Amusement

Bits and Pieces

The rest of the places in Buffalo this weekend that weren't quite big enough for their own posts WILDROOT -- the product that made 50s hair the greased-up mess it was. Just by nature of what the factory made, and a precipitous drop off in demand once greasers were out and bowl cuts were in, Wildroot closed after just 14 years of operation, in 1963. A few later attempts were made to bring the product back, then to attach the Wildroot name to other hair products, but the association with crew cuts and grease was just too much for the…

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Capitol Offense

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…

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They All Fall Down

Another return trip, this time to the Adirondacks, once again, with UR UrbEx. As one might expect, the place looks almost exactly the same as it always did. I won't bore you with more overview photos of Frontier Town, since it's just what it was last year... I tried to focus more on details this year, as the place falls down there's less and less left to see though. Abandoned pianos are so much fun. Especially when there's no risk of getting caught and you can actually "play" them (which usually amounts to absolute noise, but still...) What's left of…

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Cold Borscht

I'm near the point where this becomes an addiction. It's finals of my senior year, and the only thing on my mind is getting back to the Catskills. Nate doesn't even want to wait the week (the misery of entrepreneurship and self employment has some silver lining, it seems), but I finally convince him to wait until after my last exam to go back. So we spent the week planning and plotting, and finding every abandoned resort that might be worth a visit. The first one we explored, the Tamarack, has a typical story of intrigue and shady dealings for…

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Hot Borscht

Grossinger's resort on a horrendously hot April afternoon. Open from the turn of the century to 1986, Grossinger's was one of the three crown jewels of the Catskill resort area, known in its time as the Borscht Belt or Jewish Alps for the predominant nationality of its vacationers. These resorts were the reason the now-desolate route 17 expressway was built from New York to Binghamton, which once packed with bumper-to-bumper traffic every summer weekend. Now the resort towns sit boarded-up and depopulated, and those resorts that haven't burned down yet remain abandoned and open to the elements. 25 years can…

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The Lonesome Crowded West

Frontier Town was one of the first theme parks ever to open in the United States, in 1952, capitalizing on the old west folklore that was then so popular with American children. (There were amusement parks since the turn of the last century, but not themed to one particular canon.) It finally closed long after Westerns fell out of fashion, in 1998, and most of its contents were auctioned off in 2004. This was a particularly strange exploration for me, having been there and vaguely remembering it from a day there in 1996 (I didn't like it much at the…

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