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Abandoned buildings can be quite an eyesore in urban environments, but when artists get on board they can become their own makeshift museums.WebUrbanist has a great collection of cool empty buildings that are now brilliantly adorned in a variety of manners.
Failed amusement parks somehow seem sadder than most other abandoned places. They evoke ghostly memories of children’s laughter, aromas of delicious indulgent foods and the joy of wild rides. Gulliver’s Kingdom, based on Jonathan Swift’s story, sits in the shadow of Mount Fuji in Japan. It opened in 1997 with great optimism that it would help stimulate the local economy but closed its doors for the last time 10 years later. Although it is located in a tourist area it is also next to Aokigahara, Japan’s “suicide forest”, a suicide location second only to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Creepier still it also borders on the location of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult’s headquarters and nerve gas production facility. The cult released the nerve gas sarin on the Tokyo subway system in 1995, killing 12 and injuring 3,800. In the end Gulliver’s Kingdom just wasn’t big enough to be “big in Japan”.
Nothing remains of Gulliver’s Kingdom today but a rough concrete scar, and even this basic foundation is gradually being subsumed by dirt, dust and windblown sand. Was it all a dream? Perhaps it was… and if any lessons can be learned by Gulliver’s Kingdom’s rise, fall and disappearance it’s that if one must dream, at least dream big.
Many cities and urban centers these days are discovering the increasing problem of figuring out what to do abandoned buildings and structures. As populations and industries change many large factories, apartment complexes and even theme parks are left as empty rusting hunks of man-made waste. One publishing company is trying to brainstorm a solution in an upcoming book.
The concept is the brainchild of Gregory Crawford, who recently launched a Kickstarter project in a bid to fund his book, Fall Apart Park, and a publishing company called The Afterwords Archive. The project will offer creative transformation proposals for abandoned buildings and places, through a combination of fiction, non-fiction, journalism and photo-essays, while adopting re-purposed materials.
Photo: Second City Warehouse [Flickr]
Neatorama reader lir wrote an interesting account of the abandoned Uptown Theatre in Chicago. The ornate theater, the second largest in the United States, has been abandoned and boarded up since 1980 because the high cost of upkeep and repair:
The theatre is called the Uptown Theatre. It was built by Balaban and Katz, a company started by four Chicagoans who built, owned and operated dozens of theatres and movie palaces from the 1920′s to the 1970′s. It was designed in a Spanish Baroque style by Rapp and Rapp – the same who built the Chicago Theatre on State Street four years before. It was built in 1925 with 4,381 seats (only the Radio City Music Hall is larger), a five story main lobby and two other side lobbies, an eight story facade, a large Wurlitzer organ, and millions worth of marble statuary and oil paintings. Silent films with full orchestras were the original entertainment at the theatre, but since its opening the theatre has been a stage for musicals, concerts, television shows, company meetings…
Unfortunately, due to the less then perfect reputation the area has had for a while, the cost of upkeep, its size, and from competition with the Riviera and Aragon, the Uptown started to sell off parts of itself, starting with the organ, and continuing with much of the interior decorations to pay for the care of the place. In the 1970′s, the Uptown was used as a large concert venue, with evidently a very memorable show by Bruce Springsteen taking place there in 1980. It was about this time that the theatre was sold, boarded up, and while plans with what exactly to use the massive ornately archaic and deteriorating structure for were being formed, water pipes froze and burst inside, causing severe damage. (Source)
Undercity.org, a website dedicated to exploration of abandoned and hidden urban sites, has a fascinating gallery of the Uptown Theatre: Link | Uptown Theatre photoset at Flickr by Second City Warehouse
