Saturday, July 11, 2009

Abandoned Places (etc.)

As a source for desolate, claustrophobic, and/or seedy locations to set a game I highly recommend the Abandoned Places blog. A smattering of it's more famous or interesting areas includes:


Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong

Abandoned Places:

Kowloon used to be one of the areas of Hong Kong city. By the end of 1970s Walled City began to grow. Square buildings folded up into one another as thousands of modifications were made, virtually none by architects or engineers, until the entire City became monolithic. Labyrinthine corridors ran through the City, some former streets (at the ground level, and often clogged up with refuse), and some running through upper floors, through and between buildings. The streets were illuminated by fluorescent lights, as sunlight rarely reached the lower levels.

. . .

By the early 1980s, Kowloon Walled City had an estimated population of 35,000. The City was notorious for its excess of brothels, casinos, opium dens, cocaine parlours, food courts serving dog meat, and secret factories.




Centralia, United States

The moderately well known Pennsylvania town where a mine fire, raging unchecked since 1962, occasionally still opens smoking rents in the ground and chars hillside foliage.



Gunkanjima, Japan

Abandoned Places:

Mitsubishi bought the island in 1890 and began the project, the aim of which was retrieving coal from the bottom of the sea. They built Japan’s first large concrete building, a block of apartments in 1916 to accommodate their burgeoning ranks of workers (many of whom were forcibly recruited labourers from other parts of Asia), and to protect against typhoon destruction.

As petroleum replaced coal in Japan in the 1960s, coal mines began shutting down all over the country, and Hashima’s mines were no exception. Mitsubishi officially announced the closing of the mine in 1974, and today it is empty and bare, which is why it’s called the Ghost Island. Travel to Hashima was re-opened on April 22, 2009 after more than 20 years of closure.



Pripyat, Ukraine

Ukrainian community built to house workers at Chernobyl. Evacuated and abandoned after the 1986 disaster.



Link.


Thanks to Mike Lake of the Unknown Armies mailing list for pointing out the site.

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