Tony Urban Photography – Senior Photo Art, Pittsburgh Wedding Photographer – Somerset, Johnstown, Greensburg

I read in the Daily American last week that the owner of the North Star Inn in Hooversville is going to have the building torn down. Now, I admit that I never heard of the place before reading the article, but apparently it’s a “blight” on the town and residents have been wanting it down for years. The idea of an abandoned hotel was pretty darn cool so I figured I’d better get my butt over to Hooversville before the wrecking ball arrived and the hotel was turned into a pile of rubble.

The old hotel was pretty impressive. Signs on the outside walls read “Condemned” and “No Trespassing”, which actually just fueled my desire to climb inside via one of the many broken windows on the first floor. But seeing as how a dozen or so residents were chilling outside and within view, I relegated myself to taking photos of the exterior.

The past few weeks I’ve photographed several new buildings for the Abandoned project. This weekend I was processing the newest shots and I ran into a bit of a mental stumbling block. I’m torn between whether to keep the images in color or convert them to black and white.

As a photographer, I’ve always loved black & white images. To me, they just feel more like art. But viewing these photographs in color, I realized that the color images sometimes do more to tell the story of the buildings. I’m almost leaning toward keeping everything in color. I guess it’s really not a big deal at this point in the process, as I keep the originals of every shot, but I always tend to get caught up in the minutia. I’m posting this set in color to show some variety. I have also realized that I really, really hate stray power lines that are impossible to shoot around.

Anyway, here are a bunch of shots from the past couple weeks. Leave me a comment and let me know whether you prefer color or black & white.

The house in the last shot was especially interesting to me. I remember the house from years ago. We used to see it from the highway when we took my grandmother to the shopping mall in Lavale, Maryland. From the road, you could clearly see that it was abandoned but it was in pretty good condition. The windows were intact and I would always see cats sitting by them, soaking up the sun. I sort of imaged the house to be a feline version of Watership Down and assumed there must have been dozens of cats roaming around inside the giant, old house. When I went to photograph it, it had been years since I passed by. I was sad to see the house is now, quite literally, falling down. It was a beautiful building. And I wonder where all the cats have gone…

For a limited time, I’m offering prints of two of my favorite abandoned buildings for sale.

16×20 Prints of “The Homestead” and “The Clubhouse” are available for $100 each. This is the first edition for both pieces and they will be signed and numbered with a limited edition of 50 of each print. The pieces are printed on fine grade Kodak Professional Endura Supra Luster Photo Paper. The pieces are unframed and as you will see on the images below, there is room to have them matted before being framed. The pieces will appear exactly as they do on the below images (minus the copyright notice, of course).

Either piece can be ordered by visiting the Prints page on my Fine Art Site. Please contact me with any questions.