Room for Romanticizing: What’s in an abandoned building? (Part I)

Recently I had the pleasure of giving a grand tour of Pittsburgh to a couple of friends visiting from Boston.  Although we didn’t make it to Carrie Furnace (sigh), I was sure to show them some key points among the remains of our Industrial past while giving them a personal and cultural thumbnail history as best I could.  While we were walking along the Allegheny near the CMU Robotics building in Lawrenceville, my friend, a fellow fan and student of the old, the rustic, and the abandoned, remarked about a rusted out piece of equipment along the railroad tracks, “This is SO cool.”  Then paused and asked,  ”Do you think we’ll ever be able to stop romanticizing this stuff? Why do we like this?”

Giving the question about same amount of consideration I might have given it if he’d asked me what I wanted for lunch I responded, “Probably for the same reasons we like horror movies.”  He looked at me with a polite look of confusion and we moved on.

I had no idea what I meant by that, really.  But in the days following, the memory of that answer began to haunt me (see what I did there).