Rust

I was listening to a story today on NPR about the various rust belt cities that are trying to reclaim or consolidate abandoned land – the Mayor of Detroit trying to get people to move out of neighbourhoods where they are inverse pioneers, a sole resident clinging to her home amid 25 empty houses; someone in Cleveland growing wine grapes on the site of the 1968 riots; residential neighbourhoods now overgrown with weeds, trees, coyotes and deer.

My ears were pricked up because of the adventure I went on a couple of weekends ago, to prowl around a couple of abandoned buildings in Buffalo. I’d heard a little bit about this urban exploration lark, but I found this Toronto Exploration Society by serendipity. Mostly I wanted to find some folks who were taking pictures; the rest unfolded.

The first thing we did was go to the Buffalo Central Terminal, an abandoned railway station. For various reasons, I don’t have any photos of the whole – I’m not good yet at grand scale, and it was raining and overcast in any case. But what struck me about both this location and the second one we went to — an abandoned TB hospital about 50 miles south of Buffalo — was the immensity. Both weren’t just buildings, but multiple buildings, vast space, completely empty and overgrown.

I took a few shots in the Terminal I quite liked, but mostly I was just having a little thrill playing with exposure, getting all excited about the sheer guts of slogging up broken stairs and wading through ankle deep papers and other debris just… left.

The building we spent the most time in at the train station was an office block, and there was one room just filled with ephemera at its absolute utmost. Scheduling, pay stubs, social club raffles, drivers’ reports, insurance papers.

Only that room that really had “stuff” in it, other furniture and residue clearly hauled away, the occasional piece too big and useless to be called into service as anything else.

I wandered off from the group to take some shots of the empty tracks, populated only with the occasional feral dog, ignored in the shadow of the occasional train that still passed about 200 m away. Autumn leaves reclaiming.

My wanderings, plus the noise of the train, made me miss the fact that the group moved on to a much grander building – the actual terminal – and I only got in a few shots. I didn’t have time to really adjust to or feel the space, being too irritated with myself for being the New Kid who stupidly lost the group in my weird little reverie. But I wanted to go back.

The thing about the Central Terminal that really struck me – particularly vis a vis the other stories of shrinking cities – is that it was never fully used. It was always a case of eyes too big for the urban landscape, unfulfilled optimism. The TB hospital was different — again, vast and overbuilt, but it served a real purpose for 50 years. But when it was left behind, it too seemed to have been left mid-meal. (I posted a picture a few posts back).

That was the astonishing thing about both of these places — people just walked away from their desks, their offices, dwindling numbers, no one tasked with corralling the stuff once critical enough to have been carefully filed, the basics for serving meals. In the hospital kitchen, I saw egg cartons, a huge whisk, dishes that had passed through the washing conveyor and just… left.

A few posts back, I mentioned the new piece of art I bought about a month ago. The day after my Buffalo adventure, I had the chance to meet the artist, Julia Grady, an amazing, warm, depth-filled woman. I sort of burbled at her because I had to run off and get my hair cut, but I managed to mention what I’d been doing. We had a subsequent email exchange where she told me something of her own story about Buffalo (hers to tell, not mine), but she did say something that really struck me about the “futile hope” of the city, and how hard it is for dreamers to absorb a place like Buffalo. I have the same sense about places like Buffalo, like Detroit — the puffed out grandeur that never came to much makes me uneasy, and yet, the tiny details that once mattered, the coffee spoons that measure out life, make me feel simultaneously, paradoxically bleak and grounded. Much of what we do really doesn’t matter in the long run, but it matters now, today. Those trays fed people, and then, they mattered.

Across this weird ramble, I claim and create new versions of myself. The person willing to participate in a not-quite-cutting of a fence to get into the TB grounds, learning, finally, in mid-age that rules can be thought through and got around if they really don’t seem to matter.The same person who marched confidently 12 miles up a closed mountain road (and back again) with M last spring so he could photograph a sooty grouse. And finding the slimmest sense of myself as some kind of artist, someone who can see and make meaningful images. I donated a couple of my images from Austin to a fundraiser for my friend Kat, and someone *paid money* for them — a “bidding war,” even. Finding new languages, new ways to tell stories.

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