Relics of America’s youth: Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas

Mike GristMilitary Installations, USA, World Ruins 7 Comments

Way back in 1825, with the revolutionary war 49 years past and the purchase of Florida from Spain only 5 years gone, America still very much feared attack by a foreign power. Inspectors were sent to the Dry Tortugas in the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico to source sturdy islands for fortification. 21 years later Fort Jefferson was built on sandy Garden Key, designed to consolidate the young country’s coastal defences and secure her lines of naval trade. Fort Jefferson, over 100 years ‘abandoned’ For only 42 it saw active military service, in Federal hands for the Civil War, …

Painting the Ruins of NYC

Mike GristArt Ruins, Fantasy Ruins, Ruins Types, USA 4 Comments

Cities can be destroyed at the click of a mouse button. The ruins of New York are nothing new, we’ve seen them in countless movies as the stunning backdrop to end of the world tales. But how hard are these images to make? For film they typically do it with computers, and frame-by-frame paint what they want. Here I take a lesson in that kind of frame-by-frame painting- with just one cell. This is my first effort at destructing a city through Photoshop. I followed an indepth tutorial online here, and if you go to check that out you’ll notice …

The Mad Ruins of Kentucky’s Waverley Hills Sanatorium

Mike GristHospitals, USA, World Ruins 13 Comments

The Waverley Hills Sanatorium in Jefferson County, Kentucky, opened in 1910 in the thick of a Tuberculosis groundswell, then an incurable disease rife in the swampy backwaters of rural Loisville. The infected went to Waverley to be quarantined, and most likely to die- their bodies trundled out down the ‘Body Chute’ by night so as not to disturb the other patients. Described as one of America’s most haunted locations, Waverley boasts a total body count of around 60,000 over its 51 year life-span. It was shut down in 1961 as TB was gradually being eradicated, changed hands a number of …