Gutters collect smelly pigeon carcasses half-chewed by the peregrine falcons that nest there. Three years ago a rooftop water tank collapsed, flooding the corridor below and drenching valuable paintings. The stonework looks more medieval than Victorian, so worn is it. To the north, the clock tower popularly known as Big Ben leans by nearly nine inches (22cm), rattled out of place by the Jubilee Line running beneath.
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Many of the biggest problems lie under the surface. The palace has 444 miles (715km) of wires and about 17 miles of pipes, many in the enormous basement. The wiring was installed bit by bit, and it shows. Masses of lines carrying electricity, division announcements, phone calls and broadcast feeds (plus a dusting of asbestos) are slung from water and air trunks like creepers along the branches of a tree. “I’ve been chasing them for two years,” groans one workman in a hard hat, ducking under a tangle. Some are almost completely inaccessible, impeding repairs. A fury of 1950s telephone wires pinned to one corridor wall remains a mystery to engineers. Some, they reckon, connect lost speakers in one part of the building with lost receivers in another. Revamping the lot will be a mammoth task.
The lack of maps will make it even bigger. No original drawings by Charles Barry, who designed the 1,100-room palace after the fire in 1834, survive. The authorities are constantly adding to their plans as new chambers and vents are discovered. Some cavities turn out to house families of mice, for whom the building is a perfect home (by the river, with warm nooks and lots of food sitting around). Others hide treasures. Under one flagstone, workers recently discovered remains of the bench at which Londoners stood to petition kings nearly a millennium ago.
This story has a lot of schadenfreudian elements for me: Failure of gigantic attempted mass-appeal projects, failure of Six Fucking Flags projects specifically, and, you know, just plain Ohio.
LOL that muzak too. They're somehow actually piping in awful old people muzak that was already awful old people muzak in 1980. (I didn't recognize the second song, but the first one was Somethin' Stupid, which there is probably a Lawrence Welk version of also.)
I used to go that mall to get cigarettes, because DE sin tax is way cheaper than NJ tax, and anyway it was on the way to a customer site. Looks like the tobacco place is closed. I don't feel any loss over that, since they basically preyed on a mostly black clientele. It makes me sad, though, that the kiosk owners are still trying to make a go of it with their little costume jewelry stand. It seemed especially forlorn in the vid.
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Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant
Not so much urban, but an album of shots of the decrepit hanger that houses the decaying remains of the Russian Space Shuttle (Buran / Ptichka) program. The only Russian shuttle to ever reach orbit was destroyed over ten years ago when its hangar collapsed - the two shuttles inside this hanger were test vehicles / mock ups.
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