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.

452-460 Victoria Street, Brunswick, VIC, Australia

Big ugly apartment blocks are far from uncommon around here. In a city that has such a tendency to sprawl, high density housing is the logical (if not the most attractive) step to take to try and manage things a little bit. Fair enough.

But does it have to look like THIS?

Ugly even for a construction site.

Yes, it's under construction. Most things are ugly when they're under construction. But this, I think, is in a class of its own. Not only is gigantic and imposing, dwarfing many of the pretty little Victorian era houses nearby, it uses some truly bizarre building materials. There's plenty of corrugated iron floating around. Normally used for roofing (but sometimes used for the entire house), it is an ugly but perfectly acceptable building material. However, have you ever heard of corrugated concrete? Let me introduce you.

I can't begin to understand.

As much as I'd like to believe this eyesore will be covered up once the place is finished, I have a horrible suspicion that this is going to be some kind of feature wall. I don't really know what's worse - this, or the shite I saw Walshe and Whitelock claiming as a feature wall in a recent Property Press. It was a brick wall. Inside. And no, of course it wasn't done well. It just looked like someone had transplanted a factory exterior into their lounge.

Luxurious ... as individual as the other 154 in the block.

I also love the way they're trying to sell these apartments as "luxury". I don't know about you, but when I think of luxury items, I think of large and expensive things that not many other people have. This place ticks the box for large, yes, but "luxury" does not bring to mind 155 suburban apartments made out of badly moulded concrete.

No wonder that little house looks so sad and dirty. It's lost the will to live.

Perhaps when this is finished, I'll do an update to confirm if the corrugated concrete remains or if the builders do a mercy killing and cover it up. Only time will tell! All I can say it the prospects are not altogether promising. Oh and they'd better build a roof. I don't think I can handle that amount of ugliness when it doesn't even have a roof. Please just start again, it's not too late!

Rating: Condemnable

786-798 Elizabeth Street (Elizabeth Tower Hotel), Carlton, VIC, Australia

Looks more like a hospital to me.

I don't understand this hotel. One day, we were walking past and noticed exactly how dilapidated it was, and yet we couldn't figure out how it got this way. We both swore that last time we had seen it, it was a perfectly functional inner city hotel. And now it just looks like it's about to fall over, with a load of smashed  windows, graffiti covering the walls and a dingy carpark that seems to be used for storage of ex-hotel materials, such as rolls of carpet and old chairs.  Seriously, how does somewhere like this get so run down so fast? It's in a pretty busy location, so it might not be as easy to break in to and destroy as some of the other places we've covered here, yet it still looks like this. I would say that I'd like to break in and check it out, but it just brings to mind squatters and used syringes.

The old carpark, with bonus chairs.

It can't have been abandoned for long, either. Google Maps street view still shows it looking pretty fresh and clean, and a Google search brings up many results that would suggest this place is still in use. However, further searching lead me to find out that the University of Melbourne has been attempting to lodge an application to demolish the Elizabeth Tower Hotel and replace it with an institute for infection and immunity. To this, I would say go ahead and build something useful, but I'm quite nervous. After the miserable abortion which didn't at all remind me of deciduous trees in winter, I have somewhat lost faith in the architects employed by the university.

No vacancy, except for squatters.

Even when this place was used, they could have tried with the architecture! It's quite hideous, let's be honest. Even when it was a little cleaner and devoid of graffiti, it still looks rather sparse and budget. The spiral staircase with the glass windows probably provides a great view of the city, but from the outside it is just an eyesore. A good lick of paint may have redeemed it slightly, but definitely wouldn't have saved it. I think it was for the best that this hotel was abandoned in the end. Even if the University of Melbourne does fuck the site up with another mouldy building, at least it will have a purpose that is a little better than housing hoards of fat American tourists who hop on northbound trams and ask "are you going to Flinders Street?" Small mercies.

How very welcoming.

Rating: Condemnable

Update; It has come to our attention that the University of Melbourne's application to demolish this building has been approved. Axver has written an entry on this welcome decision - be sure to read it, if just to drive home again how hideous this place is.

Bell tower, Miranda Street, Stratford, Taranaki, New Zealand

Stratford is a lovely service town amidst the farms of central Taranaki. It's the kind of quiet place where you can lie in the middle of the road on a Friday night and not get hit by a car. Besides Mount Taranaki in the distance, the skyline in Stratford is dominated by two towers a block apart: the clock tower on Broadway and the bell tower on Miranda Street. Now, if you arrive in Stratford by night, you'll find it to be a very pretty place. Both towers are well-illuminated and look quite pretty:

The Elizabethan clock tower

The modernist bell tower.

However, things are not as they seem. The clock tower maintains and arguably improves its character at daytime. The same cannot be said for the bell tower. At night, it is stark and almost imposing given how much it dwarfs the surrounding buildings. But you kind of get a hint that it's actually ... well, pretty ugly. And here's the daytime proof for you:

Is that a bell tower, or a monument commemorating an oil well? I'm not entirely sure. It's just a few concrete legs wedded together. It signifies nothing. It could not possibly be any more spare; it is functionalist to a repulsive extreme. Did they run out of money to make it look good? So much effort has gone into the picturesque clock tower that you would think its cousin a block over would get similar treatment. Instead it seems like they erected a bell tower purely as a chore rather than as a complementary landmark, and now the people of Stratford are stuck with something that looks like it should be at the entry to an industrial park.

I'm sorry, but there is no charm in a few concrete legs. As with any concrete surface, it shows off weather wear-and-tear in its own particularly unappealling way; click the daytime picture for an enlarged version and you'll see just how spotty parts of the tower's surface are, especially the centre of the foremost leg. That said, at least some effort seems to have been put in to keeping it a bit clean; I've seen spots and smears that are so much worse. But some things age well and some things don't, concrete structures falling firmly into the latter category. This bell tower is a great example of something that didn't look good when it was erected, doesn't look good now, and never will. C'mon Stratford, surely you can paint it or clad it or otherwise decorate it somehow so that it looks even vaguely as pretty as the clock tower! This stain on your daytime skyline is not very becoming of you.

Rating: Condemnable.

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

5 Bent Street, Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

Click for a larger version that shows the flakiness and tardiness in detail.

Charlotte's been terribly slack and lazy (by which I mean not lazy at all, and certainly busier than me), so the job falls again to me to provide today's dose of man-made failure.  I'm going to stick very close to yesterday's entry and this empty lot and stay on Bent Street in Brunswick West.  Now, poor Bent Street, I don't mean to knock it or make it sound like some miserable slummy road.  In fact, three of my favourite properties in Brunswick West can be found along its length, one of which is home to a couple of adorable cats.  However, in its three short blocks, Bent Street also has five properties worthy of this blog; the previous two, this one, a fourth I'll cover in due course, and this Murray St shitbox is on the intersection with it.

Now, you may think 5 Bent Street is adjacent to yesterday's subject at number 7.  That's too logical.  In between them is Cumming Street (yes, we laugh at that all the time) and two properties that are numbered in Cumming's sequence.  Not long after moving to the area, this property made me just as curious as 7.  While 7 was evidently abandoned, this one signs of being lived in, of which one was big and obvious - a clean, fairly modern car normally parked in the driveway (see picture above).  And that just caused me even more confusion.  The car was clearly in decent mechanical and aesthetic condition, yet this place is falling apart.  Now, I'm sure we've all met guys who'll let their house fall apart while they masturbate with their car for hours, but as you can see in the picture at right, this is hardly a car-lover's car!  If you're taking reasonable care of your vehicle, wouldn't you also keep your property at least vaguely presentable?

This house isn't ever going to be the most exceptional piece of real estate, but you could tidy it up and make it look neat and presentable.  As it is?  The paint appears to have gone untouched since it was first applied so many years ago, alongside the footpath is a sad excuse for a fence, the lawn is ratty and has been threatening to lose all control for as long as I've known the property, and the roof actually looks like it has grown a layer of mould or even guano to keep it company.  Actually, maybe this isn't some Mafia den or meth lab after all, but somebody cannily starting their own guano mine.  They're patient!

Rating: Damnable.

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

Donovan's Road bridge, Healesville, VIC, Australia

Donovan's Road is a small side road west of Healesville township, off the main Healesville-Yarra Glen Road.  In fact, I think its official name is "Donovans Road", but I love correct apostrophes a bit too much for that.  It is a pretty short affair, winding its unsealed way between paddocks to a railway line, ending not long after crossing the tracks.  It would be wholly unremarkable if it weren't for one thing: its condemned bridge.

The bridge (and RM 22) as seen from the level crossing.

I'm honestly surprised a bridge was ever built here, since the branch railway to Healesville was constructed in the 19th century, in an era well before massive traffic backlogs behind boomgates and impatient twits speeding in front of trains led to cries of "zomg every road/rail crossing should be grade separated!!!!1!1" and the like.  Donovan's Road is pretty damn trivial, and the planners certainly couldn't be fucked bridging much more significant roads nearby.  And now that we're in this age of "grade separate EVERYTHING!!! and make the damn railways pay for it even though it's only of benefit to road users!!!11!11", the bridge has funnily enough been replaced by an at-grade level crossing.  Not that it's a big deal, since the Healesville branch last saw revenue trains in the 1980s and this section of track only sees a few weekend services run by the good folk at the Yarra Valley Tourist Railway (allow me this opportunity to give their fine restoration work a massive shout-out).

Although the bridge has been superseded, it is by no means gone.  It continues to loom above the railway line, blocked off from road traffic, condemned but nonetheless standing.  I admit I find decaying relics like this simply fascinating.  In its heyday, it would've been a pretty unremarkable bridge - small, of very basic construction, indistinguishable from hundreds of others around the state.  But now that it has fallen into disuse, the forces of nature have worn away at it and given it a rustic, decayed sort of charm with flaking paint, creaky boards, and even a couple of random weeds to drive home the point about its dereliction.

More photos of this and other disused Yarra Valley bridges here.

If more people had any reason to come out this way, I'd wonder if some bloody idiot drink-driving on their way home had ever mistakenly tried to cross the bridge.  It doesn't look like it could really withstand the weight of any decent-sized vehicle!  I certainly wouldn't try my luck, though you could probably get away with one of those Smart cars.  And honestly, even if you re-opened the bridge, it looks like it could go days without traffic anyway ...

Rating: Condemnable by default, since it actually is condemned.  If it weren't, it would not garner such a harsh rating.

460 Albion Street, Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

The drug house was for sale for a very long time. Wonder why?

Brunswick West does have a lot of nice places. It really does. But you can never quite get rid of properties like this, loitering incessantly like a bunch of underage youths outside a liquor store. This place is probably just as dirty, but a hell of a lot more fascinating. Like many of the properties around these parts, we initially thought this one was most definitely abandoned. It looks as if it hasn't been painted since it was first built - and if you think the front looks bad, you should see around the sides and the back! There are a couple of outbuildings which I believe were once a shed and garage. Both are now falling to pieces and literally unrecognisable. So, who in their right mind would actually live here? Nobody, right? WRONG.

Complete with nice car.

We had taken to calling this place "the drug house" due to to the fact that we would quite often see very nice cars parked incongruously in the driveway. We assumed that nobody would have a car that nice and a house that shitty, so we naturally jumped to the conclusion that the falling down shed out the back was actually a sophisticated hydroponic setup. Mystery solved! We would smirk knowingly to ourselves as we wandered by, sure that we had uncovered yet another house of illicit wares. However, as always, things were to take a surprising turn.

One day around Christmas, we were lucky enough to be walking past the drug house when the front door was open. Up until this point, we had never had so much as a glimpse inside, since the curtains are always drawn. But today we were in luck. One of the very nice cars that we had been seeing regularly was outside, and there was a couple who appeared to be dropping a few things off at the house. But here's where the shock set in - this decrepit, falling down heap of turds is actually furnished. It would appear that despite all evidence to the contrary, people actually live here. I'm not just talking about a couple of garden chairs here, either. I'm talking large sideboard (complete with mirror and Christmas decorations), reasonably well-kept floorboards, bookcases and soft furnishings.

The original ad for the drug house.

This is bizarre in the extreme. The place had actually been advertised for sale up until just a few days ago when the sign disappeared. Given that they were asking over a million dollars for the site (they pretty much said "just knock this place down and build massive apartments"), I'm not surprised it hasn't sold. Still, this place didn't look too bad inside. If someone has been living there over a long period of time, why the hell haven't they done ANYTHING to the outside? People would probably be interested in this place if it was fixed up - it's a pretty big house on a full section. A clever estate agent would be able to get close to a million for it quite easily. But no, it's been left to fester and now nobody even wants the land it stands on. I'm not surprised; that shed probably full of cockroaches and rats and used syringes. I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.

Rating: Condemnable