The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
The joy of urban exploring
Sweat was dripping from three students’ brows as they waded through the woods in search of the remnants to a decrepit train station. As they pushed through the final clump of bushes, they fell into a clearing and found a 300foottall, rusty light tower.
One of the explorers immediately started to climb, and as she scaled the ladder, it began to creak and sway. The higher she got, the more it moved. But despite the dilapidated state of the tower, she continued to climb. When she finally reached the top, her view was spectacular. Everyone there was entranced by the abandoned world around them, and the group stayed silent and admired the forgotten treasure.
These three urban explorers from
Quinnipiac University — Emma Shipton, Amelia Griffin and Josh Sprague — climbed through the old abandoned Cedar Hill rail yard in New Haven. It was once one of the largest rail yards on the East Coast, but now it has rotted away and become the perfect place for urban explorers to investigate.
While many people find it strange that someone would risk their own safety to look at what most people see as condemned, this group’s story isn’t uncommon.
“I like to learn about different things.” Sprague said. “There’s definitely an area of curiosity that leads me into wanting to go into these buildings.”
A large network of people who spend their free time going into abandoned places call themselves urban explorers. The exact definition according to Google is “a person who explores manmade structures as a pastime, especially in areas not generally open to the public.” They want to know what’s inside a decaying building, and the rush of adrenaline that comes with exploration it is very popular.
Brendan Hurley, a senior film major at Quinnipiac, has been exploring abandoned places for years.
“You’re going because you appreciate the history,” Hurley said. “You’re not looking for a place to do sketchy things … when we go in, we take pictures of everything, like we’ll find really cool things from the 1920s and 1910s, cause some of these places are that old, and just seeing this history in such a decrepit state and being able to preserve it then, like in its current state forever, is fascinating.”
But what else drives these people to go into these buildings? Why do they look past the health and safety risks of these properties?
“I am so curious and I just want to learn,” Shipton said. “There is so much we don’t know and I’ve got so much time, I just want to see what I can, and somebody left something in there for us to find.”
The dangers
Some of the biggest safety issues that come with these decaying buildings are their structural integrity and hazardous environmental issues.
“I understand the allure that people have for these things, but some of them are pretty dangerous,” said Quinnipiac Civil Engineering Professor John Greenleaf. “I’ve seen walls collapse, because the mortar is no good between the stones that holds the stones together. Floors could cave in, so people could experience falls. Things like termites eat the wood and the steel will rust and then decay.”
The U.S. Fire Administration has also listed many other structural issues that come with vacant and abandoned buildings. A few of these things include trip hazards lying on the floor, standing water in the basement, hazardous waste that’s been left behind and criminal activity that can further damage the building.
One example is Holy Land U.S.A. in Waterbury. This old rotting Catholic theme park had been shut down since 1984 and closed to the public since 2011. It finally opened back up to the public in the past year. News outlets over the years have detailed rapes, murders and vandalisms that took place on the property.
“When we were here last year it was closed. You couldn’t even come up here,” said Donna Brady, a longtime resident of Waterbury and frequent visitor to Holy Land when she was young.
Most of the buildings on the site were built before or in the 1950s, meaning there is a high probability they contain lead paint. Over time, the paint rots off the walls and becomes lead dust, which can easily seep into the ground and make the water toxic for people to drink.
“Many factories built around that time and before were also built along waterways,” said Courtney McGinnis, associate professor of biological sciences at Quinnipiac. “This means that as the building decays, rain, snow melt etc. carries the chemicals into the waterway, which is in close proximity.”
She also explained that asbestos, a mineral that can cause lung cancer, can become a huge issue when buildings decay.
“It has contaminated soil, water and air,” McGinnis said. “Asbestos was used very often in building materials, for example cement pipes, as they erode and water passes through them contaminates the drinking water.”
Many explorers stress the dangers to newcomers to warn them that it’s not the easiest hobby to get started in.
“It is an extremely dangerous thing to do and not always legal,” said Rich Gugs, a veteran urban explorer from Connecticut. “I try to seek permission before I go anywhere whenever possible, and although I have not gotten hurt myself, I have seen and heard of a lot of people being hurt over the years. We even lost a local urban explorer about two years ago in a tragic accident. She had slipped and fell down into a storm drain and was tragically killed.”
But the possibility of beams collapsing, floors giving out and toxic inhalants lingering in the area doesn’t stop most avid urban explorers. The past pushes them to continue to explore.
“I’d say it’s definitely more so the adventure aspect,” Shipton said. “With this one school I went in, you’d find these old textbooks and you could go through them and see kids’ notes and stuff like that. So kind of like seeing what it’s like and seeing what gets left behind.”
The newest trend
Over the last 10 years, the want to explore abandoned places and venture into the unknown has become an extremely popular trend.
When searching “urbex” on Google trends, the results show that searches have been on a steady incline since 2004. Out of the top five subregions that search the term, Connecticut is number four. Subreddits, forums specifically dedicated to specific topics on the social news website Reddit, show that the terms “urbex” and “urban exploration” have anywhere between 11,500 and 964,000 followers on each channel.
These large groups of people that have created the name “urban explorers” for themselves spend their free time going from one abandoned treasure to the next. They take photos and videos, find little pieces of history and try to uncover the mysteries of the past.
For Sprague, exploring to understand history is his favorite part.
“The most interesting part for me, is looking for artifacts of what it used to be, because now it’s obviously this old beat down building, but then just to kind of look for hints of something that might have happened in the building before, cause like you kind of see that contrast of like, oh yeah this is just an old decrepit building, but it used to be something else,” Sprague said.
The urbex community, as they call themselves, has created blogs and Facebook groups, where some have close to 1,600 members. Within these platforms people can post pictures, videos and interesting facts about the places they are exploring. Examples of these sites are Abandoned CT and Damned Connecticut, Abandoned Tri State and Abandoned Connecticut.
Gugs, a frequent sharer on Abandoned Connecticut and his own personal YouTube page, is an advocate for the hobby.
“I really like the communities because not only do I get to share my locations with other enthusiasts, but I can see locations from around the world without even leaving my house,” Gugs said. “As long as it’s something historic, something from the past or a window into our past then I love it and I love to explore every inch of it.”
The members in each group can network and message each other to learn more about abandoned places near them.
“There are communities of people that don’t post the locations to anything,” Hurley said, “because no one ever posts a location. If you want to find out where a picture was taken, you have to get in touch with the person who took it directly … and that’s what makes it almost a community in itself too because the way you find everything is by who you talk to.”