Urban Exploration

There is more to urban exploration than taking a walk in the city.

There are 339 posts filed in Urban Exploration (this is page 30 of 57).

Abandoned Canada

One of the projects I am working on is a web directory with sites relating to urban/ rural exploration and abandoned sites in Canada (the rest of the world as well but it’s a massive project to tackle all of it at once). It’s far from ready to be shown off. But, I do have a list of sites for Canadian explorers and those who just like to look at old houses, places and things.

Flickr: Ontario Rural Ruins
Flickr: Canadian Rural Exploration

Flickr: Abandoned Canada

Ontario:
Flickr: Abandoned Ontario
Facebook: Ontario Ghost Towns and Historical Places

British Columbia:

Flickr: Abandoned British Columbia

Alberta:

Flickr: Historical and Abandoned Alberta

Saskatchewan:

Flickr: Abandoned Saskatchewan

Quebec:

Flickr: Abandoned Quebec

Flickr: Abandoned Montreal

Northern Canada:

Flickr: Abandoned Alaska and Yukon

Abandoned Gardens

It`s a sad thing to explore an abandoned site and find what is left of a garden. Once planned out, nurtured now vacated and forgotten. Sometimes there isn`t much left to ever know it had been a garden. Only the perennials and a few biennials (which grow from their own seeds) can stand fast against the wild and ready weedsé native plants.

In Spring it is usually the bulbs like daffodils which I see. Now it is the time of the iris and the daylily. I often take a photo of the abandoned garden. I don`t always post them to my Flickr account or the Ontario Rural Ruins group I started for rural exploring. There isn`t all that much to really see. I think, having been there, the photos have more meaning to me than someone who can only see a flower or two and not visualize the abandoned garden the way I saw it at the time.

Write about an abandoned garden. What grows there, what used to grow there and what might the fate of it be?

Flickr: Neglected Friends

Flickr: Abandoned Gardens

Flickr: Weeds in the Pavement

Flickr: Overgrowth

Flickr: Nature Prevails

Flickr: Nature Will Out

Flickr: Nature Laughs Last

Flickr: Reclaimed by Nature

Flickr: Land Reclaimed by Nature

Flickr: Wildness – The Edge of Nature – About living on the edge of nature.

Ruins in New York

As seen on a post in Design Corner: One misty morning while in New York City, take a cab uptown to West 64th Street in Manhattan. When you reach the Riverside park, observe a dark undulating skeleton sticking out of the Hudson River. The twisted metallic construction that stimulates comparisons with Frank Gehry’s architecture has been there since 37 years ago. Before Pier D was consumed by raging fire in 1971, it was a part of the New York Central Railroad Yard. Today Pier D is the kind of design form that quite literally follows the function – chronologically leaving its original practicalities behind in the smoke of Manhattan’s industrial past. Back then, Pier D’s utility was to be used as a deck for longshoremen to unload bulk cargo. Now Pier D is all about emotional significance – it serves no purpose other than the aesthetic one. However, the official confirmation of the site’s new aesthetic status was issued no earlier than in 2003 – through a timely gesture of Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner who has been known for his protective stances vis-à-vis the city’s natural and historic beauty. He was called on the phone one day to be put on notice that a crane had begun dismantling the pier – according to approved plans deliberated and finalized in Benepe’s absence. The commissioner rushed to the site and ordered to stop the demolition.Accidental landscape design… In the opinion of a nearby dweller, since the arrival of Trump Place “everything looks so new here, […] we need a reminder of what it was like 80 years ago.”