Friday, July 27, 2018


I am still recovering from my heart repair.  My wife insists that I rest, so YouTube is my friend.  Most of these are really sad; shopping malls that died in the 2000s (before Amazon could be at fault) when you think of the jobs lost and dreams destroyed.  This one I watched this morning is a huge house abandoned about 2003 and absolutely stuffed with momentos, children's pictures, and furniture:

My guess is that the last resident (probably an old woman) died and no one cared enough to sort through it.  You would think just to sell the house, this would make sense, but this was in Texas.

Another tragedy is this 1920s Texas hotel; a huge place, originally a resort built around a mineral springs, which closed in 1972.

I understand why no one would try to restore it now; it is falling apart and would cost far more to repair than it is worth.  But in 1972, why was it abandoned?  Even if it no longer made sense as a hotel, it is hard to imagine that it could not have been repurposed.

Of course, most of these abandoned places explorers are technically trespassing, but they seem pretty careful not to destroy anything (unlike the previous thousand graffiti artists), but it does not seem like anyone would care.

1 comment:

  1. Item: back around 1980, a friend attended a cooking academy that was housed in a defunct 1920s mineral springs resort hotel in West Baden Springs, Indiana. It was a huge and rather eerie place - as if it had been struck dead at the height of the 1920s, and slowly decaying ever since.

    However, I googled it just now, and it has been revived!

    Item: YouTube carries some content one can't get anywhere else. One thing I am rather fond of is the "Nero Wolfe Mysteries" which were made for the A&E network in the early 2000s (based on some of the novels and short stories by Rex Stout). They were produced by Timothy Hutton, who appeared in them as Archie Goodwin. They are wonderful period pieces, set in the 1940s through the 1950s, when Stout wrote them. The production values are exquisite, Hutton is brilliant - so are the rest of the cast (some of which appear in different episodes as various one-time characters, like an old-fashioned stock company).

    All of the episodes have been uploaded by fans (with imperfect quality, alas), but they're all highly watchable. And since the shows are not commercially available anywhere, YouTube leaves them up.