after my surgery screening today i met jerry out at “rearden”. didn’t get all that far, just the power building, before we saw movement and trucks. damn workers. hung out in there for 2 hours waiting to see if they’d leave but they didn’t. at one point we thought we heard a horse, and we thought “if they have mounted security we are so screwed” haha
i am so fucking bored. what on earth am i gonna do while on disability.
recent dreams:
the government decided to restart it’s nuclear testing program, and started detonating atomic bombs at the nevada test site again. when i found this out i wanted to try to be one of the people who got to observe the tests from the press hill. i guess i found out right before any of this was happening tho and i wasn’t able to. then i thought, oh adrienne must be able to see the tests from las vegas. then suddenly i was in the area or something, and i got the bright idea that if they were doing tests, i should be able to see them from any of the surrounding areas. so i was gonna drive out to the desert to try to watch. i got delayed and the test was performed, and it was so huge that i was able to see it from wherever it was that i happened to be.
adr2 bliss and i were trying to go to bethlehem steel, and we met at some location, and bliss was driving. she was like, wtf are we gonna do, we can’t walk in through the gate with armed police standing there. and i was like DUH we’re gonna go in near the marine star, and they were like oh, yeah smart. so bliss started driving toward the marine star from wherever it was that we were and we couldn’t find the right street. so we got out of the car and started walking down this very strange stone path, much like the trail through watkins glen, just not pretty. then suddenly there would be weird pipes and machines blocking the path, and one pipe spontaneously combusted, and it all seemed really dangerous. so we decided not to go. then i guess it was another day and i was trying to talk to adr2 on IM about going that day, and she said “only” in response and i was like wtf does that mean, and it was some sort of thing she bought and it really made no sense. but i guess it meant they weren’t gonna go. i really wanted to go shoot the coke plant at sunset so i was just going to go by myself, but i knew my mom would freak out so i didn’t.
i was doing something at the richardson complex, outside, and i was in the back of the property when i noticed someone going through a revolving door in the fence. so i figured, hell i’m gonna go in too and finally get to see the building. so i got my laptop bag to look professional and i went in, and walked in the back door which led you into the lobby of the admin building. the whole thing was pristeen and perfect looking. i had some sort of thought about it being the nicest kept kirkbride in the country.
in other real news, i’m so totally excited about this slide show i put together on dvd for the terminal. someone had one up on youtube and bev liked it and asked if we could show it on a loop at the train show. well the persons slide show didnt necessarily use the best and most recent photos, so it really gave the impression that it was still a bombed out shell. so i put a new slide show together last night, took me about 6 hours (including searching the web for photos i wanted but didn’t have), and i set it to the unfortunately titled – for this slide show – nin song “leaving hope”. i set it to “ripe with decay” first, cuz that also seemed to be appropriately titled, but besides the odd coincidence of a weird background noise that sounded like trains playing right when i began showing trains, it didn’t really fit. too many loud points that didn’t coincide with the images. “leaving hope” worked much better. but i’m a dork cuz i’m really proud of it, and i swear if russell picks it apart and tells me what i should have done i’m gonna stab him. *edit* ok i just watched it again, and i’m really really really proud of it. i think it looks great. haha well done me!
thursday brought more deinal for us as far as locations…david and i headed out to the east side, first passing spaulding fibre which had a few cars parked behind the fences, not a good sign. we also went by wickwire steel and didn’t see any obvious entrance, especially one where we wouldn’t be spotted – as the property in front of the site have active businesses. ok, off to our target destination of church of the transfig. denied. aside from not being able to find the rumored entrance now that the doors are locked, there were also people sitting on a porch of the building directly next to the church. they stopped talking as i tried to look into the windows of this shed thing. ok next…sacred heart church, also near the terminal. i had looked at a map to find the location, seemed easy enough. except we drove around for an hour and a half not finding the street. asked people at a gas station, followed their directions, still didn’t find the street. at this point we noticed smoke coming from something in the first ward, so we drove over there to see what was on fire. turned out to be a house, but for a moment i thought “what a great photo op it would be if one of the elevators spontaneously combusted.” on driving back towards the terminal from the first ward, what street do we find, the one we were looking for the entire time. i then realized that james, lei and i had driven by this church 2 years ago and i had refused to get out of the car due to the neighborhood. no obvious entrance plus the fact that people were around, and that there is a group working on restoring and reopening the church made us leave pretty quickly. ok now what. i didn’t want to go to the orphanage again, and it turns out david hadn’t been to concrete central so we headed there. spent a bit of time there, got lunch at the place with the biggest pieces of pie ever, then dropped him off at the terminal while i went to the doctor. back to the terminal after my appt for the board meeting, then back home once it was dark.
had a good time. still mad the nursing home foiled me. i figure just wait a few weeks for the ghetto kids to take care of it hahaha. off to go through my photos.
wednesday brought david coming into town – late, got detained by the canadians for an hour – just as chris and alex arrived. the plan was to try to hit up st mary’s manor, an old nursing home in niagara falls. someone had told me about “a nursing home” in the falls, but no name, and that is what i came across. unfortunately the building foiled us. it appeared as if it was just recently boarded up. we checked the perimeter 3 times, with nothing coming out of it. gah. i’m irritated haha. so driving around, we tried to find the abandoned church off main street jerry had mentioned to me awhile ago. we think we found it…but it was not abandoned. it was in bad disrepair, but your typical poor ghetto church. who knows though. so driving around more we come across mount st mary’s long term care nursing home…now i wonder exactly which nursing home this person was talking about haha. this one proved an easy target so we spent some time in there. not entirely exciting, but a new place none the less. i got to try out david’s old nikon d70 with my lens, and whatever cutting the digital did with the film lens it was quite tolerable. which is good for if i finally do decide to get one, i don’t need to buy a lens right away. afterwards i had the brilliant idea to head down to beth steel to photograph the coke plant at sunset.
headed down to beth, and started to approach the field when a big dump truck came up to go through the gate. i think they were all quite surprised that i didn’t care the guy could obviously see what we were doing. my philosophy is if you act like you’re supposed to be there, people won’t question you. so i went ahead through the field towards the buildings. no one bothered us. however once on site, i could hear some kind of construction equipment at the coke plant. as the others worked in the building i tried to find out what was going on at the coke plant and tried to decide whether i cared or not. in the end i cared, so i stuck around in the building with the others. in the end i think it was just one guy in a back hoe working on a building but i still didn’t want to risk it. i definitely want to get back at sunset though, i guess it’ll have to be on a sunday.
david and i cased the psych center, with instructions i had gotten on how to gain entry…they didn’t make any sense, and checking it out in person, i don’t know what they were talking about. oh well. spent the rest of the night at the apt watching tv.
omg i thought the law offices of *insert lawyer here* in buffalo with william shatner were exclusive to that law firm but they’re not! there was just one on for a different lawyer in detroit. haha he did a generic commercial! i dunno why i find that great.
best church sign in a long time: the best vitamin for christians is b 1. ha ha
and i don’t like “sex in the city” i find it quite annoying. i don’t need to listen to someone narrate their blog. i narrate my own life in my head pretty adequately. she has an annoying voice. god and her friends are beyond obnoxious.
yesterday mom and i arrived, had to wait at the house for the estate sale lady, then headed to royal oak for dinner. we parked by noir leather, the goth store/sex toy store that my aunt had taken me to one xmas eve. i was like I WANT TO GO IN THERE and my mom said “she’d rather not know that i’m a pervert.” LOL *looks at dan*. i eventually went in to look at the clothes, but it was alot of the same lip service and tripp stuff i could get at hot topic for cheaper. or make once i learn to sew hahaha. after dinner we went looking for the mysterious ray’s ice cream shop that we had 2 different directions for. we never found it and no one we asked had heard of it.
today brought exploring with david in detroit. first stop, michigan central station again. and we spent 5 hours there hahahahah. i know he said he never gets tired of mcs, and he goes alot on his own, i can’t help but feel like he MUST have been bored after 5 hours there. god knows i can’t stand spending 5 hours at bct with explorers anymore. spent more time on the first floor, checked out the mezzanine level, then each of the 18 floors. while still on the main floor some guy came walking through. no big deal. later on one of the higher floors i walked by a room and we had woken some guy up. i was startled and then smiled at him. haha didn’t know what else to do. i think that is the first time i’ve encountered a homeless person in any location i’ve been too. psycho ted in REA terminal never actually confronted us, he just started things on fire. and i never talked with jesus the walker (well i may have now if it’s the same homeless guy with a dog).
alot of the floors were the same, but walked through them all anyway. ended up using my whole 512 card. oh yeah, i managed to get the camera to work acceptibly in aperture mode. had to keep it on the lowest f stop since the up button doesn’t work, adjusted the +/-, and it just did longish exposures when necessary. we’ll see how they actually look on something bigger than the camera’s lcd screen.
after mcs we stopped at a gas station to get drinks and the guy gave me a discount for no reason. rock.
i had decided instead of trying to crawl through the tunnel to the post office/school storage building next to mcs we’d go to a factory. i don’t know what first factory david had taken me by, but there were city workers around removing the grass between sidewalk cement cracks. why do that in an abandoned neighborhood is beyond me. he didn’t feel good about them being there so we went over to the packard plant. which is HUGE but david said mostly similar on each floor. big open floors with the typical factory columns. one building led to the rest, each one a bit different, but each floor the same. as david pointed out, it was kind of annoying that you really had no clue as to what each building and each floor did in the construction of cars. it was pretty empty, no equipment, just debris and things dumped. interesting but he said some of the others, especially studebaker in south bend, is way better.
we were out for about 8 hours and he brought me back to the house. went to dinner with my mom and then WE FOUND RAYS ICE CREAM and omg best ice cream in a long time. special made flavors, huuuuge servings. a++ may go there for breakfast tomorrow before going home haha.
found out my dads sister has another child that she gave up for adoption way back when!! and her husband has one not by her too!! i guess technically that means i have another cousin – a half cousin i guess that would make it. and their 2 kids, my real cousins, have no idea. the only people who know are my aunt, my parents, and my dad’s other sister. she had spilled the beans to my parents years and years ago, and no one knows they, and now i, know hahaha. scandalous! mom and i discussed the whole story of my dad’s parents too. my grandma had been married before she married my grandpa which i knew. nothing really secret there. we joke that my dad has a twin though because one of my parents friends cut a picture out of a vermont newspaper and sent it to us because they thought the picture was of my father. this guy looked exactly like my dad, the same hair, same beard, same sort of bald spot in the beard. and he was a photographer. just like my dad. but my mom said dad doesn’t feel like something is missing and that he’s incomplete like some twins do when they don’t know they’re a twin hahah.
so long day. tired but waiting to be tired enough to go to sleep. leaving in the morning to go home, then work at 8.
bethlehem steel is overrated. not to say that it wasn’t cool…it just isn’t as good as i was expecting. and it’s not to say i won’t go back. i most definitely will to check out the coke plant side some more. i think the coke plant took about 10 years off my life, but that’s ok. work has been so smoky lately i can feel the tumors growing in my lungs. at first glance i don’t think any of my pictures are any good. that’s what is weird about beth steel…it just doesn’t scream “photo op” to me like alot of other places do. ah well. and i don’t know wtf brian was talking about years ago when he said there was no way in, and there were gates and guards. try walking through the field. you really can’t get much easier.
and the decision to buy a new digital camera has now been made for me. i broke the minolta. tripod fell over, the up button doesn’t work anymore, so i can’t change manual settings. i can still use it on auto. the zoom slide is touchy now, it sticks, but still works. maybe i can still sell it for like 50$ on ebay or something. it seems a shame to throw it out, but i don’t think it’s fixable. time to research.
thursday turned into an interesting day. i was expecting to hear from drie who was in town with an explorer from dallas about going to bct. met them at the building around 4:30 and did that and the roof. they were headed to toronto to meet up with ian and kowalski for dinner and invited me. sure. i had nothing else to do.
picked up kowalski on the side of the road near union station then drove around to find a place to eat. ended up at an italian place in the gaybourhood. ian met us there. great food. after that we decided to go crane climbing. that’s a first. i’m not a climber. so we drove out to the cityplace construction sites but were foiled there, lots of activity. and it was like midnight at this point. so we went off to the college park site. no problem. got inside easily and took the stairs up to the 26th floor where we encountered a locked door. shit. i half jokingly asked if the elevators worked. and they did. so we bypassed the locked floor and continued our way up. 52 floors. yikes. i almost died. somewhere in the 30s we heard music. crap. someone else was in the building with a radio on one of the 20s floors. oh well, we were already this far…once we got to the roof i was way too tired to climb the crane. that and i decided that i have no problem with heights if i’m on something solid, but i don’t think i would have done well on the crane. so i chilled there while the rest of them went up. then we all hung out on the roof for another hour probably. so on the way down the man with the radio had moved up to the 40th floor. we got by him though, and took the elevator the rest of the way down hahahahahah.
took ian to his car, took kowalski home, and drove back here for drie and brian to crash on my floor.
69 flights of stairs yesterday. my ass and thighs better be stunning now. surprisingly, my legs don’t hurt, but my ankle does…
i have found a location in niagara falls to try my geiger counter out at. i am so going tomorrow! woo hoo for becoming sterile!
i am researching for my site again, and it began with trying to find out the real name of “the battery factory”. brian refers to it on his site as “power city” and i don’t know why. i *think* it was autolite battery factory but i’m waiting for confirmation from someone who mentions his father working at autolite on his blog. but now branching out from that search, trying to find more information based on the fact that the area spontaneously burned a few years ago i’m finding all sorts of fascinating information about the manhattan project in the falls. (see above note). and my god, this just really makes me feel that i need to do this as a career. researcher, or historian, library of congress or something. because this made my day and i wish i had started this earlier today.
one of the fascinating tid bits…the graphite that was used in the first nuclear reactor by Enrico Fermi came from the carbo-sil plant when it was National Carbon/Union Carbide. ok so *I* thought that was interesting.
wow i really really really want to write a book about the manhattan project in WNY….
the orphanage. it’s a nifty little place, but not huge amounts to see. and the main problem is that it’s very boarded up, thus very very dark inside. not too many photographic opportunities, and the ones that were there were still so low light that it was tough. esp since i went all digital again, and the noise was incredible, and most every picture is blurry. but i took a picture of myself in a confessional. probably the one and only time i will ever be in a confessional. the chapel was cool though strangely boring for a catholic church. the structure’s not in too bad of shape although sean fell through the floor at one point. 2 of the buildings are exactly the same, classrooms littered with desks and random furniture, but…too dark. didn’t go in the basement much, too dark. and too old and creepy. and given the location of the site, if there was going to be a dead body anywhere, it’d be there. the gymnasium building was neat, not completely dark haha. power building accessible as well.
after we finished there we did a quick trip to spaulding. so the reznor heater is now mine! after all the time ian and i spent at spaulding, and now that i got the heater, i have no real reason to get back. checked out pretty much everything now, and nothing really caught my eye that i missed the 1st trip. i’ll still go with whoever is interested but…no real need to do so. as far as industrial sites go, i still prefer carbos-sil for some reason, and keep going back.
will post pics tomorrow or monday. helping mike work on the floor at the terminal tomorrow, and some photographer is coming to look around. possibly doing a sound check for the voodoo dollies for the movie premier too but i’m not sure. it’s best to schedule everything on the same day, so i don’t have to keep going there. did anyone think i’d ever say i didn’t want to be at the terminal all the time? hahaha i just have other things to do, like sleep…
right, was supposed to go to danielle’s grad party today, but i came home from exploring and slept for 4 hours instead. and i don’t feel bad about missing it, because she continues to blow me off while she’s home…so whatever.
i’m going to the german orphanage tomorrow. wtf! yes this existed in buffalo and has been abandoned for ages, and i don’t know of anyone else who has heard of it. there is a website for it, mainly for reunions, with no photos of the building. any other online info has been in obits, and genealogical reference sites. so this is going to be my little secret 🙂 and whoever else is granted permission to read this entry 🙂 i still don’t know how my toronto ue friends found out about it. but it’s in the ghetto. like, near by but worse than the terminal ghetto. so hopefully with the big group of people that will be there, we won’t get stabbed. but incase i don’t come back, go look for me in the orphanage.