The Strange Allure of Abandoned Buildings

Over the last couple of decades, we've heard countless tales of daredevils who enter abandoned urban structures to record images. They're called urbexers — short for urban explorers — and for many of them, the risks of entering a shuttered factory, hotel or skyscraper are part of the allure. It's dangerous and, most likely, illegal.

For less adventurous souls, like me, the notion of risking one's life or limb to get a cool photo holds minimal appeal. However, the larger urbex message — old, abandoned buildings have a mysterious beauty of their own — does strike home.

That may explain, at least partially, why the hobby launched by urbexers has spread to a safer and gentler form known as "rurexing," for rural exploration. After all, the countryside is full of abandoned old buildings. It's also full of people, like me, who find them uniquely beautiful.

I became a rurexer, unwittingly and gradually, in 2021. Freshly vaxxed for COVID-19 that spring, I finally felt safe enough to reenter the world a bit with an aimless 150-mile drive that took me from my St. Paul home to tiny Bertha, Minnesota. It felt good just to walk around in a little town, even though it had seen better days.

Then an old brick building caught my eye: The Bertha Cooperative Creamery, built in 1919, closed decades ago and strangely handsome even though its windows had been bricked over. I found it alluring, haunting, powerful. So I shot it with my phone. I didn't know it then, but my rurexing days had begun.

Among rurexers, my tale is common: One day you start to notice these buildings, and then you can't stop.

A few years back, Zak Rivers, a photographer in Mankato, Minnesota, also played in a band, and his dual pursuits regularly carried him across all of the southern part of the state. "Something caught my eye about the barns that I saw," recalls Rivers, 52. "Whether it was a wedding (to photograph) or a band gig, I started taking back roads, and I'd find hidden gems here and there."

He had his own Facebook page with a focus on music and photography. He occasionally posted photos of barns and other rural abandoned structures and found that his followers loved them. So in 2021, as people like me were beginning to emerge from their homes, Rivers made his Facebook page public under a new name, Abandoned: Minnesota, so people could join and post photos of their own.

It took off, he says, "like wildfire." After one year, it had nearly 100,000 members. Today it has 214,000. That's impressive, but hardly unique. Similar public Facebook groups have attracted online crowds in states including Louisiana (287,000 members), Tennessee (319,000), Illinois (339,000), Michigan (395,000) and Virginia (495,000). In addition, scads of private Facebook groups and Flickr pages also focus on rural abandonments.

In other words, Americans everywhere are fascinated with empty old buildings.

Why?

"I think part of it is nostalgia," says Vermont photographer Jim Westphalen. "But I think there's a deeper meaning to it that goes back to the roots of our heritage. As we get older, I think people really value what the local agrarian economies were built upon. And we know that it's fleeting at this point."

Westphalen, 65, moved to Vermont from Long Island with his family and his photography business in 1996 and began noticing the empty old farmhouses, barns, schools and churches.

"Although I was enamored by the aesthetic of these crumbling old structures — the patina and the rust and the sagging porches and all that — it wasn't until the last five or 10 years that I started thinking, 'Who lived here? Who worked here? What were their lives like when they built them around these structures a hundred years ago?' "

His curiosity began to consume him to the point that he now devotes most of his professional attention to abandoned rural buildings. He has published a coffee table book, "Vanish: Disappearing Icons of a Rural America," which focuses on New England, and has also completed a feature-length documentary film by the same name.

He is working on a second coffee table book with broader, national scope. When I spoke with Westphalen on a Zoom call, he told me that he was getting ready for an 18-day trip to the Dakotas. He swiveled the camera to show me a large physical map of North Dakota with dozens of tiny photos of known abandonments pasted to it.

The map made me gasp. That's because I, too, create exacting route plans for my own rurex ventures, but not on this large scale. Typically, I map a triangular route with two destination towns within 150 miles of the Twin Cities.

Then I scour the Internet, including Abandoned: Minnesota, to find buildings discovered by others and hope to stumble upon more as I drive. Unlike Rivers, the Mankato photographer, barns don't excite me. But I love farmhouses. I also love abandoned schools, churches, creameries and commercial buildings.

At first, I posted photos on Flickr, but found the format limiting because I love to dig up histories on buildings, and Flickr is not built for much text. So I just post them, often accompanied by text, on Facebook for friends and entertain the possibility of creating a website someday. My limited Flickr presence did, however, put me in touch with a fellow Minnesota rurexer, 55-year-old Ryan Ware of Chaska. He'd noticed that we had photographed a few of the same buildings and sent me a nice note on Flickr mail.

I spoke with Ware on the phone recently and learned that while we share similarities, we also differ in our approaches. Where I meticulously plan out my sojourns, he is more whimsical and sets out on his searches in whatever direction suits his fancy.

"I just enjoy driving in rural areas," he says. "When I go out on these shoots, I typically leave early in the morning and I'm not back until dark. I just keep driving and go down whatever road looks interesting."

I asked him why he does it.

"For me, it's just a sense that rural areas are facing a lot of change — depopulation and a sense that the old business models don't work there. People live there but don't shop there to the extent they did. The young people move away once they get out of high school. So it's a sense of loss and trying to preserve, with photographs, some of the things that existed."

One thing that Rivers, Ware, Westphalen and I agree on is the importance of obeying the law. In viewing abandonment photos on the Internet, it is obvious to me that many are the products of trespassing. Too many people who take up this hobby seem to believe that just because a building is abandoned, it is OK to venture onto the property and even enter the building without permission of the owner (and, of course, there is always an owner).

Georgetown Law professor David Super points out that, in general, anyone who ventures onto private property can be sued for trespassing by the property owner, even if the interloper causes no damage.

"Now, I have my doubts about how energetic our property owner is going to be in filing these sorts of things because taking cases to court costs money," he says. "But there is the possibility that if someone does damage to a building that hasn't been kept up very well, it could be worth it."

Meanwhile, Super further points out, most states have criminal trespass laws on the books. These are the laws that stipulate the size and placement of No Trespassing signs. If you ignore No Trespassing signs in Minnesota, for instance, you could be charged with either a misdemeanor ($1,000 fine) or gross misdemeanor ($3,000 fine).

In other words, it's best to play it safe and not trespass.

If rurexing sounds like something you might like to take up, Westphalen has a few words of advice: "Start small. Pick a small region where you've found three or four structures online, and then go.

"And that's just half of it," he adds. "The fun part is those surprises along the way."

Richard Dahl is a writer in St. Paul, Minnesota, whose primary focus is law and the legal profession. He has written for Harvard Law School, the ABA Journal, and Lawyers USA. His work has also appeared in The Nation, the Boston Globe Magazine and Environmental Health Perspectives. Read More