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Category / Abandoned

Ruins of Detroit: Before & After

I keep coming back to Detroit. It’s bizarre how photogenic the downfall of America’s industrial powerhouse can be. However there’s an eerie and unwanted sense of responsibility to be felt when looking through these before & after photographs of Detroit taken in 1973 and 2010 by the same photographer, Dave Jordano. I could browse through endless…

Snooping Around Manhattan’s Abandoned Art Deco Bank

Wander around Lower Manhattan you’ll find perhaps the most beautiful doors in the whole city. Curved and ornately designed in silver and bronze, they are adorned with panels depicting methods of transportation from the golden age of travel: luxury steamships, fleets of sleek aircraft, hot air balloons and grand railroads. Most of the passersby that…

Wandering Through the Oldest (and Emptiest) Hospital in Paris

Notre Dame has a very unusual neighbour that no one ever visits. If you’re facing the cathedral’s famous facade, surrounded by a sea of tourists and selfie-sticks, turn to your left and spot the blue door behind the chestnut trees, marked “Entrée“. And enter you must! This blue portal opens up to the Hôtel Dieu, Paris’…

The Ghost Town left Behind by an American Sect of Hollow Earth Believers

In the once harsh and bug-infested swamplands of southwest Florida, lies the remains of a strange 19th century settlement. Founded by a charismatic leader who led his members into the quagmire to build a “New Jerusalem” and seek immortality through celibacy, the commune revolved around the belief not that the earth was flat, but hollow…

A Beginner’s Guide to Italian Ghost Towns Selling Houses for €1

It’s been a rough few years, but it’s also been a time for re-evaluating our lives and dreaming “out of the box”. Back in 2015, we caught wind of the first Italian towns to adopt the appealing concept of giving away or selling abandoned houses for the symbolic price of 1 euro, in a bid to…

Hitchhiking By Train To Amtrak’s Ghost Town

“Are you sure you want to get off here?,” asks the train conductor, and with good reason: for it is nighttime at Amtrak’s least used railway station. Indeed, Thurmond, West Virginia is so remote and rarely used, that it is a request stop on America’s nation rail network: not only do you have to ask…

Weekend at Wallis & Edward’s Secret French Cottage

For the man who gave up the throne of England to be with the women he loved, living in seclusion became a life sentence. Exiled from England to avoid stirring up trouble for the Royal Family, Edward and his American wife settled in Paris and lived in the beautiful Chateau Le Bois, which became better known…

For over 40 Years, This Guy Photographed the Same Buildings as he Watched them Decline

We all see familiar buildings in our neighbourhoods change over the years, but what if you photographed them from the exact same spot, documenting them over a time span of over four decades? That’s exactly what Chilean-born photographer Camilo José Vergara did. Focusing on the poorest and most segregated communities in urban America, Camilo returned…

Abandoned French Countryside Village Sold for the Price of a small Parisian Flat

It boasts 19 buildings with traditional French features, including a swimming pool, tennis court, stables, a chapel, village hall and acres of land, but only had an asking price of 330,000 Euros. At such an outlandish price, the abandoned hamlet of Courbefy soon caught the attention of the international media, interest sky-rocketed and gave the…

PHANTOMS of PARIS: The Midnight Wanderers

We all have it; that itch for exploring, to discover what’s behind the closed doors of our cities, under our feet and overhead. Urban environments hide buried secrets of the past all around us and if curious enough, we can find them. For a while now, I’ve been following the online imprint of a small…

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