A friend of mine from high school got in touch with me recently. I hadn't seen or talked to him in 18 years, but thanks to the magic of social media, he had seen some of my urban exploration photos and wanted to know if I had any interest in going out exploring with him. So we met up downtown and tried a couple of locations that potentially might have given us access to Cleveland's long-abandoned network of subway tunnels. We had no luck, but in our search, we happened down an alley that led us into a courtyard of sorts behind an expensive restaurant. I say courtyard only for lack of a better term, this wasn't made intentionally, it was just a void left in the middle of a block of surrounding buildings. It was overgrown and contained a bunch of mismatched architectural artifacts, as you can see in the above photo that I took.
There was also that big gaping hole in one of the buildings, so we decided to check that while we were there. There was a small room with a dirt ramp inside that led up to the second floor. There were a couple of lights on, but there was also a thick layer of dust all over everything, and there didn't seem to have been any people in there for a long time.
There was a bunch of random junk, none of any less than 30 or 40 years old. The doors were shuttered or boarded up and so were the windows. We checked out the whole floor and then went up the stair to the next one. It was a very industrial looking space, and there were a few signs which seemed to indicate that there had been some of factory or the like there, but they looked to be very old.
The floor was covered in wooden bricks, which I know were popular about a hundred or so years ago, but I have no idea of the age of the building. On the top floor we found several newspapers from 1980, which is very possibly the last time that this building was occupied. After trying a few staircases, we found a way onto the the roof, which made for a good view.
I plan to go back to get some shots of the city at night. I don't generally share stories about my photos too often, because there honestly isn't often much to tell. I'll hear about a building, or happen to see one, scout it out and then go back with my camera. But I've never found one by accident like this, and certainly not at the end of an alley in the middle of the city. So I decided to share this one, hope you enjoyed it.