19 Centennial Avenue, Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

A renovator's dream!

This charming little hellhole has been on our list of potential properties for some time now, but for some reason or another, we hadn't quite got around to writing about it until today. I don't know why, because this place just exemplifies the abandoned buildings side of his blog. The first time we went past it, I very nearly drove off the road in shock, because up until that point all the surrounding houses had been quite nice. This just hurts my eyes. Usually when you see something in this state of disrepair, it's surrounded by a wire fence with demolition orders up. But no, this one is just chillin', clearly without having seen any love or attention since it was first built. It clearly hasn't been painted since then - the original coat has just flaked off over time to expose the bare boards underneath. It seems that the plaster rendering on the upper section of the house has just fallen off, exposing a tasteful sort of wood skeleton underneath. In fact, those sections remind me forcibly of the huts I used to build in my back garden, which were made of bit of old trellis fence. The roof tiles are falling like autumn leaves, and I think the house has shifted a little on its foundations, because those windows certainly don't fit as snugly in their frames as they once might have. The garden is messy with a crumbling fence, and there is a lot of accumulated rubbish shoved down between the house and the fence.

I'm sure it was nice 100 years ago.

Now, let me draw your attention to the pictures taken through the windows. We examined these after our first visit here, and were surprised to see that there was actually some stuff inside. A fan is clearly visible, as well as some other random clutter. We assumed that the residents had just left, leaving all their old furniture to fester. I mean, seriously, out of all the houses we've collected for this blog, we were quite sure that this place was totally, absolutely abandoned. We assumed it must have been sitting there for years with just that horrible, fetid old caravan for company.

That poor, poor fan!

Here's why we should never assume anything ever again. Recently, we drove past this place at night. We had been keeping our eyes peeled, since we thought it might be quite hard to find in the dark. Well, this wasn't the case at all. You want to know why? Because there was a light on. A proper fluorescent light, not the torchlight of vandals or squatters. The place is actually in use. I couldn't fucking believe it. This is probably the closest we've come to finding something worthy of a Dot Dot Curve rating, and it turns out that people actually USE IT, perhaps even live in it. Out of all the places we've found for this blog so far, this was one of the few cases where we didn't even have a flicker of doubt about the "abandoned" status we gave it. Even if this is just someone's workshop rather than their residence, you'd think they'd at least fix the roof. I would be genuinely worried about this place staying up in a high wind, so I certainly wouldn't leave anything I'm working on in there unattended. In addition to that, it looks so easy to break in to. All you'd need to do is tap on the wall and you'd probably make a gap big enough to crawl through. I'm not even going to think about someone actually living here, but after seeing that light on, it's a troublingly plausible thought. I hope that they move out before that wonky chimney falls through their bedroom roof!

You win the "worst house on this blog" award. Well done.

To be honest, I would rather live in that caravan for a year than spend a week in that house. You might not quite understand how momentous that is, but I am massively ill-disposed towards caravans. They creep me out and they're dirty and horrible and get in the way while you're driving. Caravans are the crows of the mechanical world. I hope that helps you understand how bad these place actually is. I hope for the sake of everyone living on that street that the termites and the elements get rid of this place sooner rather than later. Perhaps then the mystery residents can move somewhere nicer - I think even this would be luxurious compared with their current wreck.

Rating: Cellar floor.

Update: 377 Albion Street, Brunswick, VIC, Australia

Well, well. Remember the very first property we featured on this blog? Ah, the nostalgia. Well, we took a wander past it yesterday. Back in early February's entry, I suggested they could pick up a lawnmower cheaply from eBay or pay a local child an utter pittance of small change to make the lawn all nice and tidy. And what do you know? They actually have mown their lawn!

Here's the proof. Before (i.e. 18 January):

And after (i.e. 19 March):

No weeds, no spiders, no snakes.

Yes, it's a somewhat half-hearted attempts at lawn mowing, what with all those epic weeds still sprouting merrily, and I sure hope they didn't PAY for it, but it's a bloody good start. It's obviously not a lawn you could tackle in just one go by yourself anyway. I suppose they got sick of being unable to reach their front door; now the path is clear and nobody's going to accidentally step on a brood of vipers on their way out to the letterbox.

Now you can more readily see the front of the house and the somewhat rundown paintwork, which needs a clean at the least and possibly a nice new coat. I wonder, is somebody preparing this place to renovate or sell? Because it could be so gorgeous. Spruce up the front, get rid of all of those weeds, and plant a nice little front garden and it would look wonderful. This is proven by some nearby houses built to the same plan - they are stunning.

Rating: Revised down from Damnable to Unpleasant.

105 Arthurton Road, Northcote, VIC, Australia

This house has piqued my interest for a long time, ever since we started walking over to the Northcote Social Club around mid-2010. Most of the time, we had been walking past it at night, so although I noted it as being pretty run down and dingy, I didn't realise exactly how bad it was. And then the clocks went forward, and we actually got to see it in broad daylight. And oh my god, what a sight.

It's only held together by years of accumulated grime.

Creepy graffiti and massive holes in the wall.

What an absolute mess. You can tell that this used to be a very nice house. If someone had saved this place before it actually started to fall down, they could have probably done a hell of a lot with it. It's on a massive section, and the house itself could look stunning if you gave it a nice paint job and possibly replaced the roof. Instead, it was just left to fester, and it now appears to be losing all structural integrity. The latticework is missing in places, the support poles for the verandah are on a serious lean, the place is covered in graffiti and there are numerous holes all through the walls. I would say that I would have wanted to go in and explore, but I'm sure this place is actually occupied by squatters and other ne'er-do-wells. The graffiti across the front of the house, which is currently hidden by an old couch, reads "slum village". Very promising. In fact, I imagine the old couch was a luxurious bed for many drunken squatters occupying this place - it's certainly more comfortable than a bus stop, even if it is probably full of spiders. There's another piece of graffiti next to the front window which reads "sleep well". That one creeps me the fuck out. I may be curious, but I'm not quite THAT curious.

See police tape on the lawn.

However, it looks like I was very lucky to catch this place when I did - as you can see, when I went to get the photos for this post today, the house was surrounded by temporary fencing and security tape. This is a very recent development, so it looks as though this place has finally been condemned! However, things are still not as simple as they seem. Further inspection revealed that in addition to the red security tape, which I would expect to find around a condemned building, there was something more sinister. Blue and white police tape was up around the house too! Immediately, my excitable imagination began working overtime. What the hell happened here? Was there a clash between the squatters and the neighbours who had simply had enough? A clash between the squatters who couldn't work out who was getting the top bunk? Did someone actually come and try to paint the house or mow the lawn and the squatters protested? Christ knows.

Picture used in the official listing. I wouldn't look twice at it!

I thought that I might try and find out if any crime had actually been committed here. While I found nothing in that regard, my search revealed that this place had been on the market, advertised as a "buy it and knock it down" sort of deal. Here's the thing, though - the house looks perfectly presentable in the pictures on the estate agent's website. A look at Google street view reveals the same thing. It looks like someone must have bought the house, but has just left it to rot ever since. Still, I would have thought that for this house to fall into this level of utter disrepair, it would have had to have been abandoned for YEARS. Just look at it! The weatherboards are actually falling away from the house, leaving gaping holes in the walls. Ok, that might have been vandalism, but there are plenty of other examples. The window frames are falling out and decaying, the guttering is warped beyond belief and the roof looks as though it's about to slide away. Though if I was attached to this house, I'd slide away as quickly as I possibly could too. Seriously, the house in the listing may as well be a totally different house. Check out the compete absence of rust on the roof, the straight and upstanding verandah, the nicely mown lawn, the air conditioning unit. Nothing about that picture suggests that in just a few years, the house will be transformed into a slum worthy of Otara.

Come on in, it's so inviting.

I think that in writing this entry, I've raised even more questions about this house than I already had. Nothing adds up. How did this go from being a perfectly respectable lick o' paint to this woeful disaster in the space of just a few years? Why wasn't something done sooner? What on earth is the deal with the police tape? Alas, I don't know if I'll ever find the answers. Soon enough, I imagine this place will be gone for good, the squatters will move next door (an entry for another day), and a new set of shoebox apartments will go up in its place. These will just be bland and roofless rather than madly intriguing, but at least I'll get another blog entry about them. For the safety of the community, I guess it's a good thing that this place is getting knocked down. For my sense of adventure and intrigue, it's a very bad thing indeed! I hope I can at least get a better view through the windows before it disappears forever.

Rating: Condemnable (well, already condemned).

Dargaville railway station, Dargaville, Northland, New Zealand

Sorry for the lack of updates over the last few days; we've both been a bit busy. But we return today with an absolute classic: the abandoned and vandalised Dargaville railway station!

This railway station was built in 1943 replacing an older station from the 1880s. Originally, it served passenger trains both to Donnellys [sic] Crossing and Waiotira (to meet trains to Auckland and Whangarei), but the line to Donnellys Crossing closed in 1959, and the line to Waiotira became freight-only in 1967. Since that time, there hasn't exactly been much use for a passenger station in Dargaville; even special passenger services have been rather uncommon over the last 44 years. Little wonder then that nobody has bothered looking after the place.

The building appears to have been used by railway staff well after passenger services ceased, but now I hate to think what's lurking in there. The door sits ajar; inside are strewn papers, cobwebs, and even a lonely little fridge. The window is broken, the attempt to cover it is hasty and has even had a hole punched in it, and the external walls have received the typical dose of graffiti, though the paint hasn't horrendously peeled with age like that shocker on Monday. Once upon a time, the railways cared about their presentation, and when infrastructure was no longer required, they disposed of it for money or re-used it somewhere else. Hiowever, in this age of privatisation, woefully miserable investment, and generally not thinking two seconds ahead, a building like this has just been left to rot. It's not in the centre of town either, so I'm hardly surprised the Dargaville community hasn't taken much notice, let alone an interest in its restoration or conversion to something useful.

Oh, and if you need to pee, I really, really don't recommend the Dargaville station toilets. If they once had a roof, they sure don't any more, and it's about the least hygienic toilet this side of the open sewer that is Manurewa. But at least this place doesn't have a whiff of urine like Pomare station's underpass; it just smells of country decay.

"I ... think I can hold it in."

Platform of weeds, sans track.

As if to drive home the point that passenger trains don't call here any more, the platform is now more weeds than concrete. Having broken through cracks in the aging surface, plants have now largely taken over the length of the platform and made it completely useless in case anybody ever does want to run a special service for the people of Dargaville or enthusiasts. Mow your platform! Though apart from ten railfans, who actually wants to ride the roundabout and poorly maintained line to Dargaville? It would be barely useful even in an emergency blocking the roads. In case the crumbling building and weedy platform aren't enough to deter people, they've taken the final step of ripping up the rails alongside the platform. Tracks (barely) remain in the yard for freight trains, but you are absolutely, definitely, emphatically never again going to see Dargaville station bustling with passengers.

The whole line itself is probably going to close in the next few years. Looking at the condition of the tracks, I don't know how trains don't derail upon arrival at Dargaville; if I didn't know better and if there weren't wagons (dating from pre-WWII!) in the yard, I'd have assumed the line had been abandoned already. So I guess this entry isn't just a slag on the decrepit state of Dargaville station building, but part of the chronicle of the Dargaville railway fading quietly into history.

Rating: Condemnable. Plenty more photos of the station and yard in this gallery.

39 Barry Street, Brunswick, VIC, Australia

The Barry Street frontage.

OK, this house is one of the reasons why this blog exists. It raises so many questions, though most of them are permutations on "how the fuck did this even happen?!", and if anybody out there can sate our curiosity, we'd be most delighted. Because holy shit, we had to look twice (or three times) when we first saw it just to believe it was real.

Dawson St side, seen through gigantic fence gap.

Let's go through the more minor points first. What colour was this house originally? White? Cream? Light brown? Something in between? Or a tasteful flourescent pink? Your guess is as good as mine! The paint has flaked so incredibly much that it's hard to tell; just look at the Dawson Street side (at right) and it's more the colour of mud and mushrooms due to the paint having worn away to an incredible extreme. And how about that fence? It's not fencing in much any more, that's for certain. On both the Dawson and Barry Street frontages, it is collapsing, splintered, and missing legs. You can stroll into the back yard effortlessly; there is such a large gap in the fence that you needn't duck or dodge anything. Never mind the rusty nails poking out too. And how about the drainpipe? Snapped and broken.  The lawn? Mow your lawn! Though we've actually seen worse lawn at occupied properties; not quite sure what to make of this.

Click for a large copy to see how warped the southern (left) wall is.

Now for the major point. The house has lost its structural integrity! Look at it: one half of the house is visibly and alarmingly slumping and subsiding. Check out the windows, which now don't even fit in the windowframes and a visible gap has opened up at the base. The southern wall has actually warped. And never mind that the wall beneath the verandah has gone a charming poo-stain brown just to ram home the decrepitude. This is simply depressing.

The rear of the house. Thanks, collapsed fence.

Once upon a time, this would have been another charming old house, cut from the same basic mould as many in the area. Now it's just, uh, mouldy. It's clearly suffered decades of neglect, and I am at a loss to understand how. The house is in a rather handy spot: it's on the corner of a moderately significant road (Dawson Street), it's close to Union Square, only slightly further to the wares and wonders of Sydney Road's shops, and there is plenty of public transport. Houses with those sorts of nearby amenities go for fucking heaps. What I think is depressing is that whoever let this place fall into such an abject state could make a heap of money by selling this to a developer, who'll probably knock it over and build something from the hideous contemporary templates that seem to be the basis for every new house and apartment block around here.

Rating: Cellar floor, and if that southern end loses much more structural integrity (i.e. in a strong breeze!), we may be looking at our first Dot Dot Curve here.

48-50 Evans Street, Moonee Ponds, VIC, Australia

Moonee Ponds is probably my favourite suburb around here. It's brimming with beautiful Victorian-era houses, colourful gardens and friendly neighbourhood cats.  We usually walk there from our place, for all the aforementioned reasons. On this walk, we cross Citylink (using a footbridge that is far less creepy than this one). As we cross, we first see a nice panorama of rooftops belonging to lovely old places. Then, we see this.

Glorious iron desert, stretching on for miles. Note real houses in the background.

This thing is unforgivable. In the world of Walshe and Whitelock turds, this is the biggest, most steamy turd of them all, and we have to smell it every time we walk to Moonee Ponds. Gloriously situated next to the massive sound barrier alongside Citylink, it is a truly depressing place to live. The block is huge - there are at least 15 apartments in it, probably more. It ticks all the wrong boxes - no roof, awful brickwork, tiny windows and from what I've seen through the tiny windows, dank rooms that look as if they haven't been decorated since 1962. Some residents will be lucky enough to have a glimpse of the Moonee Ponds Creek through their tiny windows. The worst thing is that the agent is probably charging hundreds of dollars per month for this shitbox, ripping off innocent international students and old people who can't afford anything nicer.

Tiny windows, but all they have to see is a huge sound barrier.

What drugs are these developers on?! They could have at least built many small units. That wouldn't have been so horribly confronting. Perhaps - and I know this is an absolutely insane proposal - they could have actually given this place a roof and some features which aren't horrible. But no, this edifice takes up a massive lot and everybody in the surrounding streets has to look at it every day. If I had the misfortune to live here, I'd tint the windows of my car so no-one would see me as I left or came home. Nobody should be ashamed of their place, but in this case I can't see how you'd be anything but mortified.

The turd in all its glory.

This thing is so big that it can probably be seen from space. From above, it puts me strongly in mind of a factory, or perhaps a prison. I feel sorry for the poor cyclists who ride over Citylink on the Hope Street bridge, spot this and fall off their bikes in horror. At least as a pedestrian I can prepare myself for what's coming.

Panoramic views of footbridge and sound barrier!

I know it's pretty hard to polish a turd, but they could have at least tried. Shame on you, 1960s developers, shame on you. I hope that when you die, your hell is a never-ending maze of huge soulless brick apartments, and I hope that the residents of this place come to haunt you with awful corrugated iron roofs and monotonous brickwork and entranceways with a whiff of urine about them.

I think the lawn needs a mow, too. I like the bush covering the window.

One slightly redeeming feature? At least they made an attempt at putting eaves over the upper windows. At least it breaks the monotony a tiny little bit. But that still doesn't raise the rating of this place. Sorry.

Rating: Cellar floor

14A Bent Street, Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

14A Bent Street is, quite simply, a mystery. For years, I had walked past it without paying it much attention at all. It was a pretty unremarkable house, really; plain, inoffensive, with nothing that made me stop in either admiration or disgust. Here it is, as seen on Google Streetview:

The reason why I have to resort to Streetview to show you this house is that it disappeared. After returning from a trip to New Zealand in May 2010, I discovered that it was GONE. It was as if it had never existed. All that was left was an empty lot.

Every time I went to New Zealand in 2010, I would return to find a building had disappeared. In the case of a house on Melville Road that vanished, it was one of those “wow, finally?” cases, and it lay as an empty lot for just a couple of months before development began. In the case of the Royal Dental Hospital of Melbourne, construction on a new cancer research facility began basically as soon as the dental hospital was gone.

But in the case of 14A Bent Street? Here we are well over half a year later, and the lot has very quickly been given over to nature. If you are ever curious just how quickly a city would be eaten by nature if humanity vanished, if you ever doubted The Day Of The Triffids and the like, then have a look at how quickly this lot has turned into uncontrolled scrub: 

(And check out the bonus ugly Walshe & Whitelock-esque flats in the background!)

They're going to have a fun time clearing that. I just feel for the neighbours – by this point, I'd start to worry about what may have made a home in there. Mow your lawn!

Rating: Unpleasant.

194 Dawson Street, Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

Or, "how Mow Your Lawn! got its name".

It was 31 December 2010 and time for that annual celebration when the entire planet joins weirdos like me and Charlotte to be number nerds and celebrate something as basic as one number changing to another. I mean, I think interesting dates are a perfectly good reason to get drunk and set off fireworks, and it's comforting that once a year, everybody else joins in.  What, you're telling me there's a bit more to it than that, something called "culture" and all that?  Oh, well then.  That's not the point!

The point is that, on this particular New Year's Eve, Charlotte and I were going to meet my mother and her partner for dinner.  Classy souls that we are, we got smashed on delicious cider before even getting out the door.  So we stumble onto the tram, and I'm trying not to be one of those obnoxious, overly loud tram drunks talking about totally inappropriate subjects (cf Charlotte when we took Helen to see Alpine in November).  I don't think I entirely succeeded.

We already had some budding curiosity about decrepit buildings and crankiness about shonky modern architecture.  See, for example, this post and another post on this topic from Charlotte's blog.  On this particular trip, we'd already - and fairly quietly - noted a couple of Melville Road's more curious places (like Gibbi's Pizza and the shop next to Con's).  But then the tram pulled onto Dawson Street, I laid eyes on #194, and blurted:

"Mow your lawn!"

Because, christ, this thing really does need a mow, soon.  The property is otherwise lovely, and with a nicely mown lawn would attract a considerable amount of approval from me, not that this hasty shot shows much beyond the overgrown lawn:

I spent the next ten minutes critiquing unmown lawns and even urging one concrete paradise to "get a lawn!", which just made me think of a line from the Late Show's sketch about things wogs would never do.  Charlotte finally forcibly got me to shut up, or perhaps it was the urgent call of my bladder, parlously overloaded with cider.

Anyway, all I was getting at that night, and all I'm getting at now, is that you should mow your lawn.  You can't do a whole lot on an unmown lawn (except pass out in it, or hide power bills you don't want to read), and it's probably going to wind up home to things that want to kill you.  Especially in Australia.  And since this country is only three quarters of a mile from the sun, it's a bushfire risk too.

Rating: MOW YOUR LAWN!, or on our oh-so-formal scale, "lick o' paint".

377 Albion Street, Brunswick, VIC, Australia

To start this blog, here is a quintessential example of what Mow Your Lawn! is all about. It may not be the most ramshackle property we've seen, and it's not an architectural abomination, but it has so many of the classic qualities of a neglected, intriguing property.

Firstly, the lawn. Mow your lawn! There is just no excuse for a lawn being this overgrown. You can easily pick up a lawnmower for $50 on eBay and it'll use just a few precious moments of your weekend to make your house look presentable. If you aren't physically up to mowing a lawn, I sympathise, but if you can forego a couple of stubbies a week, you can get yourself a gardener to do it cheaply and quickly. Or even cheaper, put an annoying local child to good use behind their father's lawnmower for a ludicrously low amount of spare change.

Secondly, the incongruity of the house. The front looks neat enough – the paint isn't hopelessly dull or peeling away, in stark contrast to the lawn or to the miserable letterbox. So is somebody looking after this place? It's hard not to be intrigued. But if they are, well, you can't exactly get to that front door.

Thirdly, the neglected rear of the house. Through a gate that's just lazily resting open, you can see all kinds of stuff lying around at the back. Including a hose that's still connected. I'm just even more mystified. It's hard to tell if somebody's living here and has no sense of tidiness or lawnmowery, or if the property has – fairly recently – been left to fend for itself against nature and the triffids. Whatever the case, a bit of lawnmowery, some fence repairs, and a big old tidy-up could make this place a star on Albion Street.

Rating: Damnable.

So with our quintessential example established, join us to see more fascinating places from inner Melbourne and elsewhere, including a few forays to New Zealand.

Update (20 March 2011): The rating for this property has been revised down to Unpleasant after the lawn was mowed; see this entry for details.