An Old Familiar Face

People who love old buildings tend to form special, emotional connections with certain ones. This is mine.

Five years ago, I was very unhappy. I’d just lost my grandmother, my last living grandparent, my biggest supporter. Her death destroyed the foundation of the family life I grew up knowing. I had gone through three day jobs in six months, each of which seemed to be worse than the last. Matt lived in a different city. I was broke. My photography sucked. I was floundering and lost and miserable.

Away from home on a job and in the midst of a terrible depressive episode, I got in my car and I drove. I ended up here.

I parked in the overgrown weeds and walked up to the most beautiful building I’d ever seen. I was surrounded on all sides by the chaos of a downtown city, but everything went eerily quiet. I went back for my camera, and I started to shoot. What I remember most vividly is how much I swore the building was a living, breathing entity looking back at me.

I had no relationship with abandoned buildings back then. I didn’t photograph them, never really paid attention to them. I didn’t even know this was a thing people did.

In retrospect, I don’t know if it was purely coincidence that I ended up here that day, in a shit mood and at the end of my rope.

This place means a lot to me. It’s very hard to describe how or why a person could find a sense of peace and comfort in a rotting insane asylum, but that’s what happened. Maybe there’s something to be said about the catharsis of seeing a place so destroyed and decayed still standing and still so beautiful.

I’ve gotten lost again plenty of times over the past five years. Incidentally, the next time I fell into a terrible depression, I wound up once again at an abandoned state hospital…that time I realized it wasn’t a coincidence, and that became the catalyst that started my entire abandoned portfolio.

By late 2016, much of this complex, which is currently under active construction, will be re-purposed into a resort and conference center. This city is in the midst of an incredible renaissance, renovating many of its old, abandoned buildings in ways that will bring money and tourism back into the area. I will miss the old, but I also can’t wait to see the new.

I’m glad we got to meet face-to-face again before the renovations are complete. We are both new, stronger beings than we were five years ago.