Explorations and Adventures?

Fuck It, We’ll Do It Live

Sunday was a day I honestly thought would never come, especially after the fuckery in Poughkeepsie -- my first time in a real abandoned mental asylum. Not just Rochester psych, half of which wasn't even built until the 60s, and the other building which I only saw by permission, but a real explore, a respectable location, and as an added bonus, even a working camera! Willard was actually the third asylum we tried that day, after abject failures at Rochester and Newark, and it seemed I would do anything possible to make it three in a row. I barely had…

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Rites of Spring

Playing with fire again, this time in the old Flint St warehouse... reason #18 I shouldn't go to Burning Man: I can't spin fire without burning a hole in my shirt and having to get put out with a $8 bottle of Drunken Bastard! Some people were much better at it than me though We need to make a sport that uses these. Fire hockey? Dodgefireball? Cricket 2.0? All that fire did light the place up nicely at least... Go home, you're drunk! Random 3am calls from these freaks to go exploring is one thing I'll miss horribly about graduation.…

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Phosphorescence

Sometimes blogging at work has its positives... like discovering am explorer sits at the desk right next to me! We decided to take the first Sunday of spring and go to the drains and play with some fire and glow sticks. Explorers in their natural habitat: Garrett the fire god: Incendio! Now entering RGB color space What else are you supposed to do when you find a dead mau5 while you're exploring? Eventually we just smashed the glowsticks and went Jackson Pollock on the place.

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Office Space

The last stop on my Albany adventure for this year, this warehouse in Menands seems to have been a casualty of the recession. While it was originally a national leader in magazine printing (Williams Press, contractor for the northeast printings of Condé Nast magazines), a decline in the print business forced Williams to close in 1999. The next tenant, judging by what still remains, must have been a moving/storage facility for Manhattan offices, containing neatly stacked regiments of furniture from the likes of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, undoubtedly hidden away, perhaps on pawn, until the recession thawed, but left…

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Scrap Pile Hospital

This was one of the few places in the Albany area I'd researched, and the only one any local explorers would help me out finding. As you might expect, it sucked. Genesee hospital was torn to shit, but this one, Seton Hospital, took it to an entirely new level. Anything of any value was missing, anything that could be smashed was, and most surfaces that would hold paint, were covered in graffiti. Making matters worse, it was a cold, rainy, February morning, an unphotogenic day for a downright ugly hospital, and I was dragging around a pounding hangover from round…

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Fallen Giants

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…

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