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.

7 Bent Street, Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

Sigh. This lot had potential, you know? Once upon a time, a nice old house sat here. By the time I came to Melbourne, it was more of an “abandoned old house”. Here it is, as seen on Google Streetview:

Now, the garage was pretty ugly and needed to go, but the house itself had so much potential. If somebody had the will to do it up and restore it to its former glory, it could have been lovely. I often looked in and wondered how it appeared in its heyday. But no. Some developer evidently just found it easier to knock the place over. I took some photos of the demolition in May 2009:

So what was built in its place? Nothing aesthetically pleasing, I assure you. A couple of boxy, unattractive townhouses have arisen where a beautiful old house once sat, complete with inexplicable decorative poles as a token gesture to “character”. Honestly, it's not the worst example of modern architecture in the area, but seriously, can you explain those poles? And build a bloody roof:

Turned out our old friends at Walshe & Whitelock were the real estate agents for this. It took months to sell, not that I was tremendously surprised. About half a year passed before the completed building was actually occupied; we just kept walking past a forlorn "for sale" sign and big, uncurtained windows showing off empty space.  Given the place has been stained by the hand of Walshe & Whitelock, I imagine we'll be back in a decade to chronicle how much it has fallen into disrepair.

Rating (dereliction and destruction of abandoned old house): Condemnable
Rating (new occupied property): Damnable

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.

55 Bent St, Moonee Ponds, VIC, Australia

The Bent St side.

This abandoned shop just doesn't make sense. Diagonally opposite it is Moonee Ponds Central School. You know, a place full of children who, every weekday at 3pm for most of the year, pour out of the grounds with pocket money and spare change stolen from their parents. They are eager to spend it on products to turn them into diabetic dugongs. Their fiscal knowledge is not very sharp, so they are happy to slap down whatever overpriced sum is asked; as long as they can come across the cash somehow, they will spend it. Hence most schools have dairies/milkbars/corner shops (pick your vernacular of choice!) opposite. Kids are total cash cows.

The Fanny St side.  Tee hee.

So how the hell is it that this place is not only closed, but totally derelict and crumbling? The ye olde timese ads and the yellowed newspaper clippings covering the door window indicate it has been this way for a long time. How has nobody struck upon the profits to be had here? How did somebody go out of business in the first place? The traditional suburban dairy may be a dying breed, except near schools. They've perished from outer suburbs where people now just hop in the car to get their weekly groceries, they've perished from small towns where people now drive ten minutes to the big smoke for their weekly groceries, and they've perished from inner suburbs where big supermarkets are within walking distance for most people. But outside schools?

Kids aren't thinking ahead to the supermarket ten minutes away (plus that's too far to walk for today's child), nor do they really care if the bag of chips they want costs 50% more at the dairy. They're done with their hard day's work of the 9 times table, not paying attention to how to use apostrophes, and harassing the kid who actually likes going to the library. They need some sugar to keep them going long enough to play the latest Nintendo/Playstation/Madasfuckconsole game and they need it NOW. 

What's going on here.

Rating: Condemnable

PS Feel free to also puzzle over the tea ad on the Bent St side.  Why does it use American spelling when it is trying to sell to Australians a drink the Americans generally cannot make?  Perhaps this is the biggest mystery here!

10 Inverness Road, Browns Bay, North Shore, New Zealand

Woolworths Browns Bay

Once upon a time, this was a well-loved (if a little shabby) local supermarket. It had served the elderly community of Browns Bay (seriously, you only shopped there if you were 50 years old or older) for about 30 years, and is of particular interest to me considering that I worked there for two years. It closed down on the 28th of September 2008, and has very quickly fallen into a derelict state. As I understand it, the supermarket chain Progressive Enterprises held the lease on this place up until last year. Now, presumably, the lease has expired and this place is just sitting here dingily.

As of January 2011, the outside of the place is ... honestly not much different to what it was like when it was open, actually. The old Woolworths branding has been taken down, but the outline is still visible on the side of the shop. However, head around to the front entrance and things are quite different. One of the glass doors has been smashed, offering a tantalising glimpse into what used to be the checkout area. I saw that the old customer service desk (which was held together with tape when I worked there, incidentally) was still standing in a rather forlorn manner. 

Though the windows at the front of the shop were once covered in brown paper, it has fallen down over the years to reveal a very lonely old supermarket interior. All the old flooring has been pulled up, but the old signs for the meat counter and so on remain. We even spotted one of the old Woolworths trolleys, trapped inside and watching the world go by. 

Soon enough, I imagine this place will be pulled down and replaced by the same soulless high-rise apartments that are ruining most other seaside towns in New Zealand. I'm honestly not sure what would be more of an eyesore - at least the apartments will actually be useful. This thing is right in the middle of Browns Bay, for god's sake - you'd think prime land like that would have been snapped up by developers much earlier. Until then, however, I'll keep going past it every time I go back to New Zealand and wishing I could get inside. I'd love to check out the stockroom, since the windows are currently covered with old fuel discount posters, and I'd kill to get upstairs and check out the lunchroom and cash office. When I worked there, there was an old magazine in a drawer dating from the 1970s. I'd bet good money that it's still there. I could probably sell half of this stuff to the museum. 

Still, we must all remember that this place wouldn't have ended up abandoned in the first place if the bright sparks at Progressive hadn't decided to build another supermarket just across the road from it several years ago. That's in addition to the OTHER supermarket on the other side of town. A small beachside town does not require three supermarkets!

Rating: Damnable