I did all of this work on a blog, just to ignore it. I’ll add some stuff soon.
Uncategorized
11
Jan 10
Dancing in the Ruins
Dancing in the Ruins
Know your city. Know it beyond maps and neighborhoods and good restaurants, your favorite bar, blue lights, your kid’s school, the good and bad parts of town. Know its ghosts.
This isn’t too much to ask. Not just in Baltimore, but everywhere, people stay too pocketed off, sealed in cars, afraid of neighborhoods they don’t know. Just the difference in viewing a street from foot as opposed to a car, or even bicycle, is amazing. New buildings pop up, architectural quirks materialize in the streetscape, the scene changes.
Urban exploration, in its classic sense, sounds like a game of dares. Associated with sneaking/breaking into abandoned buildings, onto old hospital campuses or military bases, or descending into black slime-coated old sewers or subway passages, it comes off as more of a sport than casual touring. But at the root of even the most extreme varieties is appreciation for a city’s forgotten and shuttered urban spaces–its history, in a sense. In other words, it’s more than just purposeful trespassing.
Baltimore has long been a hotbed for that kind of urban exploring. An aged industrial burg, the city’s full of fenced off, shuttered, and mostly forgotten old factories and mills full of rusted through old machinery and other relics, although fewer and fewer than in the past. After a leveling process that took years, the Westport power generating station, once the largest of its kind in the country and a filming location for 12 Monkeys, died with a whimper in late 2007, leaving a barren platform between the Middle Branch the Patapsco River and some light rail tracks slated for upscale condominiums. Within the city limits, the massive building–full of regal arches, massive iron doors, dated generator equipment, and graffiti–was sort of the grand high temple of local urban exploring.
Many of the other popular targets of explorers are in rubble now, too. The Seton Institute, a former mental hospital for abusive priests in the Reistertown area, is mostly gone. The “hell house,” outside of Ellicott City, has been likewise razed, as is the Carr Lowery Glass Company, also in Westport. Still, these places lured the thrill-seeking kind of explorer. And you don’t have to trespass to appreciate old architecture. Continue reading →