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Photography

Haunting Holmesburg Prison

It’s Halloween and we’ve rounded up the work of seven photographers for a super-sized photo essay on creepy Holmesburg Prison. Enjoy!

Two New Books Provide A Fitting Eulogy To Byberry State Hospital
History

Two New Books Provide A Fitting Eulogy To Byberry State Hospital

House of horrors? From 1990, when it closed, until 2006, when it was demolished, the legend of Byberry State Hospital in the Northeast grew in our imagination. Now two new books aim to set the complicated record straight. Ethan Wallace has the review

Light Filters Down Below
Photography

Light Filters Down Below

Photographer Jessie Fox found herself down below, in an abandoned subway station; here’s what she saw

The Pretense Of Ornament
Preservation

The Pretense Of Ornament

This week, we began to search for images of Philly’s golden age of jazz, the 1940s-1960s, and so far we’ve found almost nothing in the archives. But then most of that world is gone–eviscerated. Nathaniel Popkin, with a little help from Joseph Mitchell, laments

With Ortlieb’s Destined for the Wrecking Ball, An Artist Speaks Up
Art & Design

With Ortlieb’s Destined for the Wrecking Ball, An Artist Speaks Up

Last month a mysterious flag appeared on top of the tree that graced the roof of the abandoned and soon-to-be demolished Ortlieb’s Brewery building in Northern Liberties. We’ve got the story of how it got up there–and why

Photography

A Goodbye Look At The Ortlieb’s Brewery

We explore the soon-to-be demolished Ortlieb’s Brewery complex on 3rd and Poplar Streets in this photo essay

Photography

Anything But Sober

The 19th century beer barons of Philadelphia built breweries that looked more like castles than factories. For our third and final Beer Week installment, we visit the suitably ornate yet sadly vacant Rieger & Gretz Brewery on Germantown Avenue, which a neighborhood group hopes to put on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places

Photography

Confessions of a “Ruin Pornographer”

Call it “ruin porn” if you like, but for Abandoned America’s Matthew Christopher, photographing lost places is an act of interrogation–there are no answers, he says, only questions


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