Who’s in the mood for a little ruin porn? I’ve been waiting a while to put up this piece about visiting the abandoned Forest Haven mental asylum outside Washington, DC.
Check it out if you’re interested in scenes of horror, neglect and municipal carelessness.
A creepy toy altar at the abanonded mental asylum
BONUS SLIDESHOW! Continue reading
Through the window of an abandoned two-story home in a rural part of Maryland, not too far from the bay bridge.
I was driving back to DC from the Delaware shore, finding myself completely unable to resist my secret fascination with abandoned buildings.
Burned out, hollowed out, run-down, forgotten and forsaken, dozens of these relics haunt the farmlands of the eastern seaboard. Some have been completely ransacked, stripped for their copper and timber. Others, as is the case with the beauty I discovered, have been left alone to sink back into the wilderness unmolested and undisturbed. Others still have been repurposed: Turned into meth houses, children’s play forts or a place to stash old car batteries.
Call me emo, but I can’t help wanting to explore each one of them, to do a post-mortem and to invent some story of death and mystery. So I turned down a road I’d never been down before and found a house, one of the most fascinating I’ve ever come across. more photos after the jump
Photo from snacktime2007 via Flickr
The WikiLeak hacker battle has been one of the most interesting stories to cross the desk in a long time. Not only does it appeal to my trouble-maker sympathies, but it has given me a chance to investigate and learn more about the chaotic workings of the online anarchists. I think we’ll see a lot more stories coming out soon about Anonymous and the other scraggly offshoots of 4Chan.
I wrote this story for our central house wire, an example of the kind of work I often do when not reporting.
From the State Department's Student Exchange Website
In the summer, Rehoboth Beach, Delaware is a city run on quarters and foreign labor. Oksana at the pizza shop, Viktor running bumper cars and Irina working skee-ball. They came from Ukraine, Bulgaria and Russia. Nobody seemed to mind, except a few cranks who took the time to write angry letters to the local newspaper demanding more jobs for Americans. But now, a new story from the Associate Press has shed light on some of the shocking abuses these students suffer when they get to the United States.
Its sad and maddening. I met students in Thailand who wanted to participate in the program. One girl told me about a friend who had a job in Six Flags in New Jersey, and while she didn’t know what that meant, really, it made me cringe. Obviously, there isn’t anything wrong with an honest day’s work, but its important to remember that these kids are paying for their experience. Some middle man recruiter takes their money promising them a rewarding glimpse of life in America, before stuffing them into a crowded apartment and putting a spatula in their hand. It’s slave labor. And when things get so bad that the girls have to turn to stripping, as was the case with a student mentioned in the AP story, well, now we’re getting into the territory of sex trafficking.
I found this old book of records while clearing out my grandmother’s house this year.
It has several paper sleeves inside; each holds a pale yellow record.
I love the deco typography on the word Recordio, and the dancer illustration is actually a photograph. Neat right?
The first record inside is the only one with any marking on it. It has my great grandfather’s name, the title of a Yiddish song and the date June 29, 1943.
I tried to play the thing on my record player at home, but it only scraped and moaned and not even a trace or whisper of the music could be heard. But I like the idea that my great grandfather’s voice is seeded somewhere in the wax.
