Rochester

The Decline and Fall of Iola

A second visit to this place proved more than enough to know why its days are numbered. Iola began its life in 1915 as a tuberculosis sanatorium, occasionally also holding mentally ill children. After TB was cured in the early 60s, Monroe County took the buildings over as offices, using them for veterans' affairs, traffic and corrections among others. Costello & Sons, a Brighton real estate firm known for constructing identical brick doctors' offices, bought the property in 2000 on a 10 year development contract, and is running out of time to tear it down and start work on its…

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Undisclosed Location #35

A meat packing plant on the west side of Rochester. The underground of it stinks to and through high heaven STILL from all the rotting meat that presumably was left there when the place closed in 199x. You do? I'd like to learn a little bit about it for my files. Crusty, rusty machinery Great gobs of greasy grimy somethings... What an innocuous name for a meat grinder

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Peeling Paint Asylums Aren’t Cliché

Don't worry, we had permission. This is the Walters Building at Rochester psych center, which is now owned by and partially used by the Al Siegel center for some sort of storage. They agreed to give about ten of us a tour, as long as we ran through it and saw the whole place in 45 minutes. Predictably, that meant we missed at least 3/4 of it. Oh well... it's the closest I'll ever get to seeing an asylum anyway. Apparently it was a dental asylum? Roofs are overrated. The stench of decay Steam tunnel to the Terrance building. Remember…

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Secret Passages Bank

I'll admit it: this isn't technically urbex, we had permission to be here. This beautiful abandoned bank will be transformed over the course of the next 8 days into a venue for ArtAwake 3, a one-night art and music exhibition in a forgotten part of the city. Until then, though, it's one hell of an abandoned building to explore! How about a giant vault door? Or a ceiling covered in frescoes? This would never happen in the Recession Unique view of the Times Square Building One beautifully complex cable

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Dear Mr Supercomputer

A return to Sykes Datatronics, a relic of that alternate reality where the Genesee valley was the cradle of the computer age. They did give us the floppy disk, the automated answering machine (press 4 for more information), and some of the first database software. And a big abandoned factory near the soccer stadium. Now that's a relic: original Macintosh, still in its box One of the weirdest things about this place is its floors. Despite being a solid concrete structure, the wood floors warped into crazy ridges up to two feet taller than the building. Squish. Say dirty. (Programmers...)…

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Red, White and Grue

Playing with flashlights in a local drain... in the rain. T3h 5p1d0rz! Might not look like it, but these things are alive. The drains of Rochester were built in 1888-1890 by Emil Küchling, later to become the first professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Rochester. His developments in rational scatology included enclosed brick sewers like this one, which has been abandoned since 1974. However, you can still hear the roar of torrents of excrement a few feet away in the side tunnels. Until you think about what is flowing, it looks and sounds like a peaceful, wild waterfall!…

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