Mr. P. Explores

A recent return to one of the most beautiful abandoned churches I've ever had the opportunity to document, Detroit, Michigan's famous "St. Curvy." While the day was gloomy and rather morose, the insides of this old beauty did not disappoint. Enjoy the set and have a great Saturday out there, all, wherever you may be today! -Mr. P.

A stash of old cars that were stumbled upon several years ago on the back streets of Highland Park, Michigan in what I surmise was a defunct scrap yard. Even the old wrecker appeared rusted and left behind. A case of the right place at the right time; I can't imagine these old beauties are still sitting there, even in a bashed up state. Things move quickly; sometimes lucky is plain old lucky. Enjoy the set and have a great Friday out there, all! -Mr. P.

This summer, I spent a long amount of time scanning old photos from digital archives of the "Polar Bear" yearbooks from the now-abandoned Highland Park Community High School in Highland Park, Michigan, looking for photos taken decades ago that might match up with photos I have taken there over the last eight years of various documentations of the school. Recently, I was able to return to the school to reshoot specific areas that I wanted to match up, and today we look at a large auditorium style classroom that appears to have, at one time, been used for drama and theater, as well as large class projects and lecture. While the shots are not all perfect matchups, it is surreal to see this location as it once was, before I was ever born. Most of these shots come from the early to mid-1970's, with one or two going back to the 1950's. It was well worth the time to have gone through so many yearbooks to find even these candid shots, which are scans of a scan, then touched up using various AI photographic software to get them as clean and as crisp as possible .

As always, I would love to hear from anyone who went to this high school prior to the newer one having been built in the late 1970's. Share your stories and memories with us here; this old building is STILL beautiful, even in ruin, and I would love to hear your thoughts and tales from when she was one of the most gorgeous and vital schools in the metro-Detroit area back in the day. Thanks, enjoy the set and have a wonderful Thursday out there, all! -Mr. P.

A look inside an abandoned naval training center in the metro Detroit, Michigan area. Some of the most beautiful nautical murals were still to be found on the walls of what was once the officer's lounge, and the woodwork on the walls and in the hallways were once exquisite. This is definitely a building that deserves renovation before the chance to do so has passed. Enjoy the set and have a wonderful middle to your week, all. -Mr. P.

Within the melancholy environs of the first floor of Kirkbride psychiatric hospital once known as the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, I came upon a sight I hadn't expected; the presence of children’s toys scattered through some of its rooms. A large portion of the dolls, balls, stuffed animals, and other toys visitors see today (which did throw me for a brief loop), particularly in places such as Room 319, commonly associated in paranormal lore with a young girl called “Lily," are not artifacts left behind when the hospital closed. Many of these items were brought into the building much later by paranormal investigators, tour guides, and visitors. Leaving toys has become something of a ghost-hunting tradition here; offer a child spirit something to play with, place a ball on the floor, turn on the cameras, and wait to see whether anything moves. Something I found out about after I returned home from the trip.

This modern staging can make the place seem a little more theatrical than its actual history, but as it turns out, children really were part of life at the institution. During its long history, the hospital housed patients of many ages, including children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities, developmental conditions, epilepsy, psychiatric illnesses, behavioral problems, and other conditions that institutions of the period frequently grouped together under the broad umbrella of “mental illness.” At various times, younger patients were housed in dedicated wards or buildings, separated at least to some degree from the adult population. As was common in American institutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some children remained institutionalized for years, sometimes growing into adulthood within the system.

So while the particular doll sitting in a hallway today probably did not belong to a child who lived there a century ago, the idea of children inhabiting these enormous buildings is not invented for the ghost tours. They really did sleep in these rooms and wards, eat meals there, attend activities, play, undergo treatment, and spend portions (sometimes enormous portions) of their childhoods on the grounds. The modern toys are better understood as symbolic offerings placed there by later visitors. Whether anything unseen actually plays with them is another question entirely...

In any case, the things left there in their tableau served as good photographic subjects, and whether or not they have ever been touched by live hands or by those since passed makes no difference. They were still a part of the overall mood of the building. Enjoy the shots and have a fantastic Tuesday out there, everyone! -Mr. P.

There is something wonderfully strange about the Scranton Iron Furnaces. Sitting just outside downtown Scranton, Pennsylvania, four enormous stone structures rise from the landscape like the remains of some forgotten industrial civilization. They look almost ancient; part fortress, part monument, part machine. But these massive furnaces are actually survivors from the period when Scranton was becoming one of the great industrial cities of the American Rust Belt.

The story begins in the 1830s and 1840s, when brothers George and Selden Scranton became involved with an ironmaking venture at what was then called Slocum’s Hollow. The location seemed promising because northeastern Pennsylvania contained enormous deposits of anthracite coal, and businessmen were experimenting with ways to use this difficult-burning “hard coal” for industrial iron production. In 1840, the operation that eventually became the Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company began producing iron here, helping demonstrate that anthracite could successfully fuel large-scale American ironmaking.
That seemingly simple development helped transform the region.

One of the company’s great breakthroughs came with the railroad. In 1847, the Scranton operation began producing iron T-rails for the New York & Erie Railroad at a time when American railroads still depended heavily upon imported British rails. The Scrantons recognized that northeastern Pennsylvania had the ingredients necessary to create something much larger; coal mines feeding furnaces, furnaces producing iron, rolling mills shaping rails, and railroads carrying both finished products and anthracite to distant markets. That combination of coal, iron and transportation became one of the basic formulas of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution.

The little community around the works exploded with it. Slocum’s Hollow eventually became Scranton, and the family behind the ironworks literally gave the city its name. By 1865, the company had grown into an industrial powerhouse with what the National Park Service describes as the largest iron-production capacity in the United States. By 1880, the works were producing approximately 125,000 tons of pig iron, much of it transformed in the company's rolling mills and foundries into railroad rails and other products.

And then there are the furnaces themselves. Four great stone blast-furnace stacks survive today. They are massive, heavy structures constructed from stone and brick, with huge arched openings piercing their bases. They were not designed to be beautiful in the traditional sense. They were machines; industrial architecture built around heat, gravity, fuel, ore and molten iron. Yet more than a century after their fires went cold, they have become almost sculptural.

That is part of what makes the Scranton Iron Furnaces so fascinating as Rust Belt art. Stand beside them and the scale becomes apparent. These aren't simply old ruins. They are monuments to a completely different way of building America. Stone was stacked into enormous geometric forms because those forms had a job to do. Iron ore, fuel and other materials went in; tremendous heat and human labor transformed them; molten iron came out. Around these furnaces would once have been an entire landscape of machinery, smoke, railroad tracks, workers, buildings, noise, sparks and fire. Today much of that industrial ecosystem is gone, leaving the furnace stacks standing almost like the columns of a vanished temple.

The surviving structures also represent different stages in the growth of the works. National Register documentation identifies significant construction periods associated with 1848, 1852 and 1857, while later nineteenth-century improvements made the Scranton operation increasingly sophisticated. The site is recognized on the National Register of Historic Places for both its industrial history and its engineering significance.

Eventually, geography and technology began working against Scranton. The American iron and steel industry increasingly depended upon enormous quantities of high-quality iron ore coming east from Minnesota's Mesabi Range through the Great Lakes. Scranton suddenly wasn't the ideal location it had once been. In 1902, the company dismantled much of its Scranton operation and relocated production to Lackawanna, New York, near Buffalo, where Great Lakes shipping provided much easier access to western ore.

The furnaces remained, and perhaps that's fitting. Today they are preserved as the Scranton Iron Furnaces historic site, administered as part of Pennsylvania's industrial heritage network. The Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission specifically interprets the site as the remains of the Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company and its enormous role in America's Industrial Revolution.
But they are more than historical artifacts.

To me, this is exactly the sort of place that demonstrates why the Rust Belt possesses an artistic language all its own. Industrial architecture accidentally created its own form of monumental sculpture. Nobody built these furnaces expecting people 150 years later to photograph them because they were beautiful. Their beauty came from purpose. Massive stone walls existed because they had to contain unimaginable heat. Arches existed because workers and materials had to move through them. Their scale came from production rather than aesthetics.
And now that their original purpose is gone, we can finally see the forms themselves. Stone. Brick. Arch. Shadow. Rust. Grass growing where men once worked beside molten iron. There is something almost Roman about them now. The Rust Belt is filled with structures like this; blast furnaces, grain elevators, steel mills, railroad viaducts, machine shops and abandoned factories. All have crossed an invisible line between machinery and monument. They were once ordinary pieces of working infrastructure. Time has transformed them into something else.

The Scranton Iron Furnaces are especially powerful because they represent almost the beginning of that story. Before the giant steel complexes of Pittsburgh, Bethlehem, Buffalo, Cleveland and Gary dominated the industrial landscape, places like this were figuring out how coal, iron, railroads and human labor could be combined on an enormous scale. Northeastern Pennsylvania's anthracite helped power that transformation, and Scranton grew directly out of it. The National Park Service today recognizes the Lackawanna Valley as a nationally important industrial landscape shaped by coal mining, railroads, ironmaking and immigration.

The fires are gone. The rolling mills are gone. Most of the sprawling industrial complex disappeared more than a century ago. But those four massive stone furnaces are still there. Silent. Weathered. They aren't ruins that need to be apologized for or hidden. They are part of the physical vocabulary of the Rust Belt: monuments to the people who worked there, the city that grew around them, and an industrial civilization that quite literally helped build the rails beneath America.

We visited these amazing structures in the summer of 2023, on a balmy day at the end of June, and out of all the places we looked into on our trip east that weekend, these were the most impressive. Enjoy the set and if you ever venture out Scranton way, be sure to stop and marvel at one of America's first real steel-making structures! Have a great Monday out there, all! -Mr. P.

A look back at the magnificent hulk that was (and IS) Fisher Body Plant #21 in Detroit, Michigan in December of 2023, months before she would be fenced off and prepped for the transformation into apartments that she is currently undergoing. This couldn't have been a more gloomy and foreboding day, which made every shot rather moody. I know I speak for many when I say that I miss this old girl; she was always a place where you could relax, soak up the quiet and always find something interesting to aim your camera at. AND it was usually a place where you would find something you hadn't noticed, no matter how many times you'd been there. While I am very glad she is receiving a new lease on life, I will always remember the good times with friends and colleagues had here over the years. Enjoy the set and have a great Sunday out there, all. -Mr. P.

A few shots from inside what used to be an old municipal sewer and water truck maintenance building in Detroit, Michigan. Long hallways, shadows and light, colorful graffiti galore, puddles for reflections and lines for days. A perfect place to gather up some interesting perspectives on any given day. Perhaps not the least known place, but one that is always going to show you something worth aiming your camera at. Enjoy the set and have a great Saturday out there, all! -Mr. P.

Another slice of a recent trip down to Weston, West Virginia to wander and document the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum; in this leg of the documentation, the ward for the criminally insane. Some of the worst cases on the whole campus were housed here, and you can see that the windows were constructed accordingly. There were several jail cells here as well as a caged in guard station. This was the first building I walked through on that hot and steamy West Virginia morning in early September. Enjoy the trip through and stay tuned for more next week! Have a great Friday out there, all! -Mr. P.

A tour through the silent and crumbling remains of what used to be a beautiful library inside a massive, abandoned and century-old Detroit, Michigan area high school. I have been to this building many a time, but truthfully, I am usually hurried through the place and only reshoot the most common locations that are readily noticed. I've never had a real chance to poke around and actually dive deep into the nooks and crannies of this truly wonderful building. Last weekend, I was finally able to do so, and in that multi-hour stop, we came upon a section of the place that we had never seen before; the library. How I missed this over the last six years tells you that a) the place truly IS that big and labyrinthine where you COULD miss it, and b) I've never had enough time to go search for it. As you can see, the place was once built by craftsmen who know their art; the plaster work and the columns, as well as the stone fireplace tells one that this was not just an institutional "media center" the likes of which you'd find in a modern school. No, this was a TRUE library! A place that welcomed students with a fire going in the fireplace, tables at which to quietly read or research using actual books and encyclopedias and (gasp) a CARD CATALOG! Sadly, time has not been kind to it, and you have to wonder what sort of animal or benighted savage would deface a place this beautiful. Imagine students of the 1950's and 60's sitting in this room with a stern but helpful librarian holding court, keeping her domain civilized and studious. Enjoy the set and have a magnificent day out there, all! -Mr. P.