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    Antiquity Echoes: A Photographed Tour of Abandoned America
    Antiquity Echoes: A Photographed Tour of Abandoned America
    Antiquity Echoes: A Photographed Tour of Abandoned America
    Ebook246 pages2 hours

    Antiquity Echoes: A Photographed Tour of Abandoned America

    By Rusty Tagliareni and Christina Mathews

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    About this ebook

    Antiquity Echoes is a guided tour of some of our nation's most compelling abandoned locations. With a wide spectrum of places covered, readers will be walking the dark halls of an abandoned mental asylum on one page and lost in the overgrowth of an abandoned theme park on the very next. With a focus on history and first-hand accounts by the author, Antiquity Echoes is far more than a collection of photography and text, it's an adventure story.

    Photographer Rusty Tagliareni spent years traveling the country documenting forlorn locations throughout the United States, sharing his deep passion for history and preservation and what has generated alliances with many historic societies and preservation organizations.

    What makes a place worth remembering? Antiquity Echoes ventures that this value derives from the lessons a place can teach us, even long after it has been of use. No matter how forgotten a place has come to be, underneath the overgrowth, cracked paint, and filth of ages, lie countless stories awaiting a sympathetic ear.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSkyhorse
    Release dateOct 20, 2015
    ISBN9781634509404
    Antiquity Echoes: A Photographed Tour of Abandoned America

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      Book preview

      Antiquity Echoes - Rusty Tagliareni

      I, along with my partner Christina Mathews, spend a great deal of time and effort documenting things that most people overlook on a daily basis: abandoned locations. Throughout our years spent in and around these forgotten places, one singular question has come to define our work: What makes a place worth remembering? To this there is no absolute answer, but we believe that the value derives from the lessons a place can teach us, even long after it has been of use. No matter how forgotten a place has come to be, underneath the overgrowth, cracked paint, and filth of ages lie countless stories awaiting a sympathetic ear.

      After a year or so of visiting various abandoned locations and occasionally grabbing snapshots as we went, we came upon a place that skewed our collective perspective on not just the practice of documenting these abandoned ruins, but the genuine importance of it. We were in Essex County, New Jersey, and happened to be driving directly past a massive sprawling complex of buildings. From the looks of it the place had been long abandoned, so we immediately turned around to investigate the place closer. Finding a pothole-covered access road, we made our way to the inner campus and parked away from the eyes of passing motorists. With little effort we came upon a wide open door and crossed the threshold.

      Greeting us in the dayroom that we had entered was a scene from some night terror come to life. In a dim corner, perched on a dry-rotted vinyl chair caked with dust and flakes of peeled paint, sat a headless body. The fight-or-flight urge was immediate. Yet somehow we were able to overcome the urge to run, and the feelings of shock and dread quickly subsided. Upon closer investigation, the headless form turned out to be an old CPR dummy. We found its faceless head on the floor, in a pile of debris next to the chair.

      As we ventured beyond that eerie dayroom, we were in awe of what we found: The place was clearly some kind of hospital; that much was made obvious by the countless beds, large dayrooms, and various offices. The deteriorating hallways stretched on for what seemed like forever in all directions. Christina then made a simple, passing comment, I should film this, as she took a bright pink point-and-shoot digital camera out of her bright pink cat-shaped purse. The camera she shot with that day would be laughable by today’s standards, and featured one of those gimmicky video modes that shot in a very low resolution. The quality didn’t matter, though, as it was the inspiration that struck that was pivotal. That moment is what would become the foundation of our work—the amazement that we were feeling then and there inspired us to do our very best given the tools we had at hand. Of equal importance, it was that cheap pink camera that caused Christina to become enamored by the format of video. She never stopped filming after that day. Occasionally she also takes on the role of a photographer, though it is not an often occurrence. As such, I have noted any images taken by her throughout the book.

      Upon returning home, we immediately began conducting research to better understand what it was that we’d just seen. It turned out that the place was indeed a hospital, but not in the way we had assumed. What we spent the afternoon exploring was the decaying husk of the Essex County Hospital Center, or, if you were to call it by its original title, the Overbrook Asylum. At this point we came to two startling realizations. First, though the places we had filmed up until that point did indeed carry their own tales and some weight of history, it wasn’t until that moment that we had ever seen a place that had affected so many people over such a long period of time. The amount of history found in just a single ward of the Overbrook Asylum was deeper than in all the places we had ever been. The second realization came after some more in-depth investigation into the old hospital center. In researching the history of the facility, we were able to gather together a timeline, as well as begin to see just how massive of a facility this place once was. There were thousands of stories hidden in those walls, and all of them were completely unknown to us until we stumbled on the hospital by pure chance. This floodgate of information also taught us much about the evolution of psychiatric medicine, both in practice and in pharmaceutical development, which eventually led to deinstitutionalization on a national level. All of this newly found knowledge was springboarded by the most unlikely of things: an abandoned asylum on the side of the road, one that many people likely ignore as they drive past on a daily basis. If we had to pinpoint one singular moment that came to define our work, it would be that very moment of realization: these abandoned places held much more than just abstract mystery and picturesque settings. There were stories here, and untold lessons to be learned.

      Over the next couple of years, we set about documenting as many places as possible. We upgraded equipment as we better learned how to utilize it and launched our website in 2009 with the work we had collected to that point. It had been our hope from early on that through intriguing imagery and subject matter we would be able to spark a genuine interest in learning that may not otherwise occur, much like what happened to us with Overbrook. We called our website Antiquity Echoes.

      Much to our amazement, even among the near-infinite other websites out there on the Internet, Antiquity Echoes began getting noticed. For us, the best part about doing what we do are the occasions in which we get to speak with people who remember a location from before it was abandoned, perhaps having worked at a now-deserted asylum, or having once enjoyed a stay at a long-deserted resort.

      The website itself proved to be a learning experience. As traffic grew, we very quickly learned that the spectrum of people who had an interest in abandoned places was far and wide. It was reaffirming to hear kind words from youthful curiosity seekers and older (and at times elderly) individuals who were amazed to see and hear about these places.

      Obviously we are not alone in documenting abandoned places, and there’s currently so many other people doing it that we hesitate to even call it an underground community anymore. Still, the community is what’s so great about all this. There’s no way any one person, or isolated groups of people, would be able to document the globe. Thanks to the Internet, however, we are all able to witness wonders like the urban decay of Russia, the abandoned sprawls of China, or the overgrown castles of Europe. In a global community

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