Photographer Finds Locations Of 1960s Postcards To See How They Look Today, And The Difference Is Unbelievable
Not long ago, an old matchbook laying on photographer Pablo Iglesias Maurer's desk caught his eye. Or rather, it was the postcard-like picture on it, of a resort complex built in the 1960s. It got Pablo wondering how the then famous landmark looked now, and the answer has led him to make an amazing photo series called Abandoned States.
The vintage photo came with the title How to Run A Successful Golf Course, but when Maurer got to the place, it was clear the owner of Penn Hills Resort didn't follow that advice. He pointed the camera at the abandoned place at roughly the same spot and did a '5-decades-after' shot of the place.
Ever since then, Pablo was hooked. He ordered more 60s photo postcards from eBay and started going around the country, capturing these once beautiful buildings from old photos that now stand abandoned only as faint memories of what once was.
"The vintage postcards, have their own haze—the places were never as nice as they look. I often struggle to get the two images to line up, as well. But time blurs the difference and brings everything into focus."
Check the incredible series of before and after pics below!
More info: Twitter, DCist (h/t: Ufunk)
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More of the indoor pool at Grossinger's. The tiled floor was heated, the entire structure air conditioned. Above, beautiful mid-century "sputnik" chandeliers cast a glow on the swimmers below. Below the pool are exercise rooms, a gym, salon and a host of other amenities. The pool has sat vacant since the late 90's and has fallen beyond repair.
Ok, this whole post would be so much better if we had static pictures, not GIFs.
Grossinger's outdoor pool, olympic sized, built in 1949 at a cost of $400,000 (about $5 million in today's market.) Long gone are the private cabanas, changing room and lounges that used to surround it.
The browns and reds and oranges of this Poconos dining hall's carpet have turned green, the color of the moss that's taken its place.
The Homowack Lodge now sits abandoned on the southern edge of the famed "Borscht Belt." On its lower level, maybe the highlight of the place, a four-lane Brunswick bowling alley. It has seen better days. The resort closed in the mid-2000's but lived on briefly, first as a Hasidic resort and lastly as the site of a summer camp—one which was forced to shut down after the NY Department of Environmental Conservation deemed it uninhabitable.
The bowling alley is still intact and functional! Please put it back into use!
Grossinger's indoor tennis center. The rear of the postcard is an ad for Grossinger's rye bread, a local staple during the resort's operation. Resort royalty Jenny Grossinger lays out the pitch: "The fun and fresh air people get here at Grossinger's really gives them an appetite. They love all of our food - and a particular favorite is our Grossinger's rye and pumpernickel bread. Now you can get this same healthy, flavorful bread at your local food store. Try a loaf. I'm sure you'll love it."
Surely and investor or contractor should be buying this and restoring it to it's former glory! look at those beams!! Stunning!
Sunbathing and swimming in the Poconos. Postmarked, 1967. "Dear Jonnie: If you were only here, I would take you out for a horse-back ride - or else we could go golfing. Be good until I see you. Dr. Waterman."
After a fire destroyed the main building at this resort in the Poconos, a replacement went up in the early 70's. It is a truly striking sight, a modernist spaceship tucked away deep in the woods.
The indoor pool at Grossinger's, which opened in 1958. Elizabeth Taylor attended the pool's opening, and Florence Chadwick - the first woman to swim the English Channel in both directions - took the first dip in it. From Ross Padluck's excellent "Lost Architecture of Paradise": "...The new indoor pool at Grossinger's was the zenith of the Catskills. Nothing quite like it had ever been built, and nothing ever would be again. It represented everything about the Catskills in the 1950s-style: extravagance, luxury, modernism and celebrity."
I understand that no one wants to do the summer family resort "thing" anymore, but why wasn't it chopped up and developed into a Hamptons type resort area for the rich and famous? I'm not from the area, but it's still links like a beautiful, scenic place?
The caption on the back of this Pocono resort's postcard touts this theater as the "resort world's most modern showplace." With a capacity of 1200, it remains splendorous even in disrepair. This postcard is also postmarked, and filled out. "Having a lovely weekend here. All pleasure - only exercise is rowing a boat and playing shuffleboard! Nice to be lady-like and not "rushing" about! We will see you soon."
The cocktail lounge of a now-defunct resort in the Poconos. "Peaceful relaxation - healthful recreation," says the caption on the rear of the card.
On the inside of the matchbook, some text: "Swim n' Sun Indoor Swimming Pool at Penn Hills Lodge and Cottages. The Poconos' Finest Modern Resort."
Who is dumping trash into the pool??? How absolutely disgusting some humans can be. :(
The Mies van der Rohe-inspired "Jenny G Wing" opened in 1964 and was among the last structures erected at Grossinger's. It was designed by famed architect Morris Lapidus—the man who near single-handedly created the "Miami Modern" look in hotels and, more locally, designed the Capitol Skyline Hotel.
I think this place is out of the way. There are several resorts in the poconos or were not long ago. Rooms with champagne glass tubs etc. shag carpet. It was wild baby, yeah!
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What most people might not realize is this, the resort failed because it is not off of any major interstate. People have to realize back in the fifties and sixties and even early seventies when all the interstates were being built some of these Resorts were still clinging to life, but as soon as the interstates were built these Resorts started to fail. I will say this though now the amazing thing is people are trying to be retro and they don't want to do what's on the norm like Resorts along the interstate and so I do not understand why the owner of this property does not want to revamp it because if he did at this time it would be a major hit
The 2017 picture looks almost like something from Chernobyl... Spooky... O__O;
Many times with buildings built back around the 50s the cost of redoing the structure or tearing it down now will coast way too much, mostly because back then asbestos was heavily used in insulation products and in products that helped with the acoustics of a room. Sadly, this makes demolition complex because they don't want the asbestos or other harmful toxins or molds that may be in the walls to enter the air, especially in highly populated areas.
What a wonderful bldg! Why is it not being used? Perhaps for homeless? Or us Veterans? SOMEthing???
It would have to be sponsored by the State or some huge philanthropic organization - funded independently and willing to go through the immense hassle of securing the permits, permissions and ongoing clearances from HEW, etc.
Dreary souless modernist edifice even in its heydey....good riddance to this garbage.
Such a shame there are abandoned places like this, when so many are living on the streets. Imagine providing a beautiful place like this for people to live in and look after.
Why doesn't NY state or city this for "affordable housing" or shelters. Why is this structure sitting fallow?
Because it's far away from everything. And it would be extremely expensive to make habitable.
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This looks hauntingly like some of the abandoned buildings in the Ukrainian city of Pripyat near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
Stairs lead down to an abandoned theater in the Poconos. The curtain last fell here sometime in the early 90's
Somebody turned off those lights for the last time, walked up those stairs, glanced back once, sighed, got into the car and drove away.
Postcard caption: "Birchwood is the only resort offering three swimming pool facilities, indoor pool, outdoor pool and lake with beach. Pictured here is beautiful Eagle Lake, at the foot of the Village Green. Here couples enjoy the white-sand beach, chaise lounges, bicycle and row boats, and fish off its shores ... Six low-cost all-expense package plans include indoor swimming, airplane rides, movies, bowling, horseback riding, all winter sports and 40 other free activities!" More recently, the hangar at the resort's airstrip served a different purpose: cop killer Eric Frein made the place his home during a weeks-long manhunt and was eventually apprehended just a stone's throw from Eagle Lake.
A lane attendant at the Homowack lodge in the Catskills.
Looking down the side of that same 70's structure. "Ultra-modern building houses the dining room, cocktail lounge, lobbies and offices."
This album made me sad. Why were these structures abandoned? Who lost ownership why did no one else claim it? I want a historical accounting.
A residential building at a Poconos resort sits in disrepair. On the back of the postcard: "Dear Bernie - Don't think we forgot you - but we're having such a grand time that post cards are a chore! This is the life & the place & the people are grand. We couldn't be happier or have more fun. See you soon! Love, Lou & Shiela.
Such a shame to see such beautiful things go to waste these places aren't forgotten and never will be even when nature and things take over it will never be forgotten
I get an odd satisfaction to see that humanity is not so almighty. That our works, maybe all of them, will be consumed again by Nature. Everything that can rot, will rot, rust or crumble. Even concrete - seemingly like rock, bubbles apart within a hundred years as the internal steel rusts away. Trees get into the cracks. So do insects, animals, birds poop, more seeds ... one day It all falls down. It is swallowed, digested, ground down and smothered. Part of me wants this to happen. I love to see it happen.
As a gamer I really got this same feeling when playing Horizon zero dawn. Such an eerie beautiful feeling. Those designers really captured that "the mighty have fallen" vibe.
I had the same thought.
This was a deep thought when Shelley wrote Ozymandias. Amazing how it can sound so much more adolescent in other hands.
I know right, what a shocker. An Oxford-educated Romantic poet can word something better than a random person in the comments section. So amazing, much wow.
Wow I love "Part of me wants this to happen. I love to see it happens.....this has always fascinated me too, great, splendid monuments consumed by nature. As if they were never greatest feat of all time
Watch Life After People
If you look at abandoned Railway sidings, the grass and weeds very quickly take over.
It's just sad that the demise of humanity makes you smile...
It's not the demise of humanity, stop being so dramatic. The owners were growing increasingly out of touch with their target demographic and their marketing strategies were not working so they had to close the resort. Grossinger's tried bringing in young people by transforming the resort into a hippie theme...in the 1980s! The way you make this sound, you must damn near faint when a restaurant closes.
There is a huge difference between just closing a resort and leaving it sit there to rot as if the land was disposable. There is no excuse for that and it does really show how destructive we can be with regards to the Earth.
I think, the saddest here, doesn't comes from the emptyness or the abandonment, but from the waste. As humans, we think it's normal to spoil a natural place, to build something that can be charmfull (not always the case, see all the coast with tones of buildings for mass tourism)... and to just forgot it as something disposable. Double waste. It doesn't make money anymore? then let's go concreting some other wonderful place and restard from zero, until next time. Glad to see, nature find her way despite us. (I hope they remove asbestos and all nasty stuff before leaving...)
Unfortunately, they don't remove asbestos, or anything else. They just leave it to rot, if it can rot. Or poison everything around, which is more likely. America is very wasteful society, sad to say it.
There is nothing natural in the way it looks now. Every house, every building in our great country stands on what was once "nature."
Yeah, turning Nature into Environment...
Nature wil reclaim it all eventually. Earth survives...man does not. If the human race were to go the way of the dinosaurs, remnants of our existence will be gone in a thousand years, maybe 2. Most will be gone in a couple hundred years. All that will remain will be fossils. The earth will live on until it plunges into the sun millions of years from now.
But somehow they remind us that the sixties had their time, and they outshone this epoch somehow......nostalgia!
GIF :(
Everything in this world belongs to nature, we simply borrow it!
That's impressive but to be truly honest, the photographer should have taken pictures in summer.
Some are summer pix, but I'd suspect the decision was to go for a starker look - emphasizing the emptiness and abandoned/dying qualities in frame. An artistic decision I can quite understand. Also - in winter, the buildings are easier to see.
The idea is to compare its height of beauty vs. its most forsaken state and you get the chills. The people in them, I wonder, too.
My thoughts too! Almost all these photos were taken during some dreary winter or autumn. Some outside photos that were taken during spring/summer actually look better now.
And what does it matter? Looks more cheerful? Destruction is destruction, summer or winter. Shame.
When I see stuff like this I often wonder how a whole building could just be abandoned for decades like that. Particularly when the building is not so far from a thriving metropolis. Here in New Orleans, we had a amusement park that was left like that and it's just weird that no other company tried to buy the land dirt cheap and do something with it.
It's weird to me, too. I can understand smaller properties sitting for a time, but not something large enough to construct all new buildings (office, factory, mixed-use) on.
Hey...great place for monuments ya think?
What happened? Why did these places lose their popularity?
Combinations of changes in demographics, the economy, who has the money (old vs. new money, or the age-range of the wealthy), car culture, and society.
Miami Beach was being developed in the later half of the 1900's. I was married in 1959 & we decided to not do the usual Jewish honeymoon in the Borscht Belt but get on an airplane & fly to fabulous Miami Beach! Now that was a "Shmaltzy" move. Plus it was summer all year long in Miami. I think that was what killed those places.
Yes i would agree, as airfare prices dropped from the 1970s on it changed the vacation industry in the Poconos and the Catskills.
That makes perfect sense.
Grossingers is not in the Poconos. It's in Sullivan county New York. Poconos is in Pennsylvania. The reason these places went dead was the areas turned bad and NYS neglected infrastructure to highways. To this day it's a two lane road on 17 which is 86 now. But when NYS put casinos in a area around 87 they expanded the road ways
Yeah, Liberty, NY. (YouTube videos shows some more pics) https://youtu.be/t5fAdKshdaI
It seems unreal to see the Poconos pictures :( ... Was married in the Poconos, 25 years ago, and to my knowledge they are still thriving... I guess my question is, what location at the Poconos is this? I know we ate at a dining hall, similar to that picture, it boggles my mind to think that is where we ate... Guess a road trip is in order :/
I remember going to some of these places in the 1980's when I was a very young child. So it is so strange for me to realize that they are ALL completely closed down and falling apart. For 50+ years, these places were a huge part of the culture for my family and families like mine. So strange to see these photos...
It's almost like a post-apocalyptic wasteland where these are nothing more than relics of a long bygone era where it's original inhabitants that are it's last generations ago are either grown old or long dead and forgotten and here we are sitting on their ruins today.
The worst part of was just the amount of graffiti. Ridiculous!
Gifs are annoying.
... Why?
I liked the gifs. It was like flipping back and forth between photographs and made it easy to see the changes.
YES!
Voted down, stupid comment.
PocoNOOOOOOO
Eeriely beautiful.
Its so sad ..it looks like at one time it would have been a blast...now all I see is loneliness..emptiness...it makes me ill that all these millionaires, won't come it to a place like that and turn it around...It could be a very nice seniors center...or somewhere kids could go to have fun and stay out of trouble ........I just hate to see the waste.....
Mostly the same place (Poconos) fifty years later.
sad
TAXED TO DEATH.
Bored panda is a bunch of rip off wankers. Why not link the the actual site, or better yet, produce your own content instead of leeching off of someone else's work.
What I find saddest of all in these pictures is the arrogance of people that feel they must attack, destroy, or otherwise disfigure buildings that are not theirs. Locations in which they themselves are only in temporarily; they must 'leave their mark'; as thought they themselves are mere animals. Dogs or cats that mark their 'territory'; urinating to proclaim their existence, and their impotence. Yes, the abandonment of once treasured vacation location is sad. These buildings could be used to house the homeless. And yes, nature will overrun all that man misuses. The saddest part of the article itself, to me, are those comments by today's people that have no understanding of what life was truly like 40-50-60 years ago; the depressed individuals of today that have never lived what they now openly denigrate while secretly wishing they could have been there to experience the 'heyday' of the era.
It seems to be a human thing. Grafitti is as old as writing. Especially if you had to make a special effort to get somewhere: seems a shame not to leave a version of 'Kilroy was here.' (Not saying it's right, just saying it seems to be universal urge.)
Just an FYI: the lead should say "lying," not laying.
It just makes me sad. These resorts were surrounded by thousands of acres of untouched woods in a rural area. They were a celebration after the Depression and WW II. They provided hundreds of jobs, not to mention a nearby resort destination for the Jews who were denied accommodation elsewhere. The Wikipedia page offers a great history - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borscht_Belt I actually got to experience Grossinger's when my new father-in-law took the family for a high holiday celebration in the late 80's.
One of the best series I've seen on this site. I guess the comment about taking the recent photos during the winter months has some merit, but it does heighten the differences. Very, very good job.
Good for nature! Would that it could gobble up some of the acres of useless tarmac. Supermarket car parks etc that stop the ground absorbing water and cause flooding.. But yes - it is a waste. Time effort and much money went into these creations. Shocking that they could just have been 'abandoned' and not even dismantled to reuse materials..
Why do people abandon places? Places that should be kept safe for future generations to look and understand what their parents had in their times. That they were not old duds who didn't know how to enjoy a thing, but to show that how vibrant and out going and crazy they were.
Good subject, badly presented in my opinion. the picture in picture is a really bad, goes too fast and you cant pause to see more details. should've just posted two pictures of before and after...
I loved this collection. How unique, different...shows that in time the earth takes back. In 100 years all of what's left will be apart of the earth again.. Wow... This was awesome!!! And I want to see more!
So its safe to say that the Poconos is abandoned? Seems the bulk of these photos are from there. Cool pics though.
cool project dude :)
This looks like Africa today. Joking nothing from Africa here. But something to remind us the destruction they love. Maybe they white, haha haha
Poor cheap construction. Venice is hundreds of years old.
Great photos, that tell a story, I was most impressed with the website presentation of the story, very clear and easy to follow
70's does not require an apostrophe; it's pluarl not possessive - 70s.
*plural
Yup. Check out the Orchid Island Hotel in Hilo, HI. Sad. So beautiful when it was built in the 60's. Tragic end because the business manager hired electrical contractors to do illegal and unsafe wiring and paid the inspectors to look the other way. It burnt down in the middle of the night and was never rebuilt. Oh he got his...
should it not be better describes as one structure in the 1940s?
I always wanted to go to the Poconos... not any more!
It's cool to see how quickly nature has taken over again. BTW this post would have been better if it had static pictures rather than GIFs. The GIFs are annoying.
Seeing these photos you can kind of see how there was this culture of decadence in the 60s. Build tons of resorts, for well-dressed and fit young dapper lovey dovey people, but in only a few decades, literally all of these have since been abandoned (except for maybe one or two) and are no longer the idyllic scenes that you see in the postcards. Is there any other decade that has this large of a number of resorts and entertainment complexes built but have since been lost?
Most of these places were built long before the 60s. In fact they were in decline by the 1960s. And most of the people were middle class Jewish families and honeymooners, hardly the decadent jet set you seem to envision. The 70s and 80s were a lot more decadent than the 60s, but then I guess it depends what your definition of that word is.
www.rebuildlestudio.com
Sometimes buildings get abandoned, yeah.
white flight is a helluva drug
white flight is a helluva drug
What a waste! Abandon old, build a new resort, and destroy another natural area. The motto of modern society 'let's turn Nature into environment'. What a shame!
One of these locations, Penn Hills, was also visited by YouTuber Dan Bell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSPgAEq8y-A Strangely enough, there was a fire there just the other day: http://www.pennlive.com/news/2017/09/vacant_resort_in_poconos_searc.html
A couple successful photographers have made careers out of this. Here's one: https://walterarnold.photoshelter.com/gallery/As-Seen-at-My-Art-Festivals-Exhibits/G0000W18t69YBEzU/
A very successful photographer has made a career out of this. https://walterarnold.photoshelter.com/gallery/As-Seen-at-My-Art-Festivals-Exhibits/G0000W18t69YBEzU/
Somehow its makes me sad cause these building and parks were more live full before they got demolished. I dont think ist a victory for Mother Nature I think Mother Nature is also widowing these places cause everything turned into a bitter gray color .
Somehow its makes me sad cause these building and parks were more live full before they got demolished . I dont think ist a victory for Mother Nature i think Mother Nature is also widowing these places cause everything turned into gray.
This makes me feel so sad that no one would keep up these places that were such a joy to go to at one time. Just allowed them to run down and cease to exist. Strange looking at the old photos when they were so alive and looking at how they are now.
6 and 7 are different angles of the same place, nicer pics taken in summer, new pics in winter/fall. You can see the little building with the green roof and the crooked lifeguard chair out in the water.
Both the Homowack and Grossingers were excellent resorts. There is nothing wrong with having places for people to come and have vacation. They added greatly to the environment. The grounds were meticulously kept. There was a lot of nature for all to enjoy. We loved going there.
A Era of a time gone by, crumbling with decay like the humanity that watches it crumble. Quiet sad to me as I grew up in that Era.
I find urban decay aesthetically fascinating. For me those are beautiful ruins. An entire city in just a hundred years would look like arcaic alien temples discovered in the jungle.
he went to the poconos and grossingers.
So sad to see things decay like this
Wow. It reminds me a little of that abandoned town Pripyat a few miles away from Chernobyl
I find it interesting that once a location, or a structure, falls into certain level of decay or disrepair, it's not long before the international army of graffiti vandals shows up to "express themselves." Much like a cloud of shiny green flies gathers around a road apple. I consider graffiti a sign of the steady decline and fall of Western Civilization. These guys (almost exclusively) think of themselves as some sort of "artistes," when in fact they are merely sewer rats wielding spray cans. Endless mimics of each other's putrid self expressions. I find it a very sad commentary that there is a younger generation who actually look at that ugly stuff and think that it's artistic. Sure, maybe one in a hundred is, but look what the body of graffiti that's displayed in these photos does. It doesn't make anyplace look better, it only makes most of these places look more pathetic and misbegotten. Shame on these young attention-craving disfigurers of modern society.
A couple of the things I was struck by when visiting Ireland and Scotland for the 1st time were the age of the buildings and other structures that remain standing and in use, after 100's of years. It reminded me the US is so young, and it's buildings are constructed for impermanence.
Great Scott! We need to go Back in the Past! Let's get the Time Machine DeLorean DMC.
We need to go back and build a time machines!
I hate to see places wasted! People worked there. They needed jobs to survive. Families, friends went there, together to make memories. Hate seeing things forgotten.
These postcards made me extremely sad. My parents used to vacation in the Poconos and I couldn't help thinking that the structures could be renovated and used in another way. Perhaps some of the places could become organic farms and others could easily become summer camps for kids from New York City who need to get into nature in the summer. There are, I am sure , other ways these places could be repurposed.
It saddens me that buildings are left to rot and waste out of sheer greed. They could've been used and maintained for many other purposes- housing the homeless or charities is one of many. But rather than be a little generous people would rather leave a huge expensive building to rot than to give anything away for free. Horrible.
Remember? Whites only!
The older I become the harder I find it to marvel at pictures of abandoned places. I used to find them exhilarating and romantic. Now, all I see is this tremendous waste of resources and it makes me sad and angry. We are turning our planet into a gigantic rubbish heap. (The post is great, though, although it would be a gazilliion times better with static pics, not gifs.)
Job well done, Pablo
I am a person growing and approaching thirties, to me this is the most saddening post i have encountered here. We as people try to cherish our memories and keep them safe in our hearts and try to keep them afresh every time we think of them. But this post shows that those memories will fade away and you'll remember lesser and lesser with each passing day.
Candid photographers in jaipur Really very unique and awesome post.
"More of the indoor pool at Grossinger's" strikes me as a very poor way to introduce the reader to the locale. In fact, Grossinger's never is introduced! We are given no information regarding where it is, when it opened, when it closed -- only nebulous hints here and there. Your writers really need more practice. A lot more.
great pictures... it would be fantastic if the government cleaned them up and made them housing for homeless or people who can't afford to buy a house, rather than let them sit and fall apart....
Some of these places were resorts, which means they're not convenient to the services and jobs that would best serve homeless and underemployed people. In other cases, maybe nobody's thought of it, or they have only run afoul of NIMBY types who don't want to see homeless people or think that means Alex and his droogs will be their neighbors. Or there's a clause in a sentence in a subparagraph of a subparagraph of an addendum to the local codes that makes it effectively impossible for even government agencies to use old properties that way.
These photos are really sad, The 60's were an amazing era. Even criminals had codes of conduct.
I used go there all the time it was a great place
Thank you.
I am surprised it hasn't been turned into a suburban living area homes, schools, hospital, and shopping area infrastructure must be there
This makes me want to cry. All the hard work, all the history, all the nostalgia gone because no one cared enough to keep it going.
Here lies hope and promise....I'd love to see my neighborhood in 300 years....
This makes me think of those Nat Geo shows "If humans were gone" When humanity is gone and we see what happens to the world with no one to take care of anything. Sad.
So if someone reopened Pocanos there would only be a couple of places to worry about! 😆👍🏻
It reminds me of SyFy fiction when you are coming back to earth and you see just the ruins. We are the nature and memories destroyers fellas!
It reminds me of the film "the time machine" (1960)
Society gets bored easily. All things new get old eventually. Sometimes what is old can be new again if you don't discard it.
Its very sad that no one feels that these treasures are worth saving....
So sad to see these marvelous places being ruined and rotting..
This is beautiful and sad at the same time
Good work!
Some of these can still be restored but if not at least turned into a park/ hangout spot. Any city could use a little more green
They could be but who in this day and age would want to, that is the problem. It would cost millions of £'s to restore the buildings to their former glory and then have to make the money back! Unfortunately, these buildings will just be left to rot and decay. Sad, sad times.
time can be cruel. I would love to see these places restored though that would cost a tremendous amount of money
It wouldn't be worthwhile. The places fell into disrepair because lower cost airfares made the Poconos and the Catskills not so desireable as vacation destinations, at least if you are looking for warm weather destinations. You could get on a plane and be in Florida in 2 1/2 hours or spend 90 minutes driving up to Grossingers. These are resorts which were served by New York City folks fleeing the city for the mountains to cool off. Recall the end of Dirty Dancing (a similar resort to the ones pictured here) circa 1963 or 1964 -- the owner could feel that times were changing.
Best reply to this sad situation... too bad these places couldn't be used for something: Old age homes came to mind but these places would have to be retrofitted and there are probably no hospitals close by... Also read that they were taxed to death as well when occupancy started going away
Do blacks EVER make anything they touch, better?
The whole place is destroyed with the blacks grafitti. Disgusting.
of course you can see what the blacks did to it with all of their graffiti...
Nice try MG! I've been cleaning up and painting over graffiti in the San Francisco East Bay since 2003. Precious little of it is created by blacks. Almost all of it is created by privileged white punks from middle class families. -BT
I give zero pewps. Most of those resorts were for well to-do people who thought racism etc. was acceptable. I second nature taking it back.
That's painting with a very broad brush.
I get an odd satisfaction to see that humanity is not so almighty. That our works, maybe all of them, will be consumed again by Nature. Everything that can rot, will rot, rust or crumble. Even concrete - seemingly like rock, bubbles apart within a hundred years as the internal steel rusts away. Trees get into the cracks. So do insects, animals, birds poop, more seeds ... one day It all falls down. It is swallowed, digested, ground down and smothered. Part of me wants this to happen. I love to see it happen.
As a gamer I really got this same feeling when playing Horizon zero dawn. Such an eerie beautiful feeling. Those designers really captured that "the mighty have fallen" vibe.
I had the same thought.
This was a deep thought when Shelley wrote Ozymandias. Amazing how it can sound so much more adolescent in other hands.
I know right, what a shocker. An Oxford-educated Romantic poet can word something better than a random person in the comments section. So amazing, much wow.
Wow I love "Part of me wants this to happen. I love to see it happens.....this has always fascinated me too, great, splendid monuments consumed by nature. As if they were never greatest feat of all time
Watch Life After People
If you look at abandoned Railway sidings, the grass and weeds very quickly take over.
It's just sad that the demise of humanity makes you smile...
It's not the demise of humanity, stop being so dramatic. The owners were growing increasingly out of touch with their target demographic and their marketing strategies were not working so they had to close the resort. Grossinger's tried bringing in young people by transforming the resort into a hippie theme...in the 1980s! The way you make this sound, you must damn near faint when a restaurant closes.
There is a huge difference between just closing a resort and leaving it sit there to rot as if the land was disposable. There is no excuse for that and it does really show how destructive we can be with regards to the Earth.
I think, the saddest here, doesn't comes from the emptyness or the abandonment, but from the waste. As humans, we think it's normal to spoil a natural place, to build something that can be charmfull (not always the case, see all the coast with tones of buildings for mass tourism)... and to just forgot it as something disposable. Double waste. It doesn't make money anymore? then let's go concreting some other wonderful place and restard from zero, until next time. Glad to see, nature find her way despite us. (I hope they remove asbestos and all nasty stuff before leaving...)
Unfortunately, they don't remove asbestos, or anything else. They just leave it to rot, if it can rot. Or poison everything around, which is more likely. America is very wasteful society, sad to say it.
There is nothing natural in the way it looks now. Every house, every building in our great country stands on what was once "nature."
Yeah, turning Nature into Environment...
Nature wil reclaim it all eventually. Earth survives...man does not. If the human race were to go the way of the dinosaurs, remnants of our existence will be gone in a thousand years, maybe 2. Most will be gone in a couple hundred years. All that will remain will be fossils. The earth will live on until it plunges into the sun millions of years from now.
But somehow they remind us that the sixties had their time, and they outshone this epoch somehow......nostalgia!
GIF :(
Everything in this world belongs to nature, we simply borrow it!
That's impressive but to be truly honest, the photographer should have taken pictures in summer.
Some are summer pix, but I'd suspect the decision was to go for a starker look - emphasizing the emptiness and abandoned/dying qualities in frame. An artistic decision I can quite understand. Also - in winter, the buildings are easier to see.
The idea is to compare its height of beauty vs. its most forsaken state and you get the chills. The people in them, I wonder, too.
My thoughts too! Almost all these photos were taken during some dreary winter or autumn. Some outside photos that were taken during spring/summer actually look better now.
And what does it matter? Looks more cheerful? Destruction is destruction, summer or winter. Shame.
When I see stuff like this I often wonder how a whole building could just be abandoned for decades like that. Particularly when the building is not so far from a thriving metropolis. Here in New Orleans, we had a amusement park that was left like that and it's just weird that no other company tried to buy the land dirt cheap and do something with it.
It's weird to me, too. I can understand smaller properties sitting for a time, but not something large enough to construct all new buildings (office, factory, mixed-use) on.
Hey...great place for monuments ya think?
What happened? Why did these places lose their popularity?
Combinations of changes in demographics, the economy, who has the money (old vs. new money, or the age-range of the wealthy), car culture, and society.
Miami Beach was being developed in the later half of the 1900's. I was married in 1959 & we decided to not do the usual Jewish honeymoon in the Borscht Belt but get on an airplane & fly to fabulous Miami Beach! Now that was a "Shmaltzy" move. Plus it was summer all year long in Miami. I think that was what killed those places.
Yes i would agree, as airfare prices dropped from the 1970s on it changed the vacation industry in the Poconos and the Catskills.
That makes perfect sense.
Grossingers is not in the Poconos. It's in Sullivan county New York. Poconos is in Pennsylvania. The reason these places went dead was the areas turned bad and NYS neglected infrastructure to highways. To this day it's a two lane road on 17 which is 86 now. But when NYS put casinos in a area around 87 they expanded the road ways
Yeah, Liberty, NY. (YouTube videos shows some more pics) https://youtu.be/t5fAdKshdaI
It seems unreal to see the Poconos pictures :( ... Was married in the Poconos, 25 years ago, and to my knowledge they are still thriving... I guess my question is, what location at the Poconos is this? I know we ate at a dining hall, similar to that picture, it boggles my mind to think that is where we ate... Guess a road trip is in order :/
I remember going to some of these places in the 1980's when I was a very young child. So it is so strange for me to realize that they are ALL completely closed down and falling apart. For 50+ years, these places were a huge part of the culture for my family and families like mine. So strange to see these photos...
It's almost like a post-apocalyptic wasteland where these are nothing more than relics of a long bygone era where it's original inhabitants that are it's last generations ago are either grown old or long dead and forgotten and here we are sitting on their ruins today.
The worst part of was just the amount of graffiti. Ridiculous!
Gifs are annoying.
... Why?
I liked the gifs. It was like flipping back and forth between photographs and made it easy to see the changes.
YES!
Voted down, stupid comment.
PocoNOOOOOOO
Eeriely beautiful.
Its so sad ..it looks like at one time it would have been a blast...now all I see is loneliness..emptiness...it makes me ill that all these millionaires, won't come it to a place like that and turn it around...It could be a very nice seniors center...or somewhere kids could go to have fun and stay out of trouble ........I just hate to see the waste.....
Mostly the same place (Poconos) fifty years later.
sad
TAXED TO DEATH.
Bored panda is a bunch of rip off wankers. Why not link the the actual site, or better yet, produce your own content instead of leeching off of someone else's work.
What I find saddest of all in these pictures is the arrogance of people that feel they must attack, destroy, or otherwise disfigure buildings that are not theirs. Locations in which they themselves are only in temporarily; they must 'leave their mark'; as thought they themselves are mere animals. Dogs or cats that mark their 'territory'; urinating to proclaim their existence, and their impotence. Yes, the abandonment of once treasured vacation location is sad. These buildings could be used to house the homeless. And yes, nature will overrun all that man misuses. The saddest part of the article itself, to me, are those comments by today's people that have no understanding of what life was truly like 40-50-60 years ago; the depressed individuals of today that have never lived what they now openly denigrate while secretly wishing they could have been there to experience the 'heyday' of the era.
It seems to be a human thing. Grafitti is as old as writing. Especially if you had to make a special effort to get somewhere: seems a shame not to leave a version of 'Kilroy was here.' (Not saying it's right, just saying it seems to be universal urge.)
Just an FYI: the lead should say "lying," not laying.
It just makes me sad. These resorts were surrounded by thousands of acres of untouched woods in a rural area. They were a celebration after the Depression and WW II. They provided hundreds of jobs, not to mention a nearby resort destination for the Jews who were denied accommodation elsewhere. The Wikipedia page offers a great history - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borscht_Belt I actually got to experience Grossinger's when my new father-in-law took the family for a high holiday celebration in the late 80's.
One of the best series I've seen on this site. I guess the comment about taking the recent photos during the winter months has some merit, but it does heighten the differences. Very, very good job.
Good for nature! Would that it could gobble up some of the acres of useless tarmac. Supermarket car parks etc that stop the ground absorbing water and cause flooding.. But yes - it is a waste. Time effort and much money went into these creations. Shocking that they could just have been 'abandoned' and not even dismantled to reuse materials..
Why do people abandon places? Places that should be kept safe for future generations to look and understand what their parents had in their times. That they were not old duds who didn't know how to enjoy a thing, but to show that how vibrant and out going and crazy they were.
Good subject, badly presented in my opinion. the picture in picture is a really bad, goes too fast and you cant pause to see more details. should've just posted two pictures of before and after...
I loved this collection. How unique, different...shows that in time the earth takes back. In 100 years all of what's left will be apart of the earth again.. Wow... This was awesome!!! And I want to see more!
So its safe to say that the Poconos is abandoned? Seems the bulk of these photos are from there. Cool pics though.
cool project dude :)
This looks like Africa today. Joking nothing from Africa here. But something to remind us the destruction they love. Maybe they white, haha haha
Poor cheap construction. Venice is hundreds of years old.
Great photos, that tell a story, I was most impressed with the website presentation of the story, very clear and easy to follow
70's does not require an apostrophe; it's pluarl not possessive - 70s.
*plural
Yup. Check out the Orchid Island Hotel in Hilo, HI. Sad. So beautiful when it was built in the 60's. Tragic end because the business manager hired electrical contractors to do illegal and unsafe wiring and paid the inspectors to look the other way. It burnt down in the middle of the night and was never rebuilt. Oh he got his...
should it not be better describes as one structure in the 1940s?
I always wanted to go to the Poconos... not any more!
It's cool to see how quickly nature has taken over again. BTW this post would have been better if it had static pictures rather than GIFs. The GIFs are annoying.
Seeing these photos you can kind of see how there was this culture of decadence in the 60s. Build tons of resorts, for well-dressed and fit young dapper lovey dovey people, but in only a few decades, literally all of these have since been abandoned (except for maybe one or two) and are no longer the idyllic scenes that you see in the postcards. Is there any other decade that has this large of a number of resorts and entertainment complexes built but have since been lost?
Most of these places were built long before the 60s. In fact they were in decline by the 1960s. And most of the people were middle class Jewish families and honeymooners, hardly the decadent jet set you seem to envision. The 70s and 80s were a lot more decadent than the 60s, but then I guess it depends what your definition of that word is.