“Don’t you ever want to go behind the ‘Do Not Enter’ sign?” asked Amelia as we stood on the second floor of a hotel that had been abandoned for decades. Crumbled debris from the building’s walls lay on the hallway floor like bombed-out rubble. Broken glass glittered in each direction, and any remaining wall paint puckered like the hexagonal cracks of a sun-dried river bed. “If cops show up, you hide and I’ll take care of it,” she advised.
Amelia is not her real name, but her story is real. She calls herself an Urban Explorer. She and other rogue adventurers travel through forgotten buildings, chapters of Toledo’s history that were closed long ago. “It’s like history or archaeology,” said Amelia as she looked down an open elevator shaft. “This is a record of them.”
Nobody’s Home
The remnants of the Rust Belt have become a strange destination for tourism. People travel from all over the world to see the majesty left behind in the thousands of structures that now sit dormant along the Great Lakes. The internet is filled with photos of the insides of buildings in grandiose stages of long-form decay. They call it “ruin porn.”
Often the first people to enter these buildings are “scrappers” and consignors, people who strip and loot the buildings of raw metals and valuables. Drug users and squatters—people who have no better locations in which to dwell—frequently come next, followed by graffiti artists who practice their designs on endless canvases in secluded privacy. Last on the scene are the explorers, opportunistic sightseers who wish to behold the vibrant metropolises of yesterday, and how they have been marred by time.
Toledo, a city of 278 thousand people, has a little over 100 thousand unique properties. As many as 3,000 of those properties are vacant. These aren’t just former family homes. There are factories to explore and abandoned hospitals; extravagant architecture that occupants left quickly, leaving much behind. To enter many of these places often takes little more than the gentle slide of a loose board to duck through a window.
What’s inside
I went with Amelia and two of her fellow explorers, Rachel and Catherine, to an abandoned manufacturing plant near the corner of Bancroft St. and Detroit Ave. Sun slipped through holes in the ceiling like filtered spotlights. Long stretches of floor were covered in wildly different piles of refuse. A stack of plastic car bumpers stood five feet high. Next to it lay half of a split bowling ball and a pile of children’s toys. Family photos and mock sports cards from an elementary school basketball team were scattered below wooden beams initialed in paint and dated “’67.” A floor-to-ceiling safe stood with the door wide open. Hand-written personnel records were strewn about, layered in dust, but legible.
Amelia wore tight blue jeans and tan work boots like a second skin against the building’s countless sharp edges and rusted nails.
“We have rules,” she told me.
They never go alone. They wear masks to protect themselves from dust and mold. And they won’t explore a building unless everyone feels comfortable. “We take every opportunity as it comes,” said Amelia.
“I think the photos I take are beautiful,” said Rachel, who enjoys photographing images of modern ruins that she cannot find anywhere else. “It turns into this rush,” said Catherine, who likes to return to buildings to see the changes over time. The three explorers looked up at a long, green vine that grew downward from the frame of a former skylight. “I’m intrigued by what nature can reclaim,” said Rachel. “You have a sense of respect for these places. It’s like a sanctuary.”
Hundreds of buildings are demolished in Toledo each year. The skyline is changing. Urban Explorers are the final voyagers of these buildings before they fall. They are the last people to see Toledo as it once was.
Dorian Slaybod is 28, a local attorney
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and happily living in Toledo.
