There are days meant for just getting the hell out of here… this weekend was certainly one of them. The combination of dealing with grad school, Laura and being indoors all winter put me over the edge; I had to do something besides another weekend with Her, and I had to do it NOW! So, as soon as Laura was safely on the bus to class for a Friday morning (and she’d just stayed with me, so I had to make sure it looked like nothing was out of the ordinary), I packed my bag (consisting of mostly beer) and set off running for the train!
About halfway to the station I heard a muffled BANG! from my backpack as my growler of home brewed ale chose to explode at the worst possible moment. Doing the only thing that made sense at the time, I fished out the broken jug and chugged, and chugged, as much of the spewing geyser of potent brew, and threw the remains into a trash can before too many people saw. Not that it helped much, by the time I was in my seat on the train, the world was swaying much more than just the gentle rattle of iron on steel. Little did I know this would probably be my closest encounter with sobriety for the entire weekend… and most of my photos show it!
This building is a hotel with a very surprising location, backed up directly against the New York state capitol, with which it even shares a basement, with doors still extant into the capital and the Empire Plaza parking garage. While the building was ordinary enough abandoned hotel, the location was quite striking.
Looking out at the main wing of the hotel, and the Capitol directly behind
In the lobby; this is where people would have entered from the Capitol concourse.
The hallways were particularly narrow and drab for a hotel, especially one bound to attract the political type
After restocking at a beer store in Colonie our next location was the Starlite Theater, a bizarre circular venue that closed in about 2004, mostly due to the unpopularity of a circular stage
This wasn’t the most interesting place, especially with a county sheriff keeping an eye on it, so we went back to our first location of the weekend, AlTech Specialty Steel. AlTech is probably the largest abandonment I’ve seen yet, at nearly a million square feet across 11 surviving buildings, enough to make even night photography interesting and challenging. We stayed here well into the night for beer and exploring in the old Concrete way with at least six bottles of the old Double Bastards!
My only regret here is that in easily 12 hours of wandering around and exploring over three nights, I only managed to take a few indoor photos at the very end… the best part is this place is so wide open I know we can come back in a few months and do it all over again!
