Some abandoned places carry a weight that goes beyond architecture and history — sites where so much suffering, death or violence occurred that the buildings themselves seem to hold it....
Massachusetts carries more institutional history per square mile than almost any other American state — a Commonwealth that built enormous psychiatric campuses, prison farms, reform schools and WWII military infrastructure...
Texas is a state of enormous ambitions and enormous failures — a place where oil booms built cities overnight and busts emptied them just as fast, where Cold War military...
Rochester was once one of America's great industrial cities — the birthplace of Eastman Kodak, the flour milling capital of the continent before Minneapolis, and home to the only underground...
Buffalo is one of America's great comeback cities — a place where the legacy of the Erie Canal, the grain trade and a century of heavy industry left behind some...
West Virginia was built on coal — and when the coal economy collapsed, it left behind some of the most dramatic abandoned infrastructure in America. A WWII ammunition bunker complex...
South Carolina's abandoned landscape is draped in Spanish moss and Civil War history — a state where plantation-era architecture crumbles alongside Sherman's scorched church ruins, where Cold War military infrastructure...
Minnesota's abandoned landscape is shaped by the extremes of its climate and the ambitions of its past — Kirkbride asylums built to house thousands in the era when "incurable" mental...
New Mexico's abandoned landscape is defined by three centuries of boom and collapse — Spanish colonial missions decaying into the desert, Route 66 ghost towns straddling the Texas border and...
Tennessee's abandoned landscape spans the full arc of American history — from a Civil War-era prison and Gilded Age industrial towns to the secret city that built the atomic bomb...
San Francisco is one of America's most aggressively developed cities — land is too valuable for abandoned buildings to survive long. But the city's unique geography creates exceptions: a Victorian-era...
Rhode Island is the smallest state in America — but for urban exploration, it punches far above its weight. Within a single day's drive, you can explore a WWII coastal...
