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.
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.
Outside - History marched on! The Vietnam war, the protests, the counterculture, all that music, the moon missions, The Simpsons ... every freaking thing was going on in America and world-wide. But in here, time was frozen. Nothing happened at all! Amazing.
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."
So many cool swimming locations destroyed by neglect. It's sad to see them like this.
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."
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.
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 is the fate of everything we build. Without constant vigilance, the trees will march back to where they were and get right on with being a forest.
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 :(
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 :(