Posts tagged with 'urban ex'

The New York Farmers Colony has an interesting, sordid history. It began as a poor house, before social security systems were in place. People unable to care for themselves were se…

I LOVE This device! I originally got to try a Theta M15 camera at the 2015 San Mateo Maker Faire. We gathered around and took a group shot. It was cool, but it's impressiveness had…

The other day I went out with another awesome explorer I met online. We drove an hour away from the city to this magical land of abandoned buildings. This sprawling complex was hug…

Early on in my adventures I did some silos back in the Bay Area. When I moved to NYC I quickly learned of silos over on the east coast that were similar in age and style to the Bay…

This was a gigantic warehouse - basically two in one. In was comprised of two separate buildings, joined with a large gate connecting them. In the middle was a creepy cage - see th…

I actually did a very similar spot to these years ago, so I kinda knew what to expect. An Instagrammer I followed alluded to the benefits of checking if maintenance doors are open.…

Much much earlier in my adventures I had visited and climbed some cranes. That was one of my most cherished exploring memories so I was ecstatic to find some more easily accessible…

Not sure what the original purpose of this building was, but it does have a large walk-in safe on the first floor. It does look like it was fancy inside for it's time, and being th…

This large gym has been abandoned for some time. In addition to large, open, sporting area, there's also three stories to explore. Interestingly, the stories go downward instead of…

I've known about this spots location and have been wanting to check it out for awhile. The outside is easy to check out, and probably familiar to people who walk their dogs on the …

This tunnel at one time was an epic underground art gallery, but I was late to the game on this one and missed it. The city came through and buffed the whole thing - apparently thi…

The word on the street is the HYSU crew (Have You Seen Us?) claimed a creek tunnel to themselves as their personal showcase for HYSU graff. They'll even paint over anyone else who …

My exploring buddy goes by the handle @bayareawanderer on Instagram. Over the past year he's been compiling footage of the urban exploration and graffiti yards we've visited. He fi…

When we found out about this place we were expecting a warehouse. But what we got was totally better: a slick ex-office building from a Silicon Valley company. The inside wasn't ju…

The locals call it the Slaughter House, but I call it the S-laughter House. Either way it is neither a slaughter house or a place to find comedy. It most likely was some kind of gr…

Thumbnail slightly related! About 10 days ago everyone was talking about the Rainpocalypse - a storm the meteorologists had predicted to be particularly nasty. While it didn't exac…

I recently when though my entire archive of graffiti photos, and separated out one of each Girafa I have visited. I'm three away from having visited 150 still-running Girafa peices…

We actually found this spot when we stopped by to flick the GATs / Attica mural outside. When I realized where we were, we had to peep the inside. Unfortunately we were late to the…

This was a graffiti coated underpass with unusual sidewalks. Though the sidewalks were built neatly, complete with arched tunnels, neither end of the sidewalks go anywhere. It's ac…

We were driving along the freeway when I spotted a large GATS on a building facing the road. We got off at the next exit and hunted it down. This appears to be an abandoned motel c…

This TotT article will focus on rain boots. While flashlights are indispensable for tunnels, respirators are indispensable for abandoned buildings, creeks are insufferable without …

I happened upon this building during a near-by adventure and noticed it was abandoned. Later, when driving by I noticed hand-styles in the windows. IT HAD TO BE DONE. Unfortunately…

This is a pretty common hiking trail that is getting rather popular these days. Along the way there's multiple bunkers to check out, and the treat on top is a large complex of amaz…

My next TotT article will focus on flashlights. Small-to-Medium LED Flashlights During our first few outings, we inevitably found ourselves needing flashlights. We headed to the lo…

This spot has been on the top of the to-do list for quite some time. It took us embarrassingly long to actually find it, however. In fact, we found many other creek spots during ou…

Word has it that this used to be a famous lock company. Now the building is home to art and the occasional squatter. The building is absolutely beautiful inside, I wish I could buy…

This tubular tunnel exists straight out to a beach. Oracle was there to lead the way.…

Believe it or not, these buildings involved hiking to the top of a mountain. I'm surprised at the quality selection up here. Great art and great views!…

Though only one car was enterable, this was a neat little train. It seems to have been parked here for along time... and the track it's on just disintegrates into nothing.…

This was a set of four total, voluminous, long tunnels set in two parallel pairs. The first two were surprisingly empty, but then again they were annoying to get to - the mud was l…

I really enjoyed this spot. It's a nice setting change from your typical urban ex, tucked away in the forest. Of course, it's down sides were pretty gross. We heard rats(?) running…

Not to be confused with the writer named Lush, this warehouse is literally Lush with overgrowth and art. It's uncommon to see a warehouse with a dirt floor, so this makes an intere…

With four floors, 6 halls, 14 rooms per hall, this building had over 336 rooms. It's shaped like a giant Asterisk, and is one hell of an urban exploration. The icing on the cake is…

Apparently this land was once owned by a gravel company. The company excavated several giant craters in the middle of nowhere, before shutting down their operation. The locals have…

This was a recently closed Family Fun Center, that featured MiniGolf, Go Karts, an Arcade among other attractions. I actually grew up in the area and was a patron many times, so th…

Named after the Bay Area writer, Jurne, this warehouse was a spectacular showcase of his work. Apparently he discovered the place and kept it on the DL, continuously updating it wi…

This warehouse was mostly bare, unlike the Liquidators Jungle. However, it had a small office complex with a large Uter featured out front. I find it hard to believe this place isn…

What happens when a large furniture retailer goes belly up? You end up with a gigantic warehouse still completely stocked. This place was a jungle inside, with a maze of furniture,…

Discovered this place by accident when crawling Google Satellite looking for The Cranes. The story goes, the owner purchased the property and began building a mansion using lava ro…

This was an exciting day, hitting up nearly every WW2 era bunker in a cluster up in the San Francisco Bay's hills. Some of them have been buffed, and some of them remained home to …

The Silos was one of my all time favorite adventures, perhaps because of it's grand scale. The building is a set of two towers, approximately 10-12 stories tall. The first floor of…

This abandoned Bay Area warehouse has been dubbed the "Tag Cathedral," by locals. It features wall-to-wall graffiti that spans several years, making this quite a reputable yard. We…

This spot is tucked away deep in the California coastal mountains. It features an abandoned train bridge, train tunnel and even a swimming pool dated August 1915.…

We found the point-of-entry for this dark damp tunnel on a previous adventure and decided we needed to do it one day. After psyching ourselves up for what doom may lay in this unde…

This drain water creek spans about 3 to 4 miles. Since it requires rain boots, it's a tedious walk round trip, but worth it for some of the amazing graffiti down there including Ch…

These rusting, graffiti coated tanks are now sitting empty on a hill side. Well, not completely empty - they do have a lot of dusty, rusty air inside. Though we snapped some shots …

The first time we found this location, it was boarded up too tightly. We were able to snap some pics of the inside from a hole in the exterior, but that's not good enough! This tri…

This was a house, probably once associated with the near by train tracks. Perhaps an old station. We didn't have our masks with us today, and the inside smelled musty. Better safe …

This dilapidated structure was once a busy round house for Bay Area trains. It now has become an art gallery of sorts.…

During WW2, this luxury resort hotel was purchased by the government and turned into a secret spying operation. The building was wired and used to interrogate Japanese Americans. N…

The door to this creepy building was propped open, so we were expecting that someone might be inside. At first things were chill, but as we proceeded into a darker area, we heard s…

For my first TotT Urban Ex article, I'm going to discuss the importance of P100 respirator masks. Going in abandoned buildings, drainage tunnels, and other places where air quality…

This was a wonderful urban ex adventure - an abandoned, mostly intact hospital! Hospitals are creepy enough when they are still in operation, so combing the still air, urban decay …

Another unusual location for urban ex was this freeway overpass / on ramp. It was build with a hollow enclosure underneath it, with a door leading in. Perhaps the city planned on u…

The San Francisco Bay Area is such an amazingly fertile location for Urban Exploration. This decaying train station is a unique type of exploration, departing from abandoned buildi…

The Navy once occupied this classical Californian building, using it as their Officers Club. Judging by the amount of hypodermic needles we found, it's now the heroin club. As we t…

Twinkie the Kid was our main clue that this building once stood as a Cafeteria, or a large dining commons. Today the building bares little resemblance to a cafeteria and looks more…

Here we have a series of 6-8 rather large, college style school buildings. These buildings all share basically the same architectural floor plan, though half of them were mirrored.…

This place is known as the Kitchen Temple, named after it's eccentric builder, one of the Kitchen brothers. You can find out more of it's history with this thorough article. We wer…

This was a gigantic drainage pipe, more than big enough to comfortably walk in - if you don't forget your boots. We thought it would be try, so we had to awkwardly walk along the s…

This tunnel is located south of the Bay Area so it has a different set of artists than I'm familiar with.…

Near the Cranes, there was a bunch of miscellaneous industrial buildings. Obviously we had to check it out. We actually found a surprising piece by one of our favorite artists - GA…

This was one of my favorite adventures - getting to play on some gigantic abandoned cranes! It's not often you get to climb up into these beasts, so I seized the opportunity when w…

This random house we found whilst hiking back from The Ruins. It was pretty small inside, so not a lot to shoot, but it was a fun little side stop. I just wish one of us had taken …

The Ruins are the remains of a century old factory in the bay area. Due to it's classic construction style, the ruins feel unlike any other urban ex in the Bay Area. You could almo…

We saw these decorated trains off in the distance, whilst on another adventure. We decided to check it out, and it was worth it.…

The Swamp is yet another storm drain canal, that get's it's name from the swampy like conditions you walk through. It has become a great graffiti yard for all the locals, but has t…

This was a quick stop on the way home from some other adventure. It was a bridge tucked away in an east bay nature trail. It had some of my favorite graffiti artists, such as Plant…

I heard about a warehouse with a well known graffiti artist on the outside, named GATS. We were in the area, so we swung by. We weren't able to get inside this trip, (although we d…

For my second canal trip, I went to this amazing drain system that had some of the best graffiti I've seen in the entire Bay Area. Much respect to these artists, both for their wor…

This is a weird little storm drain oddity. A local storm drain was split into three separate channels, that the Bay Area's best graffiti artists decided to turn into a rather epic …

Combat City is an abandoned training center located in the middle of a forest, in an abandoned army post! What makes combat city so creepy, is that it's an entire town built in the…

On our way to another adventure we discovered this disproportionately tall tank in the hills. It seems to be out of use, as you can actually climb inside it. It was covered in graf…

The brick yards are the remains of a demolished brick factory ... that was made of bricks! Not much is left, but this used to house a piece by my favorite graffiti artist - Girafa.…

The Secret Sidewalk is no secret to the locals, but I'll be keeping it's location secret. It is a defunct water aqueduct, that had a closed top. Due to it's unique closed-top style…

We revisited the church we found earlier, and set out to find a second church nearby. The second church is built in the same style, though interestingly it's floor plan was mirrore…

The first time we visited this location, there was a band filming a music video there, so we didn't want to spent too much time disturbing them. Worse, the camera I had been using …

(Not Alcatraz!) The title says it all - this was one of the most wonderful, frightening, out-of-this-world explorations we had done to-date. To make things more intense, there was …

Due to a technical malfunction, and limited light during our first visit to the Workshops, we planed a second visit so we could document them better. This time we got a much better…

For some reason, when we saw this building at a distance we dubbed it "The Factory," though it really is more of a warehouse. At any rate, the building has a wonderful industrial d…

SUPER CREEPY, is the only way to describe this mini-adventure. Inside the no-name brand gas station was very dark. The air felt still, luckily we couldn't smell it through our resp…

This warehouse was vast, but mostly empty inside. We had to toss our back pack in and crawl under a narrow gap to get inside, but it wasn't too difficult. Inside there wasn't much …

This epic building had a giant satellite dish on the roof, hence the nickname. Inside was an amazing gallery of the Bay Area's best graffiti artists, including Girafa, Plantrees, M…

This once was a place people used to plan our their vacation destinations. Now it has become a vacation destination for urban-exers. Inside we found a Molotov cocktail, as well as …

This was a little cluster of abandoned workshops. Some of them still had project cars left sitting to rot, while others had all kinds of power tools, slowly rusting away. There was…

The dining commons were our first stop, but shortly after we entered this huge complex of creepy communal dorm-style apartments. They were full of interesting artifacts left over f…

Near a large apartment complex we found the communities dining commons. We hadn't entered the apartments (yet), but this was an interesting location. It was very dark inside, and t…

Whilst exploring we saw some local musicians pull up and duck behind some plywood boards covering a large building. We asked if they would mind us following them in. Once we were g…

This is a huge sprawling complex of abandoned barracks. We painstakingly entered dozens of them. It seems as if a local group of air-soft teams has been using this complex for thei…

This was a complex of fire-damaged barracks. The buildings were super unstable, so we had to be careful while placing every footstep. In one of the first areas we entered, the top …

These abandoned, decaying barracks have been rotting away in the East bay for years. We decided to check them out on the way home from The Bulb. I happened upon these several years…

I planned this trip shortly after I discovered the location through social media. There were doubts whether or not it would be worth the effort, but over all it payed off and was a…