Browsing category Abandoned

  In this museum – otherwise known as a shuttered regional hospital – a special room is dedicated to the science of deterioration. Enter this glass-framed exhibition space and you can admire an astonishing specimen of wall decomposition with its characteristic folds of drooping paint. Stay as long as you like, the show will only get better. There is even a bench for those who would like to sit and sketch or simply contemplate the epidermal changes in the scenery. All that’s missing are a

  Above, the upper floor of a mental hospital building as seen in December 2006. Below are the same three doors in December 2007 (top) and December 2008. The green door took a hit; otherwise there are surprisingly few changes, even though this area no longer has a roof. If it's still possible to return in December 2009, it will have been a good year.    

  Recent talk about how to commemorate the patient cemetery of Western State Hospital, where patients were buried for 160 years with only a number on their tombstones, once again calls attention to the sporadic dehumanization of the mentally ill. In this case, among other things, the separation of a body from its name. Burying patients without clear identification was standard practice across the country. Nonetheless, stumbling across one of those grave sites unexpectedly - like the