Wednesday, 21 November 2012

Argus bomb site



While I was in Melbourne waiting for the train, I had time to check out the abandoned Argus building.

The Argus was Melbourne's first newspaper, an amalgamation of a number of early colonial papers including the Port Phillip Patriot and the Melbourne Advertiser.
Its readership filled a compromise between the more conservative 'Age' and the sensationalism of 'The Sun'.

The Argus newspaper was established in 1846, and with its partner The Australiasian (est 1864), was housed in the Argus building on the corner of Elizabeth and La Trobe Streets, from 1926 (the foundation stone was laid in 1924).
It closed in 1957 when sold to Keith Murdoch’s 'Herald & Weekly Times', and the building was later purchased by the Stamoulis family.

The building is an 8 storey stripped classical combination of neo-classical Beaux Arts style with Chicagoesque and Moderne influences, complete with a regal classical tower. La Trobe University purchased it for $8 million in 2004, and apparently spent $34+ million gutting the building. The building had lead-paint and was riddled with asbestos. They then sold it for $15 million in 2010 to the Melbourne Institute of Technology. MIT intend to convert the site into an educational facility.


Now a large portion of the roof and several sections of floors are missing. There is exposed reo and rusty iron beams. Water has damaged parts. Melbourne City Lord Mayor Robert Doyle declared it one of Melbourne’s “bomb sites” -said it was a building of ''historic significance, but it is deteriorating as we look at it and I want to give them the strong message that we will not tolerate the tactic of allowing a building to deteriorate to a point where you can't do anything with it''.
The building is classified by the National Trust and is on the Victorian Heritage Register.


 The Argus building is hosting the Melbourne Music Week a 9 day program of events. MMW with the Melbourne City Council have a short-term lease for a festival site of performance, dining, learning and socialising with bands, DJs, film screenings, vintage clothing stall and more.
Unfortunately most of The Argus building remains off limits, the two lower floors have been renovated to allow 400 people upstairs and 800 people downstairs in the temporary concert hall, which will host both local and international acts.
"Be free"
Here's a short YouTube video of the site and MMW, which shows the bare building and gives a better idea of its dimensions.

Tuesday, 13 November 2012

Fire and brimstone


A few weeks ago I created a post regarding Shawn Glover’s Drawbridge photos, but I was drawn to Shawn’s work with ‘now and then’ of San Francisco "The Earthquake blend". The colour photographs of modern-day scenes in the city contrast with the black-and-white images of destruction – buildings half-collapsed, damaged roads revealing yawning subterranean pits, facades blackened, trolleys smashed. Shawn has painstakingly researched and constructed images reminiscent of Sergey Larenkov’s “Ghosts of WWII series (see my ‘Penetrating the layers of time’ post). 
To put these photos together, Shawn created a catalogue of historical photos that looked to have potential to be blended. “Unfortunately most of these photos end up on the digital cutting room floor because there’s simply no way to get the same photo today because either a building or a tree is in the way. Once I get a good location, I get everything lined up just right. My goal is to stand in the exact spot where the original photographer stood. Doing this needs to take into account equivalent focal length, how the lens was shifted, light conditions, etc. I take plenty of shots, each nudged around a bit at each location. Just moving one foot to the left changes everything.” His original idea was to tear away a piece of the modern photo to expose the 1906 photo, but after playing around a bit, everything seemed more interesting when the two were softly blended together.
Shawn kept running into delays. In the case of the Valencia St. Hotel, he had to return to the scene on Valencia Street four times before managing to get it right. There’s quite a bit of conflicting information of exactly where this building once stood.
A variety of photos taken from April 18, 1906 to 1907 of the devastation of San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake, that give a well-rounded depiction of the city at the time. Luckily photography was a common hobby by 1906 and thousands of photos have survived to this day.
The San Francisco earthquake struck on April 18th 1906 with 42 seconds of intense shaking estimated at 7.8 on the Richter scale. Buildings fell, sinkholes in the streets opened up, the ground liquefied, railroad tracks bent, and collapsing bricks crushed cable cars. However, it was the out-of-control fires that did 90% of the destruction. Over 30 fires, caused by ruptured gas mains, destroyed approximately 25,000 buildings on 490 city blocks, many fires were started when firefighters used dynamite to demolish buildings to create firebreaks, which resulted in the destruction of more than 50% of the buildings that would have otherwise survived. The fires burned for four days and nights.
The city was in disarray. Federal troops and police had orders to shoot and kill looters. Thousands of tents and temporary relief houses went up to house the 20,000 displaced people.

A cable car heads towards the California Street incline while shocked residents walk aimlessly through street amidst the devastation. The tower in the background belongs to the Old St Marys Church, which survived the quake but was gutted by fire. It was rebuilt and still stands at the corner of California Street and Grant Avenue.

Happy tourists pass by the Fairmont Hotel, on top of Nob Hill, which still stands, but was destroyed inside from the fires. Built in 1902-06 the opulent Fairmont had not yet opened at the time of the quake though the interior furnishings were there. It finally opened exactly one year after the earthquake struck.


People cross Market Street in front of the destroyed Hearst Building. The building caught fire at noon on the 18th, and the front wall facade was all that remained standing. The dynamiting of buildings started at 2.30pm.


Pedestrians cross Jones St towards a pile of rubble on Market Street. The Hibernia Bank building on the McAllister Street corner is burned out, but still standing strong. It was repaired and temporarily housed the Harbour Police after the quake. It was restored to bank use, then again became a police substation when the Hibernia Bank closed in the late 1980s.

A woman opens the door to her Mercedes in the fish wholesaler’s district on Sacramento Street while horses killed by falling rubble lie in the street. After the original photo was taken, the entire area was burned out.

Two girls stand before the partially destroyed Sharon Building in Golden Gate Park. Built in 1888, the Romanesque sandstone building was a canteen for children visiting the park. It was damaged by fire in 1974, and is now an art studio.


Cars travel down S. Van Ness, which has buckled after the quake. The fires reached Van Ness Avenue on the 20th



A bicyclist rides towards the fallen Valencia Street Hotel and a huge sinkhole that has opened up in the street. The hotel on the west side of Valencia Street between 18th & 19th Streets sank one storey into the sinkhole, which was a filled-in swamp known as Lake Coppin. Up to 200 people may have died in the hotel, many drowned as a major water-main broke as the hotel sank.
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People walk up California Street amid charred scraps of lumber. The dark bricks of the Old St Marys tower is visible behind the modern day woman.

People stroll by the original adobe Mission Dolores which survived, while the brick Gothic Revival church (built 1876) next door was destroyed. The Mission District is up the hill and the fires reached there on the 21st. The Notre Dame Convent across the road was dynamited, but the fire jumped the road to the church and damaged to the extent it was razed. The fire was halted almost on the Mission doorstep. Dedicated in 1791 the Mission Dolores is now the oldest surviving structure in San Francisco. A new grand basilica was built on the church site in 1913-18.
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Horse carriages and cars park in front of Lafayette Park while a destroyed city looms in the background. Lafayette Park encompasses a four-block area bounded by Sacramento Street to the south, Laguna Street to the west, Washington Street to the north, and Gough Street to the east. More than half the city was homeless, and 11 relief camps were set up in public parks.


Monday, 5 November 2012

A double delight


OMG lighthouses AND abandonment! It is WebUrbanist's "Lights Out!: seven more eerie abandoned lighthouses"
7 scenic sentinels slowly succumbing to the endless onslaught of wind and waves stand – barely – as solitary reminders of a time when fog-piercing lighthouse beams guided wayward mariners from the cold clutches of the devil and the deep blue sea. Often built in isolated locations beset by the harshest of environments, these relics of a more romantic age are gradually giving up the ghost, ravaged by the same seas they sought to make safer for sailors. Last one to leave, please shut the door and turn out the light.

Mys Aniva Lighthouse on the rocky outcrop
 Mys Aniva lighthouse, built under extremely difficult conditions on a formerly jagged rock just off the southeastern-most cape of Sakhalin island, Russia. Firstly, Japan ordered the lighthouse built in the late 1930s when Sakhalin was divided between that country and the USSR. The Soviets seized the whole of Sakhalin at the end of World War II, they installed a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator to supply electricity to the lamp. The fall of communism in the early 1990s led to a decade of near-chaos with funds in short supply. The Mys Aniva lighthouse, isolated though it was and is, was looted, ransacked and abandoned.

Looking derelict Grand Harbor Lighthouse
The Grand Harbour Lighthouse and attached keeper’s house at Fish Fluke Point on Ross Island, New Brunswick, Canada opened in the fall of 1879 and has been in a state of slow-motion collapse since the station was closed in 1963. The once-picturesque lighthouse’s degeneration was accelerated by the great Groundhog Day Gale of 1976, but the wood-framed complex hangs on.

Klein Curacao

Klein Curacao Lighthouse on the Caribbean island of Curacao was constructed in 1850 on the tiny, (3 km square) island situated 10 kms south-east of the mother island. In 1877 a powerful hurricane destroyed the original lighthouse and in 1879 a stronger replacement was built. It was subsequently storm-damaged and repaired again in 1913. Though the lighthouse had been abandoned and left to decay, the light itself was recently reactivated and an automatic solar-powered LED beacon was installed.

Though shattered by two decades of on and off civil war, the city of Mogadishu in Somalia has a long and prosperous history based on sea trading. The Mogadishu Lighthouse was built in the 19th century by Italian colonisers. Its light long dimmed and its open spiral staircase on the verge of collapse, the lighthouse ruins serve as a shady retreat for fishermen.
 
The remains of the Mogadishu Lighthouses's spiral staircase

Great Isaac Cay Lighthouse was built in 1859 on tiny Great Isaac Cay in the Bahamas. The rusting 152ft tall tower is surrounded by a group of decrepit and decaying outbuildings abandoned after the last two keepers mysteriously vanished in 1969. The lighthouse still functions using an automatic light. It has acquired a reputation for being haunted by the ghosts of shipwrecked ship passengers - when the full moon shines, the spectral shades of a mother and child shipwrecked off the island in the late 19th century can be heard bemoaning their fate.

As always photos, information and 2 more lighthouses at WebUrbanist 

Thursday, 1 November 2012

Lots of reasons to celebrate



This isn't self congratulations just a big thankyou to the audience out there
Yesterday this blog received it's 50,000th visitor


Now it's onwards & upwards and let's crack 100,000!