Abandoned New York City
Chances are, when you think of New York City, you imagine the large crowds of people, bright city lights, and the familiar humming and buzzing sound of big city life. Even in the subway, the city’s underbelly, New York City still pulses with life. You don’t think about all the desolate warehouses, decaying classrooms, or crumbling psychiatric wards that are sporadically speckled around the city’s five boroughs.
On a whim, and perhaps encouraged by an insatiable curiosity, photographer Will Ellis stepped into one of these abandoned repositories one afternoon. At the time, Ellis was reading a lot of gothic horror books (think Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, etc…), and was drawn to the eerie atmosphere those books were frequently set in. After experiencing that same kind of atmosphere outside the realm of a novel for the first time, Ellis was hooked.
I must admit to being fascinated by old buildings so this post quickly caught my interest. I would disagree with one of the author’s comments however:
It’s interesting to see that, just in the past few years, the internet has become saturated with images of abandoned buildings, leading to the term “ruin porn.” But the pleasure of ruins goes back thousands of years. It plays into this morbid curiosity that is within all of us — a fascination with death and decay that’s just a part of what makes us human.
Yes I’m interested in crumbling old buildings. I also like cemeteries. However, this is not because of a fascination with death and decay. I find crumbling old buildings somewhat romantic. I grew up in the UK and always loved the old castles. I also liked the old Tarzan and Jungle Book movies, which often featured vine encrusted old temples and the like abandoned in the jungle. I like cemeteries because they are usually quiet and peaceful (at least in the rural areas where I live); they have interesting trees, shrubs and plants; I also like the statues and the gravestones with their inscriptions. And the stained glass. I just find them to be beautiful places and it only rarely occurs to me that there are dead people there.