Have you hiked it?
Cool family history too!
Hah, there’s so much derelict stuff around here, I forget about it. Here’s an abandoned airfield I drive past every week
Growing up in NE Ohio, my family would often take weekend trips exploring the countryside. There is abandoned infrastructure everywhere! But most of it is either wooded or tilled over at this point.
Railway grades are the easiest to pick out. The interurbans went everywhere at one point. (It’s a shame that all the time and money spent on them was wasted.)
There are many old family and church cemetaries, mostly forgotten. Sometimes you can find the outline of a building’s foundation nearby, presumably a church. Have to be respectiveful when walking around these, since the locals can be very protective (presumably against gravestone vandals). It’s exciting to find the graves of ancestors and other ancient relatives.
Going into more traditional archaelogy, Indians mounds can be found throughout Ohio. Look for series of large conical humps in a field, especially along hill tops. While its impossible to be certain of origin without intrusive digging, I’ve seen enough verified mounds to make reasonable guesses.
I get a certain “nostalgia” when walking through areas where people lived long ago.
Great thread. Hey Eurodopers, do these pictures seem to reflect a particularly American phenomenon, or do you have abandoned highways and amusement parks everywhere also?
Some more stuff:
A lot of valuable space in New York City is taken up by the ruins of Floyd Bennett Field. Its massive hangars are pretty close to the main road. You can keep driving south over the bridge and walk around Fort Tilden, and see some massive concrete structures that used to hold enormous long-range guns. Just across the bay in Sandy Hook, NJ, you can find similar structures at Gunnison Beach. (But if you Google “Sandy Hook” and “gunnison” you’ll get a lot of sites about the nude beach that’s there now.)
The Catskill Mountains are chock-full of abandoned hotels, from tiny little clapboard cottages to magestic old hulks like the Concord and the Overlook Mountain House.
we don’t get many structures just abandoned here; land is scarcer and they will usually be demolished and built on again.
Many wartime airfields can still be traced out; a few look like they did when the last trucks pulled out of the gate but many more have changed out of all recognition.
Did ya not see my posts? 
In seriousness…early American interstates could simply be abandoned, in the examples given. In Europe, a road’s role as a long-distance route may be superceded by new construction, but the road doesn’t fall out of use, because it’s still serving the local population. Look at my earlier post about the road I live on - until the 1980s, this was the trunk route through this part of the county, dating back many centuries. A bypass being built didn’t remove the need for this road to exist.
Railways - plenty of them lie abandoned. I can supply a few more photos to demonstrate, if I remember to take them when I pass by particular locations later this week.
The difference may be what particular items get abandoned. American forts may have become redundant long ago, but British coastal defences have had a very real role far more recently. Our military relics are cold war ones, instead. And as for amusement parks…I can’t think of any comparable examples, but I’ll keep thinking.
Thanks.
I have hiked the entire canal length in partial walks. I normaly don’t go on the part from the Wisconsin to the railroad bridge. I’ve walked as far as to Governbend county park, from the Canal and Fox River junction. I’ve canoed from the canal to my former rental home on Buffalo Lake. I had a nieghbor that lived in Portage for about eighty years. He immigrated at about ten with I think 13 brothers and sisters. He was here for the hill that Fort Winebago was on getting cut through for highway 33, and the straightening of the fox for where the 33 bridge crosses the Fox. It was straightened for the old sewer plant about a block up the river. The large cut stones that comprised the poultry building, were used to keep the river from eroding the bank along the wayside located by the old fort.
He knew a lot of Portage’s history, and he had a great accent. He had a coat of arms hanging on a post in his front yard.
We have a marker somewheres on EE for a horse, and I haven’t looked for it in years. Older people seem to know about the horse, but nobody can say who burried it and why it has a marker by the road.
To go along with the other couple of abandoned subway examples, Cincinnati has several miles of abandoned (never completed) subway tunnels. They were part of a rapid transit loop whose funding ran out before completion; construction ended in 1925. Much of the surface portion of the loop is now occupied by I-75 and another highway, and the underground portions are still maintained because they support a street and also because there is still a chance that the tunnels may one day be used.
This guy has a lot of information on it.
I thought they were only found in Cleveland, and Cincinnati during interleague play.
Ba-dump bump.
I’ve heard that if you go down to the basements of the buildings nearest to and facing the Embarcadero, you can tell when the tides come in.
Isn’t it Seattle that has some buildings that sank in an earthquake, so they rebuilt the front facades one story higher, so now these buildings have front doors that open up onto an underground street?
One famous British railway example: the Monsal Viaduct, now part of a popular walking route through the Peak District.
They didn’t sink in an earthquake. The business district was regraded so that the street level on some blocks was raised one story and some hills (e.g., Denny Hill) were eliminated. Some of the old stores are part of an “Underground Seattle” tour.
Absolutely fascinating. I’d never heard of this one before. Thanks
Back when my sister and brother-in-law used to live in Streeterville (I think that’s how it is spelled) in Chicago, I noticed an entire abandoned VA hospital in the neighbourhood. I’m not certain if it’s entirely shut down but there never seems to be anyone going in and out of it-the windows are broken etc. etc… It’s a huge building, too, and I remember it as having a gated parkish yard or something. About a year after she got there, Northwestern Med started building a huge Women’s Hospital a few blocks away from the VA hospital. I still wonder why they didn’t just buy out the old building and refurbish it.
And, for a significant portion of the project, they simply imported mining water cannons and flushed the tops of the hills down, so the doors on the original levels (and the basement–now sub-basement–windows and coal chutes) were simply blocked with mud if the owners did not erect barriers/cofferdams in front of their buildings before the grading took place. (I do not know that water cannon were used to fill the area around Pioneer Square, but the same level of simple brute earth moving achieved much the same result.)
The various “regrades” in Seattle took place over a number of years, beginning before the fire of 1889 and extending to the 1920s. Different buildings that were spared from the fire or that were built after the regrade was completed or that were built when the regrade had been planned, but before it could be executed, all have different prospects. For example, after the fire, but before the regrade could be implemented, several land owners rushed to get their buildings up so that they could begin renting space, again. However, knowing that the regrade was coming, they actually built their ornate main entrances above the ground floor, emptying into space at the point where the street would eventually wind up, while building very modest entrances where they knew that the entrance would eventually face shoring or a cofferdam.
That’s about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. . . made up or not. Thanks for the link!
There are still a lot of railroad tracks running through Underground Atlanta - when I worked on the New Georgia Railroad our Depot was down there. The current incarnation of Underground Atlanta is somewhat smaller that the one that existed back in the '70’s, if I recall correctly. We were never tempted to do any exploring down there because we had a hard enough time keeping the winos and the vandals off the train without going into their territory. Some of the areas down there (we would be sitting on a siding waiting to get on the mainline and everyone got precidence over us) were very spooky looking.
Not exactly. Apparently, the plan was to connect Newmarket and Aurora with Lake Simcoe, which meant that the Newmarket canal traffic could connect to the Trent, if it was willing to go across the lake.
Really quite an interesting spot to visit, Sunspace, if you’re ever inclined. I’ve been there once, and my wife and I spent a nice summer afternoon just wandering around and exploring through the old locks.
Some pictures of Underground Seattle are on the Wikipedia page.
Just happened across this blog. If you go to the end of the June 16th entry, there are tons of links to sites about abandoned stuff. Lots of old asylums.
Back in my parent’s town you can see the remnants of the old Strabane canal. The story goes that the canal basin car park was built on the old canal basin (funnily enough) that was filled in when too many people thought it roadway on calm dark nights and drove straight into it.
And when the railway lines that once straddled Northern Ireland shrank to a route along the North Coast and around Belfast, all that was left were some raised areas where the track used to lie and some old bridges.
But nothing like abandoned highways and amusment parks