Vintage now & thens

I've seen copies of these on a number of sites, but this is from WebUrbanist, 10 Vintage London Paintings Superimposed on Street View Images

Blending fiction and reality, art and history, this series of super-impositions takes the ‘then-and-now’ imagery all the back to the 18th Century to the streets and rivers of England’s capital city. Most of the added classics (spliced with Google Street View shots) are largely unedited, a few are strategically cropped but many show a naturally stark contrast in colours, tones, lighting, and of course: street life.

These hybrids show historical structures in their built environments like ‘St. Martin in the Fields’ painting by William Logsdail in 1888, of a little Victorian girl selling flowers in Trafalgar Square in London. There has been a church on the site for at least 800 years.

And another Logsdail ‘9th of November, 1888’ by William Logsdail of the Lord Mayor’s parade passing through Bank Junction in London. To the left is the Old Bank of England (the building was demolished 50 years after the painting was done). The 9th was also more famous for the crime on the very day of this parade – Mary Kelly’s murder, the last Jack The Ripper’s victims, took place less than a mile away in Whitechapel.

'Blackman Street London' by John Atkinson Grimshaw in 1885. The church is St. George The Martyr, this is the Church next to the notorious Marshalsea prison where Dickens' Little Dorrit is born. The Brough Street Market in Southwark is south of the River Thames and one of the oldest fruit and vegetable markets. It was an area also famous for its inns, like The George, which still survives. Today, Blackman Street is called Borough High Street and offers a view of the Shard – the biggest spire you'll see looking north-east.

'The River Thames with St. Paul's Cathedral on Lord Mayor's Day' by Canaletto.The Millenium Bridge cuts across this patch of the river now. You still get a great view of St. Pauls dome from the south side of the river but in 1746 - only 40 years since they had finished building it - it must have totally dominated London's skyline. St Paul’s was the city's tallest building for over 300 years. Giovanni Antonio Canal (known as Canaletto) was a Venetian painter remembered for his renditions of building landscapes in Venice & England.

'The Strand Looking East from Exeter Exchange' by Caleb Robert Stanley.The Strand has changed massively since this painting of St Mary Le Strand. It was half demolished and widened in 1900 removing all the alleyways and narrow residential roads. The church is a replacement for another one demolished to make way for Somerset House. In 1822 all the roads on the right would have still led right down into the Thames before the embankment was constructed. Most of those buildings are gone, but some of the roads remain and retain their slope down towards the old Thames riverbank. 

These images are a logical extension of the ‘now & then’ photo concept, and I believe have been improved by imposing the old masters over them.

The decline of Detroit grandeur

Grandeur Lost: The Modern Ruins of Abandoned Detroit is another abandonment post from WebUrbanist

The now famous pic of William Livingstone house

Detroit is arguably one of the most fascinating modern cities in the world. This is thanks to the city’s unique balance between its former identity as a manufacturing mecca and its current state of sectional abandonment and renewal. It is neither deserted nor wholly occupied, but exists in tension between destruction, creation and everyday living. 
French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre saw the abandoned parts of this compelling urban landscape and documented it in their book The Ruins of Detroit.

United Artists Theatre - talk about decayed grandeur!

Despite the empty neighbourhoods, abandoned buildings and crumbling structures. The city balances its former glory, its current semi-abandoned status, with pockets of fresh new life and creative directions springing up from the ashes.

East Side Public Library

The city, so rich with history both industrial and individual, was once the fourth largest in the United States. It housed some of the country’s brightest engineers and most promising entrepreneurs. The city grew and its residents continued to expand their living areas into planned suburbs.

Atrium of the Farwell building

But the automobile industry which played such a large part of the city’s early days also proved part in its undoing. White middle-class residents used those cars to move out of the inner city and into their new suburbs. Segregation increased steadily until the violent race riot in 1967.

Following the riot, the city continued its rapid decline. The industry that built Detroit moved on to other locations. Inner-city residents fled their homes by the thousands. Every race and every economic class was affected by this exodus; the city simply bled away until it held less than half its former population.

Lee Plaza Hotel

Unlike almost any other place in the world, Detroit’s abandoned buildings and ruined structures are not isolated in one part of the city. Grand, well-kept buildings can exist just meters away from crumbling ruins. Inhabited and abandoned homes exist side by side in neighbourhoods.

The grandeur of the multi-storey Michigan Central Railway Station

What is so compelling about the images in The Ruins of Detroit is the seeming urgency of the city’s abandonment. In civic buildings, papers and boxes still occupy offices. In abandoned libraries, books continue to line the walls. Schools still hold desks and police stations are stuffed with forgotten and mouldering mug shots. Chairs are tipped over as though the former occupants of these buildings suddenly evacuated due to an emergency. No hope of salvaging the situation.

St Christopher House Public Library

Given the slow but steady decline of the city’s population, this urgency is baffling. Surely there was more than enough time to clean the buildings out, remove anything that could be reused or salvaged and clean the buildings up. But it seems that no one cared to take the time to do so.

This state of partial ruination is ephemeral – eventually it must give way to complete ruin or rebuilding. As witnessed in my Decaying Detroit post, the photographers’ goal was to capture Detroit’s current state of abandonment before fate tips one way or the other.

The East Methodist Church

Yet more photographs at the Weburbanist site.

Exploring with WebUrbanist

So much to see...so little time. The people at WebUrbanist have done it again, with 'Urban Exploration Tips, Tricks & Guides'.

Especially the link to '30 Websites & Online Forums for Adventurous Urban Explorers' as the title suggests, it is a list of online resources for would-be urban explorers around the world, from urbex forums to photo sites and more, dedicated to abandoned places and vehicles worth exploring.

Gull lightship (from Derelict London)

Too many to list here, my only objection is that there are some dead-links, still heaps to observe and read about. Just do as they suggest and bookmark it.
Always remembering as WebUrbanist put it - 'Urban exploration (also known as ‘building infiltration’) is a risky sport at best and an illegal one at worst. While WebUrbanist can’t endorse breaking the law there is fortunately no law against reporting on it and some forms of urban exploration are fortunately legal, for those interested in exploring this illicit urban sport'.

Hold it right there

I've been neglecting Bibliophile for a while, so here are some artistic shots of everyday objects in unusual senarios.

Sound waves are seen in ethereal splashes of red, blue, green and yellow in Fabian Oefner’s ‘Dancing Colors’ series. The movement of the coloured pigments is the result of music pulsing through a speaker, which is wrapped in thin plastic and covered in powder. When the speaker is turned on, the plastic vibrates, shooting the pigment into the air.

This bizarre form is actually liquid droplet captured in motion with a high-speed flash, micro controller and a knack for precise timing. Artist León Dafónte Fernánde uses water, cream, milk or a combination, sometimes thickened with sugar gum or glucose, tinted with food colouring to get these unusual results

German photographer Markus Reugels achieves a very similar, blown-glass-like effect in his own high-speed water droplet photography. Again, the water is slightly thickened to make it just dense enough to dance in the most unexpected of ways. Reugels creates all of these various patterns by delaying the time and amount of droplets and taking the image at just the right moment.
 

Floto + Warner momentarily make elusive forms within coloured liquid seem three-dimensional and static. Getting these dramatic images just right is no easy task; many attempts are made to toss the fluid into the air so that it looks just right against the hills and desert of northern Nevada.
 Yes it is 'Frozen in motion' by WebUrbanist.

Shadow title

Book of Shadows: 2D shape cutouts cast silhouettes on the book’s pages, taking paper cut-outs a step further.

Off the tracks

A children’s book with an interactive twist - ‘Motion silhouette’ from its Japanese creators, Megumi Kajiwara and Tathuhiko Nijima, engages readers through pop-up pieces that require lighting to animate shadow pictures on each page.

The story changes depending on where the shadows fall on the page, and shadows move around the page, as you manipulate the light source and how you hold each page. The idea is to add elements of manual animation that are necessarily subjective – each person will hold, turn and highlight the cutouts in different ways.

‘Motion Silhouette’ is actually a sequel to another book, simply titled ‘Silhouette’, a work which similarly uses slightly less-developed pop-up pages to create a more basic multi-dimensional experience.
More images at WebUrbanist.

Ghosts of Irish times

Time for another installment from WebUrbanist, this one is Ghost Estates of Ireland: Symbols of an EconomicCollapse

While they look like miniatures, it's a real estate

Built with visions of suburban prosperity in more optimistic times, the empty shells of former dream homes dot the countryside among piles of construction rubble and fallen-down fences. Economic highs and lows have led to abandonments of entire villages all over the world, from China to the Mediterranean, but Ireland is among the nations that was particularly hard-hit.

The ghost estates in Ireland, is well over 10,000 mostly-empty neighbourhoods in a relatively small nation (and just a small percentage of Ireland’s 350,000-some-odd abandoned houses.)

Most of the ghost estates are found in the rural areas of the northern and western parts of the country. These empty shells are eyesores for the locals in these small towns. The crisis is affecting the country – unemployment, debts, budget cuts, capital investments – but it is also shaping its landscape.

Yes, the words 'little boxes on the hillside..all the same' comes to mind

Why did I immediately think of the Clearances of the 19^th century, when many families suffering poverty and the potato famine were evicted from their homes by bailiffs, and watched their buildings being demolished so they couldn’t move back in.

I found it all very evocative, while I love abandonments more than most, at a time of housing shortages and homelessness, can't we place someone in these buildings/towns/cities around the world?

Growing cities

Must be time to combine a WebUrbanist post and 'Now & Then' images. I had seen some of these photos before, but hadn't recorded it, now here are just some of the more dramatic examples from "Then & Now: the stunning speed of urban development"
We complain about the pace of change, as old buildings are ripped down to be replaced by often uglier, utilitarian replacements. That pales against the mammoth pace of change in some overseas cities.

The well-known gambling mecca of Las Vegas was carved out of the Nevada desert, when hotels and casinos began construction in the 1930s.

The top black & white photo with the early hotels the Dunes and the Flamingo, is from 1954, and the colour image is from 2009.

China is in a building boom at present, and this is evident from these two photographs of Shanghai. The daylight image was taken in 1990, and the night-time image just 20 years later in 2010.

 Dubai may be where all the oil money is, and it shows in the architecture. 
You can recognise the 3-part apartment building in both photos, but everything else appears to have changed from 1990 to 2003. And it will have changed again in the past 10 years.

You knew Tokyo would make the list - on the left is the Japanese city in the 1960s and again on the right in 2010.

Finally - Panama City is one of the fastest growing urban areas in the world, and these two photographs illustrate the sharp contrast between the two eras. The black & white town sprouts into a maze of skyscrapers between 1930 and 2009.

 Check out other famous cities London, Paris... on the WebUrbanist post.

Diving the depths of a great cathedral

Just like a Dan Brown thriller only true! The vast, splendid Hagia Sophia (which has featured in a couple of Dan’s novels), which is now a museum, sits atop an ancient series of underground tunnels said to connect the cathedral with the Basilica Cistern Princes’ Islands and the Topkapi Palace. Director Göksel Gülensoy has enjoyed a long-standing love of the Hagia Sophia, and decided to embark on a scuba diving expedition under the building to unlock some of her ancient secrets.

The vast interior of Hagia Sophia

His 50-minute film, “In the Depths of Hagia Sophia” (Link to film trailers) shows a side of the historic structure that has never before been explored in depth, let alone filmed. Along with two divers and four spelunkers, he delved into the mysterious depths to see what, exactly, Hagia Sophia was hiding.

Squeezing into the bowels of the cistern

The team began by opening the reservoir doors in the main hall; the two doors had both been shut for quite some time, and never before had a diver been allowed into the reservoir. After studying the small first chamber, the team moved on to the larger second reservoir. There they found flasks thought to have been left behind by British soldiers in 1917, a chain which may have contained a prisoner at one time, and various other bits and pieces of the cathedral. They then moved into the two passageways beneath the huge cathedral, finding sealed passages, a graveyard full of children’s bones, and the burial chamber of Hagia Sophia’s first priest. They found that the passages long thought to lead to the Basilica Cistern and Princes’ Islands were non-existent. Every person who dove beneath Hagia Sophia that day underwent a full-body X-ray to prove that no artifacts had been removed from the site.

Hagia Sophia in Istanbul

This would be a great premise for a new Matthew Reilly Scarecrow or Ascham adventure.

The ultimate assignment

I may have found my new job - being a Trekker for Google Maps (provided I could choose my destinations).

It is all due to another of WebUrbanist's posts - 'Extreme Street View: Google Employee Maps Deserted Island'

The abandoned apartments on Gunkanjima

I've blogged about Gunkanjima before in 2009 in Abandoned towns. Occupied for over a century, and briefly the world’s most densely-populated island - Gunkanjima, off the coast of Nagasaki in Japan is now one of the loneliest places on the planet. A giant concrete wall surrounds the ship-shaped ‘Battleship Island’, giving it its nickname. At one point it was packed with an average of 1.4 residents per square meter of space, almost like an overcrowded sea vessel. In the 19^th century the island was a coal mining facility with residences for 5,000 miners. By the 1970s mining was in decline and the island was abandoned. It has transformed into a decayed yet eerie place as nature has reclaimed much of the land mass.

A tree grows in Gunkanjima

The island featured as the villian’s secret hideout in the James Bond “Skyfall” movie.

Parts of the deserted island have been reopened to the public in 2009 and become something of a tourist destination, but Google secured special permission to go beyond the cordoned-off areas and pass through long-abandoned buildings that only intrepid infiltrators have seen in recent decades past.

The lone urban explorer passing through the haunting multi-storey ruins

Strapped with panoramic photography equipment, this video shows a lone Google employee crawling through rubble, scaling partially caved-in abandonments and standing on precarious roofs, all to document one of the most unique deserted cities on the globe.

Thanks to Google’s Street View mapping, virtual visitors can now tour the corroded corridors, crumbling stairs and uncertain roofs from a much safer distance, a 360° panorama for urban explorers.

The track of the Google Trekker

There are other YouTube clips of other Google Map locations - The Grand Canyon, Venice, the Galapagos Islands..., but I may wait till they improve on the 40lb backpack.

Canadian chaos

I’ve blogged abandoned sites before, and WebUrbanist posts before, but what especially caught my eye on the ‘Great Blight North: 7 abandoned wonders of Canada’, was the shot of the deserted shopping plaza/mall, there’s something really incongruous about shops set up for customers just no people, remarkable when you realise it’s been that way for more than 30 years! So here is a selection of the Great North Blight.

I want a grand bank foyer like this

Toronto’s Forgotten Neoclassical Banks, Ontario

A historic landmark in downtown Toronto is the bank at 205 Yonge Street boasting a beautiful neoclassical facade that has darkened to a gloomy grey over the past century. Built in 1905, the Bank of Toronto and the adjacent Canadian Bank of Commerce, seem starkly out of place in all their aged gothic dilapidation, surrounded by the glittering glass of more modern buildings. Both banks have been empty for some time. The Bank of Commerce has been vacant since 1986, while the Bank of Toronto was occupied by Heritage Toronto until roughly 2001. Developers recently purchased the property and supposedly intend to restore the Bank of Commerce as part of a hotel project, though the fate of its neighbour is still up in the air, and none of the plans are final.

Canada Malting Plant, Montreal, Quebec

One of the last remaining sets of industrial silos in Toronto sits on the edge of the harbor, offering urban explorers who manage to gain access and ascend to its rooftops a stunning view of the skyline (including the city’s iconic CN Tower.) Built in 1928 to store malt for the Canada Malting Company, the complex includes stark modernist concrete towers housing 15 wooden silos. It was abandoned in the mid 1980s but protected by the city due to its historic and architectural value, and officials have considered adapting it for all sorts of interesting new uses, from a museum to a theme park. Most of the secondary buildings have been demolished, but the silos still stand.

Interior of the malting plant

Toronto Power Generating System, Ontario

This ornate power station immediately reminded me of the South Fremantle building. Built in 1903, this Beaux Arts hydro-electric power station was designed to power the city of Toronto. It’s located on the banks of the Niagara River just upstream from Niagara Falls. It closed in 1974 and was designated a national historic site in 1983. Despite still being filled with industrial equipment, the inside looks like a palace, the rusting remains of turbines contrasting with intricately scrolled marble trim. It has been described as a massive stone crypt standing majestic and alone beside the raging water… 

Note the seepage icicles

Riverview Hospital, Vancouver, British Columbia

Chances are, you’ve seen the Riverview Hospital before as it has appeared in dozens of movies and television shows, including The X-Files, Battlestar Galactica, Psych, Caprica, Fringe, Halloween: Resurrection and even the Christmas movie Elf. It didn’t close until 2012, but many of its historic buildings were already abandoned by that time, and its decline has been swift. When the hospital opened in 1913 as ‘The Hospital for the Mind,’ it housed just 350 patients, but that population grew to 4,500 by the 1950s. Like so many other large mental health facilities, Riverview lost patients rapidly during the ’60s and ’70s as the approach to simply put mentally ill people ‘away’ for life came to be seen as inhumane. 

Kitsault Ghost Town, British Columbia

Abandoned towns are always eerie, especially when belongings are still strewn around as if the residents had to evacuate in a life-or-death scenario. But Kitsault is made even creepier by the distinct lack of every typical marker of abandonment other than the simple, stark lack of people in its homes, shops, schools and pubs. It’s impeccably well-kept, looking exactly as it did when it was abandoned in 1980, as if you could step back in time and experience that year again – the shag carpets, the prices in the grocery store window, the wooden pub chairs stacked on tables waiting for patrons that haven’t returned. There’s very little decay and no vandalism. The town site as it exists today was built in the late ’70s to house workers of the nearby molybdenum mine and includes roads, residences, a hospital, a curling rink and a swimming pool, but abandoned entirely just eighteen months later after the collapse of metal prices. A single caretaker (who is presumably mowing the lawns etc) is the only resident. A developer recently bought the town with an eye to transforming it into a wilderness resort or exploiting natural gas resources..

Kitsault's Shopping Plaza

 

Either being restored or demolished

Farmhouses of Ontario

Ontario is packed with abandoned farmhouses,churches and schools that have been left behind as rural residents moved from isolated locations to more urban settings. Sad rusting swing sets in overgrown yards, stately brick homes with broken windows, boarded-up lakeside log cabins and once-elegant estates overtaken by vines with their roofs caved in.

Impressive brick home near Wasaga

 

Empty eyes of the factory

Babcock Factory, Montreal, Quebec

The Babcock & Wilcox Boiler Plant in Saint Henri, Montreal is so altered from its original state, it’s barely recognizable – due to both decay and human intervention. Just outside the borders of one of the city’s poshest neighbourhoods, this relic of a factory is little more than a brick and concrete shell that now serves as a veritable graffiti gallery, empty cans of spray paint littering the floor.

Babcock interior

 As always see more photos and some videos at the WebUrbanist site.