Ghostscrapers – Top ten post-apocalyptic abandoned skyscrapers

When city plans exceed reality, or the money dries up, or people simply leave in a mass exodus, skyscrapers vacate and slowly decay. High winds thrash through broken windows. Rats live undisturbed amongst decades old rubble. Stairways lead to doors that may never open again. The ghost of ambition’s past arrives in the present like a howling specter, creating eyesores, dangerous conditions, and free housing for opportunistic urban survivalists.

These abandoned skyscrapers range from forsaken structures aborted long before their doors opened to icons from a bygone era. While a slumper like Detroit has its fair share of empty giants, even cities with tiger cub economic growth like Bangkok are not immune to the plague of creepy abandoned high-rises. South America brings vertical favelas to the list, and Poland has a tower named after a pop-culture villain. And even San Francisco, a city with a high recreational scooter to human ratio and droves of individuals who see the world just beyond the tip of their nose, has its very own abandoned skyscraper.

From North Korea to Venezuela, these structures differ in their stories and circumstance, but each is a fine glimpse at post-apocalyptic urban decay.


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Michigan Central Station
Location: Detroit, USA
Stories: 18 floors
Story: The Central Station was finished during the advent of the automobile – 1913. The Beaux-Arts style of the classical building recalls a time when Detroit possessed the resources and momentum to rightfully emulate Parisian architecture. Its old school ambition is not lost on current Detroit residents but its function certainly is. It is a doorway into a forgotten world and a poster-boy for urban decay. The graffiti and dilapidation tells the story not just of Detroit’s acrimonious decline but also the abandonment of rail travel in the United States. At its peak during the 1940’s, 200 trains left this station daily. Today, none. While rail travel is receiving some political buzz in Washington, the fate of this gorgeous structure is uncertain. Many have flirted with re-purposing the old building, from the Detroit Police to casino developers, but for the moment it stands quietly on the outskirts of the modern world like an old ornate wrench that fits no bolt.
Abandoned since: 1988

Ryugyong Hotel
Location: Pyongyang, North Korea
Stories: 105 floors
Story: This massive pyramidal structure (above, furthest left) is a 105 story symbol for the absurdist ambitions of Kim Jong Il and the hermit kingdom. It has been under construction (on and off) for decades. It has been called the world’s most hideous hotel. It is an unnecessary extravagance in a country that can barely feed its people. The project was abandoned after the fall of the Soviet Union due to Soviet subsidies to North Korea coming to an end. The hollow shell stood vacant for decades, just towering above the city – a failure too large to ignore but too painful to acknowledge. The North Koreans spent years denying the structure’s existence, removing it from photographs and excluding it from maps of Pyongyang. Too much shame, it seems, in the very obvious failure. Construction on the structure resumed recently with Egyptian architectural firm Orascom leading the project. It is slated for completion in 2012, to sync with the 100th birthday of Eternal President Kim Il Sung, deceased since 1994.
Abandoned since: 1992, currently under construction

Tower of David
Location: Caracas, Venezuela
Stories: 45 floors
Story: The Tower of David, one of the tallest buildings in Latin America, is the quintessential slum-scraper. There is no government interference, just 2500 squatters carving up its 45 stories for purposes ranging from housing to business. The building includes apartments, home-brew PlayStation arcades, beauty salons, and perhaps the most suspicious dentistry operation in the new world. While the current occupants have yet to climb higher than the 30th floor, it is only a matter of time before the anarchic housing market pushes residences higher towards the dilapidated rooftop helipad – a symbol from Caracas’ forgotten banking boom.
Abandoned since: 1994, never completed

Buffalo Central Terminal
Location: Buffalo, USA
Stories: 20
Story: The Buffalo Central terminal has been looted for artifacts, vandalized by bored delinquents, used for art exhibitions, explored by ghost hunters, and even sold for $1. It is a gorgeous old structure plagued by a series of humiliating footnotes, caught in a perpetual fall from grace. But it was not always so. At a time, the Buffalo Central Terminal was an important hub servicing hundreds of trains daily. Still an Art Deco architectural masterpiece, the structure possesses a prominent tower worthy of superlatives, and its halls are said to be haunted by ghostly apparitions waiting for trains that will never arrive. Last Halloween, the TV show Ghost Hunters filmed a 6 hour marathon in the creepy old building. It is possible to tour the structure and even get hitched in its lofty halls. Click here for more information.
Abandoned since: 1980

Szkieletor (Skelator)
Location: Krakow, Poland
Stories: 20 floors
Story: The tallest building in Krakow is a a hulking skeleton of a structure unofficially named after the villain from He-man – a show extremely popular in Poland in the early 1980’s. Construction began in 1975, but the Pols ran into economic troubles. Today, the building is primarily a backdrop in which to drape massive advertisements. It is also a constant reminder of the decades old malfeasance of Skelator – an urban Castle Grayskull looming on the Polish horizon.
Abandoned since: 1981, never completed

PacBell Building
Location: San Francisco, USA
Stories: 26
Story: Once the tallest building in San Francisco, the PacBell building is a Neo-Gothic marvel abandoned last decade. Completed in 1925, the giant is capped with 13 foot tall art deco Eagles looking out over the great San Francisco expanse. While the building was purchased in 2007 for $118 million, it has since been left to decay quietly in its own upscale way. Unlike most abandoned skyscrapers though, this one still has some life in it. Security guards patrol the ground floor, and the tower is lit up at night. A couple of brave urban explorers over at Bearings snuck past the guard and explored the tower’s heights. Check out their first hand account of the abandoned skyscraper. The PacBell Building will likely be repurposed into condominiums in the coming years.
Abandoned since: 2005


Edificio Sao Vito
Location: Sao Paolo, Brazil
Stories: 27 floors
Story: The original vertical favela arrived on the scene in the late fifties with the intention of providing housing to Sao Paolo’s middle class community and expats. Before long though, the building fell into disrepair and became an overpopulated den of urban plight – a favela that sprawled up. As basic services and utilities declined over the years, tenants began disposing their garbage out the window and obtaining illegal electricity. Many of the Edificio’s 624 apartment units were split into two – stressing the already shaky infrastructure of the building known as “Balança mas não Cai” (It shakes but does not fall). By the eighties, the tap water was polluted and only one of the three elevators partially worked – making its way halfway up the building. Edificio Sao Vito was formally evacuated in 2004, though crackheads and drug dealers have taken to the abandoned structure like moths to a flame. Allegedly, the Mayor of Sao Paolo tried to demolish the building because it obstructed his otherwise pleasant view. While this bit of urban lore may or may not be true, the building has been flirting with demolition for the last decade. At the time of reading its graffiti flecked concrete walls may simply be dust.
Abandoned since: 2004


Book Tower
Location: Detroit, USA
Stories: 38 floors
Story: Construction began on the Book Tower in 1916, just a few years after Henry Ford transformed auto-making forever with assembly line production. It is the old style of high-rise – more a kin of masonry than a child of steel and glass. For years, the classic structure with an ornate copper roof stood for the old world extravagance of Detroit. Now, it has taken on an altogether different metaphorical role as a sad reminder of when the eminent address spoke for the industrialist success of one of America’s finest cities. The property has changed hands many times in the last decade and plans exist to drop hundreds of millions in restoring the old-school giant.
Abandoned since: 2009

Sathorn Unique
Location: Bangkok, Thailand
Stories: 49
Story: During the Thai tiger economy of the 1990’s, skyscrapers grew all over Bangkok in a display of Thailand’s new-found economic prominence. This one never completely grew up. Crows circle the pinnacle and rats call its lower levels home. Locals, convinced its hallways are haunted, stay out of the ghostscraper. Expat urban spelunkers have explored the building and returned to Khao San Road with stories from its upper reaches. The verdict: it is a dilapidated mess. The future of the Sathorn Unique remains unclear but perhaps someday it will be finished. For now, it looms on the Bangkok skyline with many other abandoned skeletal structures.
Abandoned since: 1997


Sterick Building
Location: Memphis, USA
Stories: 29 floors
Story: Once the tallest building in the southern United States, the original “Queen of Memphis” is a ghostly skyscraper, boarded up and decaying from the inside. The late Gothic architectural marvel once shuttled around thousands of workers, from stockbrokers to barbers, in its eight high-speed elevators. It has been the domain of urban explorers and desperate vagrants ever since being completely abandoned in the late nineteen-eighties. While inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places preserves its era appropriate charms, the future of the towering structure is unclear. Perhaps a redevelopment boom in downtown Memphis will reignite a need for the large ghostscraper.
Abandoned since: 1980s

top flickr image via country_boy_shane

Driving Through Detroit

In a part of the public imagination, Detroit is an urban frontier, ripe for the conquering and reimagining, poised for a renaissance, driven by Chrysler ads and noble hipsters volunteering on urban farms. It’s also true that Detroit is an abandoned city, dark and desolate, the kind of place where you can drive down Mack Avenue late one night and only see one pedestrian, a woman scratching her arms in a black dress, looking lost and sitting on a curb at an intersection in front of a boarded up building on a Saturday night.

So let’s dispense with the romance of the place, the idea that Detroit just needs one good idea to be brought back from the brink of total annihilation. It’s a city of systemic problems, even if Eastern Market remains a focal point for the community and suburban kids are moving into downtown and Slows Bar BQ, a barbecue joint that features in pretty much every story written about Detroit these days, is doing brisk business.

Traveling the American Road – Detroit


My expert source on the region, Micki Maynard, an editor with Changing Gears in Chicago, put it this way: “You have people who are trying to lead this region out of this terrible situation and people who’s lives have been changed completely because of what’s happened here over the last couple of years”

“It’s a city that if you drive around it, it looks half-empty, and that’s because it never actually filled up,” Maynard continues, pointing to plans for three separate business centers that were never fully realized in the wake of World War II. “When people talk about how empty Detroit looks, a little bit is because of the way the city was designed.” And of course, she adds, “Recent events have really taken a toll on Detroit.”

One afternoon, I went to have lunch at Slows. The pulled pork and ribs and mac and cheese are excellent but I wonder if there isn’t another reason so many people stop in: It’s just around the corner from Detroit’s abandoned train station, the ne plus ultra of the city’s ample supply of ruin porn.

After wiping the sauce from my fingers, I went over to see it, fenced in with NO TRESPASSING signs. A couple was taking pictures of the shattered windows as a Salvation Army truck handed water to destitute men dressed in little more than rags who were gathered in the shade nearby. A man with a ponytail carried a spray can, walking the sidewalk, squirting herbicide on weeds, seemingly oblivious to the monument to despair towering behind him.

Other signs of the Detorit diaspora are more subtle. Micki Maynard again: “My dad worked for American Airlines. The airlines back then were important because Detroit was important, so American Airlines had hourly flights to New York. Now they’re down to those little regional jets and basically a few frequencies a day.”

Crime, too, remains an inescapable part of life here. In 2010, there were 307 murders in Detroit, a city that had roughly 700,000 residents that year. In 2009, more than 50,000 property crimes were reported to police. My hosts at the home in Woodbridge where I stayed talked about using the buddy system when biking in the city to avoid being targeted. One of them had his car stolen recently.

The fact that the Woodbridge Pub, a relatively new addition to the neighborhood, had plate glass windows without steel bars protecting them struck me as either monumentally encouraging or monumentally stupid. I didn’t ask the bartender how many times they’d been shattered.

Inside Dearborn’s Henry Ford Museum

Outside downtown Detroit, in Dearborn, there’s a museum filled with airplanes and cars and farm implements and the most outlandish house ever conceived. Somehow, the bric a brac works, brought together as The Henry Ford Museum, an institution less focused on a particular moment or a particular discipline that the very idea of American innovation, financed by the inventor’s healthy curiosity-and bankroll.

Also here is an artificial town, Greenfield Village, a collection of notable buildings brought to Dearborn from across the country. One particularly telling structures is the Wright Brothers’ Cycle Shop, relocated from Dayton, Ohio, Ford’s nod to tinkerers who changed the course of history, experimenting with something completely new in a garage, just like he did with his Quadricycle, the world’s first car. (The museum has that too.)

Traveling the American Road – The Henry Ford Museum


The Detroit Dining Scene: An Interview with Chef Steven Grostick

Chef Steven Grostick has never worked in a kitchen outside of Michigan. It’s a remarkable accomplishment in an industry focused on apprenticeships in France, Italy, Japan, on jumping from stove to stove in New York City, on doing a turn at a resort in Arizona. Staying in-state has let him amass a network of purveyors, and he’s calling in favors from as many as he can at his year-old restaurant Toasted Oak in Novi, a growing, mostly white town halfway between Ann Arbor and downtown Detroit. I sat down in his restaurant’s bustling lounge to catch up and gauge the temperature of eating out in the area.

“I was born and raised here, and with the way the economy’s been, and the way the dining scene is, I’ve always said that Michigan is not a dining state,” Grostick tells me. “Nobody says ‘Hey, let’s go to Detroit to eat,’ not like Chicago or San Francisco or Vegas. But we’re such a food state in the fact that we’ve got the five Great Lakes, we’ve got all the fresh seafood, we’ve got awesome amounts of farms here.”

So what’s happening with Michigan farming?

“There are some really, really awesome things that are going on in Northern Michigan. I’m a part of the Northern Michigan Small Farms Conference. They do sustainable farming, and there’s a farmer up there called Paul May-he’s up in Frankfort, Michigan-and he started this really cool system where he gets these barren plots of land, takes it over and he splits it up into 52 sections. In the first section he lets cows go in and graze, and then the chickens come in, and then the pigs come in and root up the soil, BOOM, now you’ve got refreshed land to farm in.”

What are some difficulties with Michigan farming, besides of course the weather?

“The hardest part has been sourcing things because when you run a restaurant, you go to a small farmer, say a chicken farm, and I get all geeked up and say, ‘Oh yeah, I want to put your chickens on the menu.’ And so they go ‘Okay, how many do you want?’ and I say, ‘Can you give me 50 a week?’ You never hear from them again. So I’ve kinda changed my approach when it comes to this. Now it’s, ‘Well, what can you give me? What can you supply me with?’ So I might not put that particular farm on my menu if they can’t produce what I need, but I’ll use it as a special and say ‘So-and-so’s chicken’ or ‘Wordhouse Farms pork tenderloin’ if I only have a short supply.”

What’s the concept behind Toasted Oak?

“The idea of Zingerman’s Deli is actually part of what I wanted to do-I wanted to bring that concept here with the deli cases and things. I ran a fine dining restaurant for many years and I realized that fine dining is kind of dead. It’s got its place out there but you can’t survive on just fine dining.”

What’s the vibe at your restaurant?

“The guests want that chef-that white coat [as he grabs his own white jacket]-walking out and talking. So I encourage all my cooks and sous chefs to know our guests and our customers.”

I hear you’re going to the James Beard House in New York, the fancy foodie HQ that invites rising star chefs to cook for the NYC food world. What’s on the menu?

“I cook Michigan, and that’s exactly what I call my menu for James Beard, ‘I cook Michigan.’ I’m taking farm raised products, Michigan wines and I’ve actually found a Michigan distillery that makes whiskey, New Holland. The hand-crafted, smaller products are always much more fun because they’re so in demand.”

What’s it like to do business in Detroit? What’s the secret to success here?

“People expect quality no matter what you’re doing. Detroit, we’re the Motor City, so whether it’s a quality car product, a quality food product or whatnot, people want value and they want quality and that’s what I like to produce.” When his restaurant won two two Best of Detroit awards from Hour Magazine, “It’s not restaurant of the year where a food critic comes in and says you’re restaurant of the year, it’s my guests, the people sitting in these seats, that say it. So that’s a really cool honor.”

What other restaurants in the city are doing great things?

“Downtown they’ve got some really cool places that have built reputations. Whether it’s in the big casinos, places like Roast or Saltwater or Iridescence, those are your higher-end restaurants. But you’ve also got Slows BarBQ, this tiny little barbecue joint.”

When I was in Chicago, a woman from Detroit told me to try a Coney dog. What the heck is that?

“One of the things I’m taking on my James Beard menu is my version of a Coney dog because New Yorkers think they invented the Coney dog because of Coney Island. Actually, it was invented here in Jackson, Michigan. It’s a Vienna all-beef frank, and there’s a chili that goes on top made from beef hearts and beef liver. That’s a Coney dog, but the Michigan dog is the same Vienna all-beef hot dog, the Coney sauce that goes over top of it and then two strips of yellow mustard and chopped onions.”

After spending your whole life in Michigan, and as a small business owner, do you still believe in Detroit?

“It takes a certain type of person. You met that person out in Chicago who told you about Coney dogs, and I bet she was proud to say she’s from Detroit. My sister lives out in Colorado Springs but she sports the Detroit Tigers cap with the D on it. She’s proud to be from here. I think us as Detroiters, we’ve been through-it’s just like that car commercial-we’ve been through hell and back. Those of us that were born and raised here, we really believe in what we do. We want to stay here, which is why I buy local. I want to keep my money in Michigan.”

Detroit’s Urban Farms: Budget Battles and Milking Goats

I had never milked a goat before the time I wrapped my fingers around Apple’s teat and squeezed, inside a barn on a one-acre plot next to a public school in Woodbridge, Detroit. Two volunteers at the farm, Doug Reith and Leeann Drees, offered to bring me along for their turn at tending the animals at the Catherine Ferguson Academy, a school that’s also home to one of the city’s best known urban farms, made so by its appearance in the much-lauded documentary Grown in Detroit and a profile in Oprah Magazine.

Urban farms have become sort of cliche in Detroit, cast as a gardener’s pipe dream that will save the city, one batch of arugula at a time. There’s no question that many stories on the subject have been done. But at the Catherine Ferguson Academy, a school for pregnant teens and young mothers, four in five girls participate in free and reduced-price meal programs. Cliche or not, this is a city that needs cheap, nutrient-dense food — the kind that comes out of the sun and soil of a farm, urban or otherwise.

But the pastures at CFA, as its known, are facing a crisis.

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As Rachel Maddow recently reported, city-wide budget cuts are threatening to close the school, and if that happens, the fields will go fallow. My hosts Doug and Leeann, who make cheese with surplus goat milk harvested from the farm, told me about a protest to keep the school open, a sit-in that was quickly broken up by police.

Why risk arrest to protest the school’s closure? Says one student in a YouTube video of the sit-in, talking about pregnant women, including herself, “Sometimes it’s like we don’t have no hope. Basically it’s our job to give them some hope. You can’t just let them feel like they’re alone. [This says to them] You’re not alone, because you’ve got people like us fighting for you.”

As the budgetary fight wages on-a decision on CFA is scheduled for this summer-the goats still need to be milked twice a day. As the sun was setting and the mosquitoes were coming out in force, Apple and her pen-mate Royal, gave almost two liters of milk, most of which will stay on the farm. (I was most proud of myself for avoiding the flying hooves of Apple, who probably hasn’t been called docile lately.)

Walking past the rabbit warrens, hen house and horse pasture, where the school’s brown mare trotted over to greet us, Doug and Leeann wondered what would happen to the farm if the school was shut down. Without girls and volunteers and, yes, money to tend the fields, they’d probably just be abandoned. Like so much else in Detroit.