Adventure time (Nanticoke edition!)
Yesterday, Tanya continued her streak of being the most awesome girlfriend ever (nearly three years running!) by basically saying 'grab your camera, we're leaving' and throwing an address into my GPS which was 2 hours away. She wouldn't tell me what was going on, where we were going, just that we were leaving and we'd arrive there at some point. 2 hours later (after an absolutely GORGEOUS drive north on 476 almost the ENTIRE time - that road gets SUPER pretty past Allentown) we arrived in Nanticoke, PA, a little town in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area. Tanya directed me to park my car off to the side of a field and led me down into it. After some confusion about directions (easily cleared up with a glance at Google Maps since apparently even in a field 2 hours north of Philly you can get 3G now) we stumbled through some brush and arrived at something way, way too awesome for words.
To summarize - an entire abandoned complex of duplex houses in the middle of nowhere, arranged in a ring with a gorgeously overgrown courtyard in the middle. There were about 20 buildings, all still standing, all absolutely awesome and unique on the inside. This place was too cool for words.
To give the 30,000 foot summary of the location, while it's not got a history as creepy as some abandoned spots, it's still AWESOME. Basically, it was a housing complex for miners working for the DL&W railroad company. It's notable for several reasons: one, all of the buildings are made of solid concrete, basement to roof. It's part of the reason why they're still there and it also explains why their more recent history is a bit more interesting. It was built in 1911, abandoned in 1924, and since then hasn't been lived in. While it was supposed to be a luxurious garden city, what it actually was was dank and wet. Despite the builder's best intentions, houses made entirely of molded concrete trapped moisture, and keeping paint on them/keeping the insides dry was no small task. Tanya found stories online of people who recalled their parents waking up in the morning only to find that the dampness had caused their shirts to FREEZE SOLID where they were hanging.
Either way, the place was quickly abandoned and left to rot. Efforts were made to demolish the buildings but according to sources we couldfind, the first demolition effort involving 1000 sticks of dynamite failed to do significant enough damage to one of the solid-concrete rebar-reinforced houses and eventually demolition plans were scrapped. Since then, the buildings have been used for all manner of fun and exciting things including testing the impact of high-caliber rifle rounds (there's copious evidence of that) and also chemical fire training exercises (the insides of most buildings are riddle by fire damage with the upper floors' ceilings completely covered in a sticky carbon substance. They're surprisingly intact considering what they've been through, with some stairs still looking smooth and clean-cut as if they were poured yesterday. Every building remains standing, though some have worse damage than others. A lot of them are surreal to look at - they're obviously heavy, but since they're so reinforced and solid, they seem to withstand massive missing chunks of structural walls, the collapse of their foundations, and sinking deep into the dirt. Some houses are listing to one side, with one unit of the duplex sunk underground while the other half floats in the air with nothing underneath it. Many have rooms that are completely demolished or have missing floors, but overall the rest of the building doesn't seem to suffer for lack of it. It's really surreal stepping inside some, as they sink at an angle and so you feel like you're falling or walking uphill but in the frame of reference of the house you're walking at an angle, it's crazy. There's a full photo set of the trip here on Flickr if you're interested.
Afterwards, for good measure, since we were in the Scranton area, we became total tourists and checked out a bunch of places that were mentioned on the office - we got pizza at Alfredo's Pizza Cafe, we got drinks at Poor Richard's and we stopped by the Steamtown Mall (to buy candy, of course, and apparently they have a Dunder Mifflin shop there as well.)
After that came a looooong drive home, but it was okay 'cause Tanya's the best company. What an awesome Saturday.
To summarize - an entire abandoned complex of duplex houses in the middle of nowhere, arranged in a ring with a gorgeously overgrown courtyard in the middle. There were about 20 buildings, all still standing, all absolutely awesome and unique on the inside. This place was too cool for words.
To give the 30,000 foot summary of the location, while it's not got a history as creepy as some abandoned spots, it's still AWESOME. Basically, it was a housing complex for miners working for the DL&W railroad company. It's notable for several reasons: one, all of the buildings are made of solid concrete, basement to roof. It's part of the reason why they're still there and it also explains why their more recent history is a bit more interesting. It was built in 1911, abandoned in 1924, and since then hasn't been lived in. While it was supposed to be a luxurious garden city, what it actually was was dank and wet. Despite the builder's best intentions, houses made entirely of molded concrete trapped moisture, and keeping paint on them/keeping the insides dry was no small task. Tanya found stories online of people who recalled their parents waking up in the morning only to find that the dampness had caused their shirts to FREEZE SOLID where they were hanging.
Either way, the place was quickly abandoned and left to rot. Efforts were made to demolish the buildings but according to sources we couldfind, the first demolition effort involving 1000 sticks of dynamite failed to do significant enough damage to one of the solid-concrete rebar-reinforced houses and eventually demolition plans were scrapped. Since then, the buildings have been used for all manner of fun and exciting things including testing the impact of high-caliber rifle rounds (there's copious evidence of that) and also chemical fire training exercises (the insides of most buildings are riddle by fire damage with the upper floors' ceilings completely covered in a sticky carbon substance. They're surprisingly intact considering what they've been through, with some stairs still looking smooth and clean-cut as if they were poured yesterday. Every building remains standing, though some have worse damage than others. A lot of them are surreal to look at - they're obviously heavy, but since they're so reinforced and solid, they seem to withstand massive missing chunks of structural walls, the collapse of their foundations, and sinking deep into the dirt. Some houses are listing to one side, with one unit of the duplex sunk underground while the other half floats in the air with nothing underneath it. Many have rooms that are completely demolished or have missing floors, but overall the rest of the building doesn't seem to suffer for lack of it. It's really surreal stepping inside some, as they sink at an angle and so you feel like you're falling or walking uphill but in the frame of reference of the house you're walking at an angle, it's crazy. There's a full photo set of the trip here on Flickr if you're interested.
Afterwards, for good measure, since we were in the Scranton area, we became total tourists and checked out a bunch of places that were mentioned on the office - we got pizza at Alfredo's Pizza Cafe, we got drinks at Poor Richard's and we stopped by the Steamtown Mall (to buy candy, of course, and apparently they have a Dunder Mifflin shop there as well.)
After that came a looooong drive home, but it was okay 'cause Tanya's the best company. What an awesome Saturday.