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GrantCunningham.com - Revolver Liberation Alliance blog

Friday Surprise: Why didn't I find this earlier?

Friday, October 15, 2010 Filed in: Friday Surprise!, Things I like, History

When I talked about tools a couple of weeks ago, a regular reader emailed and said that his father had owned a service station in the 1960s too. He asked what brand, and I told him Texaco. He then forwarded a link to this shot of an abandoned Texaco station somewhere in North Dakota.

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The picture is hosted at a site called shorpy.com, and that link encouraged me to spend the next hour looking at the historic photos that are Shorpy's raison d'ętre. Shorpy is sort of a cross between a photo album and a blog, and with thousands of photos in their archive I’m going to need a lot more spare time! All pics have a small preview like this one, and clicking on any of them brings up a high-res version. Neat!

Very cool site that has become one of the few on my "daily read" bookmark.

-=[ Grant ]=-

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FRIDAY SURPRISE: "Your hand is staining my window."

Friday, July 30, 2010 Filed in: Friday Surprise!

Very busy this week, and I had a couple of articles I wanted to write but just didn't have the time. So today I'm just going to link to a site featuring images of abandoned hospitals and asylums across the country.

Creepy stuff.

(Bonus points for the person who can identify the quote in the title line without Googling it.)

-=[ Grant ]=-

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FRIDAY SURPRISE: The lady in the lake.

Friday, July 02, 2010 Filed in: Friday Surprise!, History

Ronald Reagan was halfway through his first term as President when I took my first trip east of the Rockies. It was also my first trip via airliner, and though I'd flown quite a bit in small aircraft the view from 30,000+ feet was new to me. I was heading to Rochester, NY. Traveling from Portland to Rochester on Delta Airlines entailed a stop in Detroit, which also meant a trip over Lake Michigan.

If you've followed the story so far you'll deduce that I'd never seen any of the Great Lakes. Oh, I knew all about them; I'd studied geography in school. I knew that they were actually inland seas, that they had their own weather, that they were the largest group of freshwater bodies on earth. What I didn't know, or more correctly didn't fathom, was just how big they were.

As the plane crossed Lake Michigan I was struck by the fact that all I could see was water. I finally grasped the reality of the Great Lakes, and the stories I'd read about shipwrecks and lost souls suddenly became understandable. In that vast expanse of water, some of it nearly a thousand feet thick, it would be very easy to lose a vessel in one of the lake's infamous storms.

In 1898, that's what happened to the steamship L.R. Doty. She was carrying a load of corn destined for Ontario when a powerful storm armed with thirty-foot waves sent her to the lake floor. The 320 feet of cold, salt-free water that sat on top of her preserved her remains in almost perfect condition.

Those remains were just recently found, 112 years after her final trip. Great story from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; be sure to check out the photo gallery of the wreck.

-=[ Grant ]=-

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FRIDAY SURPRISE: I'd like a Meatball Marinara please. Oh, wait...

Friday, May 14, 2010 Filed in: Friday Surprise!, Things I like

...wrong subway!

I found this some time ago, and thought it was an intriguing site in the growing "abandoned things" genre. It's not just about subways, either - photographer Shawn Dufour has lots of cool sites pictured: factories, hospitals, even a railroad yard.

Have a look at abandonedsubwaytunnels.com


-=[ Grant ]=-

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FRIDAY SURPRISE: A shell of former glory.

Friday, April 09, 2010 Filed in: Friday Surprise!, My Life, History

I usually eat my breakfast in front of the computer. I check my personal email, look in at Twitter and Facebook, read George Ure's blog, look at all the blog feeds to which I subscribe, and maybe even check what's for sale on Craigslist.

One of the Facebook updates this morning was from Rob Pincus, who is heading for Rochester (NY). That brought back memories, as in my former life I traveled to Rochester on an occasional basis, one time staying for the better part of two weeks. Astute readers will deduce that these trips had something to do with the Eastman Kodak Company (EKC, as it was known - Kodak was extremely fond of acronyms and abbreviations), and that deduction would be correct.

In the early- to mid-Eighties, which is when I visited, Kodak owned most of Rochester - and what they didn't, Xerox did. Kodak's facilities were huge even by Detroit standards, all based on sales of film and associated equipment and supplies. As digital photography eroded film's dominance, Kodak (which had been willfully dismissive of the digital threat throughout the period under discussion) saw their business decline precipitously.

Barely into the new century, Kodak was closing buildings at a rapid pace. They demolished a few, auctioned off some others, and sold what they felt they didn't need but which would still generate cash. One of the latter was a complex known as the Marketing Education Center, or - in EKC-speak - MEC.

MEC is where they held seminars, training sessions, and business meetings. Every time I went to Kodak, MEC is where I ended up. It was a gorgeous campus, looking more like a community college than a corporate office.

MEC sat next to the Genesee River, and featured a dining hall with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the river and a placid meadow. The view from the tiered seating was so perfectly New England, regardless of the season, that visitors joked the windows were actually Duratrans - Kodak's trade name for large, backlit transparencies. The food was't bad, either!

This little trip down memory lane got me to wondering: whatever happened to MEC? As it turns out, pretty much nothing. Kodak cleared out and sold it for about $3.5 million to an investment concern in 2004, and it appears to be sitting vacant today. The campus, with 120 acres and four buildings, is currently for sale at an asking price of only $9.9 million.

(In researching this, I came across the blog of a Rochester ex-pat whose family worked for EKC. She chronicles the decline of George Eastman's once-great empire.)

-=[ Grant ]=-

P.S.: Speaking of acronyms...at one point Kodak decided to do some corporate reshuffling, and the technicians who serviced their large photofinishing and photocopying equipment were inexplicably transferred to the control of the newly renamed Consumer Equipment Service. At roughly the same time, those technicians were given the title of “Field Engineers.” The in-joke was that since they were now FEs, working for CES, that their corporate acronym was to be FECES. Upper management was not at all amused.

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FRIDAY SURPRISE: When in Rome...

Friday, March 05, 2010 Filed in: Friday Surprise!, Things I like, History

My fascination with old and abandoned things often leads to dreams of great discoveries. Though I've been to a few abandoned places - all of which are pretty well known, at least locally - I'm handicapped by geography. Here in rural Oregon, there just aren't many such places.

There weren't enough people here to have produced a large urban/industrial base a century ago, our technological history doesn't go back much more than 175 years in any case, and we've never exactly been a hotbed of military activity. Thus my dreams of being the first (or, at least, one of the very few) to visit such a site remain elusive.

Other people are more fortunate. A British film crew just last year found the remains of the Aqua Traiana headwaters, the beginnings of a lost aqueduct that once supplied Rome with fresh water. It's beautiful and amazingly well preserved, and all lying below a pig pasture near the village of Manziana, just northwest of Rome.

What gets me is that they found it - in the best Indiana Jones style - by discovering a hidden door in an abandoned church.

-=[ Grant ]=-

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FRIDAY SURPRISE: Motor City throws a rod.

Friday, February 26, 2010 Filed in: Friday Surprise!, History

The decline of Detroit fascinates me.

For many years I've wandered the Northwest visiting ghost towns and abandoned settlements, and always in the back of my mind are the unanswered questions: why did people leave? What was is like to live in a dying town? When did people finally figure out that their town was destined for the dust bin of history? Did it happen suddenly, or was it a slow, agonizing extinction?

These questions come to the forefront as I watch the continuing downfall of one of America's proudest cities.

I'm not saying that Detroit is going to disappear like, oh, Bourne (Oregon) did. It might, it might not. But it's clear that the city's contraction leaves much doubt about its future, and the glorious past of the former powerhouse remains to confront and confound the present residents.

There are lots of great galleries of decaying Detroit around the 'net (I"ve linked to one or two of them), and Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have produced some of the best.

 -=[ Grant ]=-

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FRIDAY SURPRISE: All aboard!

Friday, January 15, 2010 Filed in: Friday Surprise!, Completely irrelevant, History

The site English Russia entices me to visit the former Soviet Union - the sheer number of abandoned installations makes my head spin. Today the site beckons me with two related stories about abandoned railways in the former superpower.

First, a look at a never-operational line in northern Siberia, apparently built at Stalin's personal request. The reason for a railroad from nowhere to nowhere remains a mystery, though in all fairness we do the same thing with highways in Alaska.

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The second is of a locomotive depot in the same part of the country, but these were all operational - until the USSR broke apart. At some point, everyone just walked away...

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-=[ Grant ]=-

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FRIDAY SURPRISE: Motor City Mildew.

Friday, August 07, 2009 Filed in: Friday Surprise!, History

I've featured a number of decay-chronicling websites, but this one is unique. onlynDetroit.com doesn't just show the deterioration of a once-proud city, it gives the why and how of urban decay. In its many pages you'll learn the stories behind the landmarks, where they came from and how they happened to get where they are today. Along with the analysis is the occasional prescription for renewal, and a happy ending or two as some eyesores get refurbished and reopened.

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The photography isn't of the same standards as some urban exploration sites, spelling errors abound, and the text sometimes describes scenes for which there are no pictures - but those are minor quibbles that only help prove that the whole is greater than the sum if its parts. onlynDetroit.com is obviously the work of people who have great affection for their city despite its flaws, and the same can be said of their site. A great place to kill some free time.

-=[ Grant ]=-

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FRIDAY SURPRISE: The Russians Aren't Coming! The Russians Aren't Coming!

Friday, October 26, 2007 Filed in: Friday Surprise!, Completely irrelevant, Things I like, History
Well, definitely not in these!

Owing to my unnatural fascination with old and abandoned things, I find the concept of an aircraft boneyard to be absolutely irresistible. The most famous of them is no doubt the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center outside of Tucson, but there are others.

The Russians have such things, too, and they can be a fascinating glimpse into the "other side" of the Cold War.

 -=[ Grant ]=-

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