Vancouver is a city of alleys, and it is here where most graffiti seems to thrive. While walls can be relatiely clean, the trash dumpsters most definitely are not.
Author: Control@ltvsquad.com
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Hopeless Warehouse
With one ear to the ground and a finger on the shutter button I heard about this MFer and proceeded to the scene of the crime. Arriving just in time, this building was found to be a triplet like this rhyme. Developers are taking it down just like they do all around town. It’s the dawn of a new age, these condos are all the rage setting the stage for a yuppified city without you in it. I could go on but you get the idea, if you ain’t got the cash you got to leave here. They don’t want you no more because you’re not new…
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Vancouver Cesspool Hotel
Traveling to other cities is usually an eye opener. Here in NYC, there’s little left abandoned for too long, and almost one of it is actually inside of Manhattan (downtown). Vancouver, however, presented this odd animal: An abandoned hotel surrounded by high rises.
This place doesn’t have long for this world, of course, but I found it to be most charming. An abandoned building with all it’s doors wide open for anyone to wander into. Given the relative ‘red light district’ feel for one of the nearby streets, i thought I might encounter some shady people in here. That was not the case though…
You have to love an abandonment where you can park your car right in the parking lot and go to town…
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Double I military base
This one was a walk in the park… an old military building left exposed to the elements. The windows have all been blown out, the paint peeling and the wood floors beginning to rot. Typical favor of abandoned building in the middle of nowhere.
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S&S Factory Day Raid
History
This building was originally constructed as the Lewis Steel Products factory in the late 1930s. After Lewis Steel moved out, it became the S & S Corrugated Box Machine factory. S & S made “Machinery for making corrugated paper, paper boxes, and machinery for combining, treating, fabricating, cutting and slotting” of all varieties of such paper. S & S also had a sordid history with the neighborhood, and after they went out of business, this factory building became artist studios and a lampshade outlet.In 2007 plans were made to convert it into high priced loft apartments. The building would be rebranded as the ‘Steelworks Lofts”. From 2007 to 2011 ownership of this building changed hands several times, with each group of owners having slightly different plans for it. As of this writing (June, 2013) the building is actively being converted into apartments again.
Adventure
After raiding this building overnight, I was up early and itching to get back inside during daylight hours.The streets of many parts of NYC are dead on Sunday mornings. I parked right outside of the door and walked in, just as we had a few hours before. Today I was flying solo though. It’s hard to keep up with me when I get this obsessed with a building.
Inside a found a very deserted first floor. At the rear of the building was a very long hallway running east and west through the entire length of the building. I later found that this was a railroad siding connecting to the nearby BEDT terminal. It is unclear if Lewis Steel or S & S ever received or shipped rail cars from here – though it seems likely that Lewis did at some point.
Upstairs was a lounge – perhaps an illegal bar? as well as various artist studio spaces. I had to stop and goof off a little at the one photographers studio that was left behind.
After an hour or three of shooting I simply walked out the front door again. The few people on the street at the time had no idea that I had no business being in there. if you look like you belong, no one thinks twice.
Buildings like these are just too rare in NYC anymore. it is a pathetic shame that our industrial history is not better saved and documented. Hopefully when it is redeveloped they’ll at least put a plaque on the outside or in the lobby explaining it’s significance. I kinda doubt it they will though. The building is being rebranded as the ‘Steelworks lofts’ – no mention of S & S and what they did to the neighborhood.
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S&S Factory
So me & S are bored to death and decide to go for a ride around town and see what’s been changing on the street landscape. It seems like every time I drive around anywhere with her looking to break into something we get lucky. Tonight would be no different.
By chance we drive down an industrial street checking on an abandonment/development site we did last year. Directly across the street sits another large factory building that has no lights on. A closer look reveals a few windows broken out, and the roll down gates on the truck bays are not looking too healthy. Sure enough there’s a way in, and in we go.
For the size and scale of this place, much of it was empty. The first floors were all factory, the top seemed to have artist lofts with eviction notices still on the doors. These were huge lofts. Whoever lived here surely lost out when they were kicked out.
Curiosity satisfied, we depart. Fixated though, I decide to check this place again in the morning.
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Bx Ferry Terminal
Here lays the remains of a ferry terminal that was once used to service some of NYC’s abandoned islands. With the islands closed to official uses, the ferry terminal also has become an obsolete waste.
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Cangros Transmission
Cangros was a transmission shop in the heart of an industrial neighborhood. It was in an old school building with large apartments located above the shop.
The neighborhood, of course, has changed, the business has gone under, and the building, it too will soon likely be gone. Interesting from the outside yet totally empty on the inside, building is a metaphor for what has become of this area: A soul-less shadow of its former self.
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PUMP
The keys to the kingdom open odd underground doors such as those to rooms like this one: a Pump Room located under Manhattan. This room contains water pumping equipment which is used in case of underground flooding in a nearby tunnel. The water gets sucked out of gratings and pumped into the cities sewer system.
