Monday, November 24, 2014

NASA's abandoned launch sites

American photographer Roland Miller has spent 25 years photographing NASA's facilities around the United States. With the rise of private programs though, many of those sites are now being left abandoned. 

For his latest book, Abandoned in Place, Miller visited 16 space launch sites and research facilities in areas including Virginia, Florida and California, taking readers on a “photographic exploration of the American space launch and research facilities that played a crucial role in the early period of space exploration. The goals of this project are to preserve and portray these abandoned, deactivated, and repurposed sites through photography that surpasses the official government approach to documentation and to lend historical and artistic insight to the subject.”

Among the facilities he visited, always accompanied by an escort, were the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and the Kennedy Space Center at the Cape Canaveral in Florida.




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V2 Launch Site with Hermes A-1 Rocket, Launch Complex 33 Gantry, White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, 2006


Launch Complex 36 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station


Horizontal Gantry from Base, Gemini Titan Complex 19, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, 1991







Monday, November 17, 2014

The abandoned Montebello State Hospital in Baltimore

Montebello State Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, was originally known as Sydenham Hospital for Communicable Diseases, as it specialized in the research and therapy of infectious diseases such as smallpox, tuberculosis, poliomyelitis and meningitis in an era when antibiotics didn't exist. 

The hospital campus was originally constructed between 1922 and 1924, and it consisted of seven Italian Renaissance Revival style buildings designed by noted Baltimore architect Edward Hughes Glidden.

The hospital closed in 1949 and some of its buildings were taken over by the Montebello State Chronic Disease Hospital, later known simply as the Montebello State Hospital. New buildings were later built on the campus while some of the old hospital buildings were left abandoned. 

The campus was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1998, however its old abandoned buildings were demolished by the site's new owners in 2013. 



SEE ALSO: More abandoned hospitals around the world // More abandoned places in Maryland // More abandoned places in the United States // LIST OF ALL DESERTED PLACES 
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Monday, November 10, 2014

Hitler's hospital: The abandoned Beelitz Sanatorium


Beelitz-Heilstätten hospital, also known as the Beelitz Sanitorium, was build in 1898 by the Berlin Workers Health Insurance Corporation for the victims of tuberculosis. Its location, outside the city of Berlin, was ideal as the patients could benefit from the peaceful environment and the clean air. The hospital grew in size over the decades and it featured its own power station which offered the necessary heat during the winter.

When World War I broke out in 1914, Beelitz-Heilstätten was converted in order to care for the the massive casualties inflicted at the front. In the late 1916, a young soldier called Adolf Hitler was sent there to recuperate from a thigh injury acquired during the Battle of the Somme. During the later decades many would start calling Beelitz, 'Hitler's hospital'.

Beelitz-Heilstätten once again became a sanatorium until World War II when it was converted to a military hospital again. Many of its buildings were destroyed by Allied bombing.

After the war, Beelitz- Heilstätten was part of the East Germany and under control of the Soviets who used it as a treatment center for the soldiers stationed in the area. It was also used for the treatment of many East German government officials, including Erich Honecker.

In the early 1990s the Soviets left the area and the hospital was abandoned. Today, only a few of its 60 buildings are in use (as a neurological research rehabilitation center and a care and research center for people with Parkinson’s disease) while the rest of the building remains abandoned. The location was used as a film set for the 2002 movie, The Pianist and the 2008 film Valkyrie. Rammestein's music video for Mein Herz Brennt was also filmed inside the abandoned hospital.



Monday, November 3, 2014

The ruins of Deception island


The Deception Island is an island in the South Shetland Islands archipelago off the Antarctic Peninsula. The island is the caldera of an active volcano with its waters being warmer than those in the surrounding area while its horseshoe shape provides a great shelter for ships.

For these reasons, in 1912 the Hektor Whaling Company was issued with a license to establish a shore-based whaling station, one of the many that were popping up in Antarctica. Whale oil was on high demand as it was used in oil lamps and to make soap and margarine. Approximately 150 people worked at the station during the austral summer, jamming whale carcasses into huge iron boilers to extract over 140,000 barrels of whale oil.

With the discovery of substitutes for whale oil such as kerosene and vegetable oils, the use of whale oils declined. Whale oil prices dropped during the Great Depression of the 1920s, and the factory operations were abandoned by 1931. Everything was left untouched on the island for a decade until a British warship destroyed the oil tanks and some remaining supplies in order to ensure it could not be used as a German supply base. The British finally establish a scientific base in 1944 but they had to abandon it by 1969 due to volcanic activity. 

Today, the island is a tourist destination and there are 2 summer only scientific stations, an Argentinian and a Spanish. A lot of ruins and abandoned facilities from the sealing and scientific stations of the past can still be found on the island.