By the time I was thoroughly fed up with my fool’s errand in Albany looking for people to explore with (and had the first few of many drinks on Lark street), I decided I may as well at least explore something before the weekend got any worse. Out by myself (which never happens) and in absolutely no mood to get caught, I went back to the one place I knew I could get into, AlTech Steel, for some night photos.
Even when it was still alive I’d have to imagine this place was incredibly drab. Industrial wasteland hardly does it justice now, rows of quarter-mile-long steel caverns that once contained the grating sounds of heavy industry, and still hold the metallic, chemical air of the brownfield.
For the last 20 years these buildings have become the territory of explorers and taggers, the only signs of life left are a few vivid pieces of graffiti
This one is probably my favorite
Especially since you can see it all the way clear through the largest warehouse.
The very visible hand pointed me this way, into another warehouse just like the last one
…until the whole building shook with the roar of a freight train right next to it at full speed!
It’s been a while since I made a pi tunnel. All these clippy numbers on the ground were just asking for it!
I can’t say I enjoy being stranded very much ever, but being piss drunk in an abandoned building while it happens makes it that much less awful
Even if every photo I took absolutely sucked again
Except maybe this one–
And this is the point where I just said fuck it, wandered back to Albany, and drank more. Even though Poughkeepsie was a total bust and Watervliet wasn’t all that much better, I’d only have to wait a few more hours for my friend to be back, and to have a better exploration tomorrow. Or so I thought, waiting there until the bar closed, downing Belgian Land Mines trying to forget about my wonderful “friends” in the UE scene, wondering how my actual friend would ever find me with a dead phone. Then somehow that worked itself out too, and by 4am we caught up with each other at the local drunk-food dive, and things started to be almost OK again, and all I had to show for it was 8 less facebook friends, and a few gigabytes of absolute photo-shit.