Governors Island: Manhattan's Ghost Town

September 21, 2011 -

Governors Island is a 172-acre ghost town on the southern shore of Manhattan. Covered in ruins, the island houses an impressive collection of abandoned structures, with empty apartment towers, homes, schools, churches, swimming pools and playgrounds. Half of the approximately 100 buildings on the island are in some state of decay, including a supermarket, auto body repair shop, movie theater and hospital. Many of the other buildings are controlled ruins, minimally cleaned up to allow limited public access. Walking through this deserted landscape is a surreal experience, especially when considering its close proximity to the bustling financial center of lower Manhattan.

After serving as a base for military operations for over 200 years, Governors Island was abandoned by the Coast Guard in 1996. The federal government sold most of the island to New York City for $1 in 2003. Today, Governors Island has come to resemble San Francisco's Alcatraz Island and Japan's Gunkanjima Island, with evocative off-limits ruins dominating the landscape while smaller sections are slowly reclaimed and opened to the public. Artists have been brought in to help colonize the wilderness, creating a variety of installations inside otherwise empty spaces. Often, they are appropriately post-apocalyptic - embalmed wildlife, metal skeletons, animal bones, zombie films. Despite these creative uses, many of the island's structures are slated for demolition, to make way for a public park. Some have been purposefully set ablaze by the fire department to "test new techniques."

These photographs were take between 2005 and 2011, after the island was opened to the public. They offer an update to a photo series from 2003-2004 titled "Governors Island: Photographs by Lisa Kereszi and Andrew Moore," a project commissioned by the Public Art Fund to document the deserted island before it was open to the public. Hundreds of thousands of people have visited Governors Island since it has been made accessible, but the ruins still remain.

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For more photo essays from partially abandoned New York City islands, please visit The Encampment on Roosevelt Island (2007) and Ellis Island: South Side (2007).

Living Room (2005)

Rope Swing (2005)

Bulldozer Playground (2009)

Game Time (2009)

Bones (2009)

Fenced Off Homes (2009)

Fire Practice Tower (2011)

Coast Guard Bedroom (2011)

Empty Kitchen (2010)

Raccoon Island (2010)

Abandoned Classrooms (2008)

Blackboard (2008)

Dropped Ceiling (2008)

Hospital Kitchen (2011)

Box Office (2009)

Theater Lobby (2009)

Empty Theater (2009)

Church Interior (2009)

Hospital Lounge (2011)

Hospital Admissions (2011)

Staircase (2011)

Abandoned Hospital (2011)

Water's Edge (2010)

The Demolition of Manhattanville

August 31, 2011 -

Not long ago, the streets of Manhattanville were lined with small businesses. Gas stations, auto body shops, parking garages and storage buildings stood alongside popular restaurants, creating a unique mixed-use neighborhood. Today, that neighborhood has largely been demolished. Businesses have been shuttered. Warehouses have been reduced to cracked bricks. In total, seventeen acres in the heart of this historic industrial valley will be destroyed and Manhattanville will be a construction site for the next two decades, as Columbia University completes its plan to build a $7 billion campus extension.

This past December, the state of New York won the final round in a six year battle against the last private property owners inside Columbia University's project footprint. The owners had been fighting against the state's decision to use eminent domain to seize their property and hand it over to the university. The battle went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which ultimately refused to hear the property owners' appeal. "In all likelihood... the battle is over," the NY Times wrote after the decision, and since then the demolition of Manhattanville has proceeded quickly.

Barricade Road

Sinkhole and Pigeon

The blocks condemned by the university's plan already feel desolate and abandoned. Huge vacant lots are filled with dirt, debris and heavy equipment. Emptied buildings are marked by the symbols of planned demolition. A sinkhole idles in the middle of an unused road, clogged with trash. Sidewalks are inaccessible, streets lined with barricades. "The Manhattanville expansion will, by Columbia’s own estimates, displace 5,000 people," according to the Columbia Spectator, creating a temporary ghost town while the project is underway. Residents who remain in the area complain that a "rat epidemic" has been unleashed by construction activity, according to the Columbia Spectator, while others fear the swirling clouds of demolition dust will cause respiratory illness, according to DNAinfo, leading the university to buy air conditioners for at least one apartment tower.

A century ago, these empty streets teemed with horses. Manhattanville's long industrial history includes thriving dairy factories with stables that sent out "wagons to drop off thousands of bottles every morning to individual customers," according to the NY Times, alongside "factories producing lumber, paint, beer, dye and other materials." Columbia has already demolished at least one historic stable, and Manhattanville's industrial heritage will soon be consigned to the past. The majority of street traffic today is from yellow cabs refueling at the neighborhood's two remaining gas stations. They are scheduled to be torn down too.

If all goes according to plan, the Manhattanville campus will be completed by 2033. However, "of the 17 planned buildings on campus, the specific uses of only six have been determined," according to the Columbia Spectator, and in the meantime, the failing economy has led the Village Voice to ask "will NYC's college building boom bubble pop?" For now, Manhattanville's empty lots and demolished businesses wait for their promised transformation.

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For more photo essays on neighborhoods endangered by eminent domain, please visit The Bloomberg Era, Part Two (2010), Manhattanville: Phase One (2008), The Iron Triangle (2008), and The Atlantic Yards (2007).

Dinosaur Bar-B-Que Demolition

Crushed Warehouse and Diner

Demolition Debris

Viaduct and Empty Lot

Jesus is Good

Crossed Cranes

Manhattanville Houses and Cranes

Cleaning Up

Condemned Home and Dumpster

Condemned MTA Warehouse

Idle Garage

Gate N

Brick Field

Exploring Grand Central Terminal

Grand Central Terminal is one of New York City's best known landmarks. Opened in 1913, this monumental structure has over 500,000 visitors a day. However, few of the millions who pass through Grand Central each year ever glimpse the mechanisms which control its complex system. This is "the largest train station in the world by number of platforms," according to Wikipedia, with with 67 train tracks spread out over 48 acres. All of this is run by a small army of traffic-controllers, substation engineers and track workers.

These workers operate in Grand Central's off-limits areas, in spaces accessible only through a network of private elevators, unmarked floors, secret staircases, and locked doors. These hidden spaces start with Grand Central's highest point, a small clock room containing the world's largest example of Tiffany glass. This luminous 13-foot-wide clock faces south down Park Avenue. It is accessed via a ladder in a closet behind an unmarked door. Just outside that door, construction has begun on a spacious new traffic-control center and situation room. Grand Central's current traffic-control center is a relatively cramped space, "home to roughly two dozen controllers who watch every move and hear every sound along the routes serving Grand Central," according to the NY Times.

Far below the traffic-control center, Grand Central's tracks spread out under the streets of midtown Manhattan. They are laced with wooden footpaths, dirt passageways and concrete bunkers. One track spur houses an abandoned platform and elevator which were reportedly used by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, according to Abandoned Stations. Some claim FDR also used the abandoned train car nearby. The power for this subterranean world comes from a substation hidden in a basement beneath Grand Central's main hall. Accessible via an unmarked freight elevator, basement M42 houses antiquated rotary converters next to modern equipment. In the breakroom, a handwritten sign reads "we have rats down here again." This is the lowest point in Grand Central.

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Note: These photographs were taken while filming a documentary about my photography for "New York Wave" - a television show on NHK (the Japan Broadcasting Corporation) that profiles "young people in their 20's to 30's" in New York who are "a driving force in creating a bold idea." My episode aired from May through July, 2010.

Park Avenue, Facing South

The Clock Face

In the Clock Room

The Tiffany Clock

Oil Can

Clock Room Shadows

New Traffic-Control Room

New Situation Room

Traffic-Control

Track System

On the Tracks

Look Both Ways

Dirt Passageway

Wooden Walkway

Abandoned Train Car

Onboard the Abandoned Train

Abandoned Train Instruments



To the Substation

Substation View

The Substation

Rats Again



Break Room

Measuring Up



Modern Substation