soda Springs- a fancy resort/spa/hotel -as well as the home of Napa Soda Water and Jackson’s Napa Soda, which were bottled at the source.
Brochure from 1930
According to the Western History Project, beginning in 1856, “the Napa Soda Springs resort hosted the elites of San Francisco and beyond… Situated above…the eastern hills, it presented a Victorian world at its most pleasant. It remains now as forest-covered ruins, as obscure as its history. Though a common feature of documents and books of the time, more modern writers of California histories seem oblivious of the once-famous Napa Soda Springs resort. It might well have never existed.”
Napa Soda Springs from afar in 1888
It’s strange to have gone there so often without knowing its history, especially considering how I now try to learn as much as I can about a location’s history before I explore it. But as teenagers, we were afraid to ask for details for fear of getting caught. Also, it was the late 90s, so “google it” wasn’t a thing quite yet. I knew its history was known to a few people in town, as I once heard a group of diners talking about it at the restaurant where I worked in early 2000. However, when I mentioned that I’d been there, I was met with four horrified faces, and one of them said, “and just exactly how did you get on the property? We know the owner…” so I mumbled something unintelligible and scampered off to hide in the dish pit until they left.
Tower House & Bottling Works in early 1900’s
the Tower House & Bottling Works in 2017
the Tower House & Bottling Works in 2017, post-Altas fire
Before it was a hotel, the Soda Springs area had 27 different mineral springs that were used by the Wappo, Napa’s native Americans. The mineral springs were “discovered” (aka stolen) in 1837. Around 1856, San Francisco lawyer Eugene Sullivan acquired the land and had Chinese laborers build a resort hotel. Public records noted that “on July 21st, 1856 W. Allen (the man who ran the resort) writes to tell Sullivan that this is the first day he’s officially opened the bar and dining room; they take in $93. The only complaints, he says, concern the inferior cigars. Allen requests a better brand.” Unfortunately, in that same year, the hotel burned down, which was the first of many fires the property would endure over the next two centuries.
the “Clubhouse” (date unknown)
the Clubhouse in 2017 after the Atlas fire
Around 1860, the Napa Soda Water bottling company was established, using the natural mineral springs to make their water. There was a flurry of lawsuits regarding the property, and in 1861, an attack on the workers at the springs led to the destruction of the bottling building. Shortly after, “masked men set afire the bottling works” as part of a property dispute. The bottling company was quickly rebuilt.
The bottling company continued to run while a new resort hotel was constructed. Then, “on April 21st, 1877, a Saturday night ball introduced the just completed Rotunda.” Complete with a band and “upper class” dinner, it opened with 75 elite couples in attendance.
The Rotunda in 1907
The rotunda in 2019 pre-Atlas fire but after a smaller fire in 2011
the rotunda in 2017, right after the Atlas fire
The rotunda in 1999. One of the few actual film photos I developed in the darkroom at my school.
the Rotunda in 2013
The Rotunda in 2019
The Rotunda in 2017 post-Atlas fire
The Rotunda in 2017 post-Atlas Fire
The Rotunda from the back in the late 1800s
The Rotunda from the back in 2019
In 1881, the resort opened and in January 1886, “The Napa County Reporter reports that the springs will now be open year-round. It goes on to say that it’s a great stimulant to the local economy, and what’s good for Napa Soda Springs resort is good for Napa. It notes that the previous June, the resort spent $1000 on meat alone.”
Side note: The Napa County Reporter is still around in its current form- the Napa Register- and, coincidentally, my ma is married to the paper’s city editor. Second side note: The only other Napa resident who seems to have taken an interest in the history of the resort, and even wrote the book called The Haunting of Napa Soda Springs, was my college professor Lauren Coodley. She is also the mother of one of my friends from grade school through high school. He even accompanied me a few times to the castle, but I wasn’t privy to this information at the time. (Actually, it’s entirely possible that I was, but we used to smoke weed up there, so it’s understandable that I’d have forgotten.)
This dated keystone corresponds with the year a new bottling building was erected, but the property had been operational since 1856.
Lemon Spring in early 1900’s
Lemon Spring in 2011
Lemon Spring in 2011
Lemon Spring in 2017 post-Atlas Fire
In 1895 “The Napa Register (previously the Napa County Reporter) reports the wonders occurring at the springs. It suggests that the tallest century plant ever known in California is blooming…almost reaching 40 feet in height, and the bottling plant is shipping two million bottles annually.” That century plant was the stuff of lore to us in high school. Rumors circulated that it was a rare plant that only bloomed once a century. In truth, century plants are incredibly common and they bloom once in their lifetime, which is anywhere from 10-30 years. The property is full of them.
Jackson, of Jackson’s Napa Soda
Jackson’s soda bottles can still be found amongst the ruins
Bits of soda bottle that have washed down into the creek at the bottom of the hill
The soda bottles were dumped over the side of the hill and covered, but subsequent fires and storms have uncovered the remaining debris
In 1889, “The Napa Register reports Jackson’s new residence–Bellvue–is almost done.”
Bellevue in 1855. (None of Bellvue remains today.
This structure (which has been cited as a residence, the servants quarters, and stable) is gone…
…however this is the mountain that appears behind it, now half covered in vineyards.
the “road of a thousand wonders” in late 1800s
the “road of a thousand wonders” in 2013
Two more fires went through the area, totaling, as far as I can dig up from reports, four fires during operational times. After a fire in the 1960s, the resort and bottling plants were finally abandoned.
The property had two sets of main gates. One was (and still is) at the base of the property off Soda Canyon Road (as shown below) and the other gate was (and still is) off Soda Springs Road.
Soda Canyon Road gates, undated photo
Soda Canyon Road gates in 2019
Soda Springs Road gates, in 2017 after the Atlas fire
View of bottling works & the Rotunda circa early 1900’s
the Rotunda in 2017
In the years after abandonment, multiple fires went through the area, the worst being the devastating 2017 Atlas fire. As of 2019, the property and the ruins are for sale.
The Pagoda (above) was a spring/fountain that appeared on the front of the Spring’s brochure (the 3rd photo in this piece.) In the 1960s, after the resort was abandoned, an unknown photographer took photos of the Pagoda’s collapse (below.)
What remains of the Pagoda in 2017, post Atlas fire.
Sometime after the Atlas fire in 2017, this statue appeared on the grounds, wrapped in a blue tarp.
Without any official information, I’d like to think it was uncovered during the fire, which cleared the grounds substantially. The forest around the ruins had been thick for years, despite other fires on the grounds. But the Atlas fire was part of the devastating Northern California wildfires in Napa and Sonoma Counties of November 2017 that killed 46 people. The Atlas fire burned all the trees and vegetation around the Soda Springs.
In the aftermath of the fire, previously concealed old roads were suddenly visible, as seen below.
Although the fire devastated the grounds, it didn’t take long to see vegetation start to pop up. By 2019, grass and bushes had grown back. Some of the eucalyptus recovered, but most of the trees had to be felled and hauled away. The photo above was taken right after the fire.
inside the clubhouse
view from the Rotunda
a fountain
behind the tower & walkway
remaining springs that are still going
Sources:
Addendum: If the current owner of the property reads this, please note that I do not provide anyone with directions to the ruins. Please accept my profuse apologies for trespassing. This has been my favorite place since I was a teenager, and it’s very special to me, so one would not be remiss to call it a crime of passion. Please don’t sue me.
______
Disclaimer: If any information is incorrect, if you have more info, or if you’d just like to tell me something, feel free to contact me.
To support my work and see new comics, go here. To buy books, original artwork, merch, and more, visit my website store. Follow me on instagram.