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!
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
Photography Light Filters Down Below Photographer Jessie Fox found herself down below, in an abandoned subway station; here’s what she saw
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
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
