Saint Laurence Catholic Church, which began its life at 71st and Dorchester as a monument to God, is ending it as a monument to white flight. Built in 1911 for the Irish of the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood, the church began to empty out in the 1950s, and was finally deconsecrated in 2002; the mostly Protestant blacks who had moved into the neighborhood couldn’t provide the members or the money to keep it open.
For Eric Holubow, an urban explorer who lives in West Town, the risks are worth taking if it means he’s able to snap stunning pictures of forbidden zones, shots less adventurous photographers can’t access. In September, Schiffer Publishing will release Holubow’s art book of his trespasses, Abandoned: America’s Vanishing Landscape, which follows in the tradition of Detroit Disassembled and Ruin: Photographs of a Vanishing America in bringing urban decay to coffee tables. It’s a magnificent document of a number of dissolute Chicago landmarks: Edgewater Medical Center, Lawndale Theater, Michael Reese Hospital, the Brach’s candy factory, and the aforementioned Ravenswood Hospital, among others.
The trespasses of Chicago’s urban explorers
Check out the ugly, beautiful images of rustbelt ruin taken by Chicago urban explorers.
Saint Laurence’s front doors are sealed with no trespassing stickers, so Holubow heads around the back, plodding across a jumble of bricks—all that remains of the church rectory. Reaching an open window, he hoists himself up, climbs through, and drops into a vestibule. The 33-year-old is fully equipped for urbex: he’s wearing hiking boots and canvas cargo pants, to avoid cutting his legs on fencing or other jagged surfaces; he carries a tripod; his backpack contains his Canon 5D-MK II and a headlamp, for the inevitable tenebrous spaces.
“That place was epic,” he recalls. Abandoned includes a photo of Washburne’s cafeteria, littered with fallen ceiling tile, looking like a sort of baked salt flat. After that, Holubow broke into the Lawndale Theater, where he was confronted by a naked squatter who put on a pair of pants, grabbed a hammer, and chased the photographer out of the building. To gain entry to Edgewater Medical Center, Holubow donned wading boots and walked through knee-deep water in an underground tunnel. In a psychiatric hospital outside of Detroit, he was caught by security cameras and paid a $500 fine for trespassing. But Holubow has turned his hobby into a lucrative sideline: a print of the City United Methodist Church in Gary, whose missing walls give it the look of a World War II French cathedral, sold for thousands of dollars at an art fair.
A frequent explorer of Gary’s fabulous ruins, Katherine Hodges posts her photos on the blog City of Destiny, and on a Flickr account under the handle Katherine of Chicago. During a trip to the “Magic City of Steel” in 2010, Hodges visits Gary’s old Sheraton, which was closed in the 1990s and has proved difficult to demolish or redevelop—a perfect circumstance for urbexers. Entering the deteriorating building is a cinch: wearing eyeglasses and a backpack, she strolls through a hole in one wall, right into what was once the hotel’s restaurant. In the kitchen, saucers are scattered beneath a dishwasher conveyor belt. Cattails grow out of the stagnant water in the deep end of the rooftop swimming pool.
Now at Gary Screw & Bolt, Hodges pushes aside some branches and ducks through a breach in the fence that’s like a rust belt version of C.S. Lewis’s wardrobe: she passes through the hole and into a posthuman future. Not for nothing has this former factory been featured on the History Channel show Life After People. Ten-foot-high drifts of work clothes sit moldering on the factory floor. Large trees grow through fissures in the concrete. Hodges raises her camera and takes a photo. A suitable caption for the oddly beautiful snapshot: “Nature always bats last.”
