Abandoned America: A Field Guide - Volume One
I drive a truck for a living. Most of what I know about these places I learned at four in the morning on a road nobody else was on, watching a dead mill go past with the moon on its windows. For years I just drove by. Then I started pulling off, walking the streets, reading the county histories, and working out what had actually happened. This book is twenty-four of those places, set down so you can go and stand in them yourself.Every place gets its own page. You get where it is, down to the coordinates you can type into your phone. You get how it started, who built it, and how big it got, with real dates and numbers instead of a vague "long ago." Then you get the thing that ended it, which is almost always one event: a mine worked out, a plant closed, a single year when everything turned. Then what is still standing today, and whether you can get to it.That last part is why I built the book the way I did. Half the point of a place like this is wasted if you drive six hours to a locked gate, or worse, to a brand-new warehouse sitting where the thing you came for used to be. So every place carries a plain status. Open means you can walk it, a park or a preserve or a town you can drive straight through. Managed means it still stands but you need a tour, an appointment, or a word with the owner first. View only means look from the road and keep your boots on public ground, because it is private or the floors will not hold a grown man. Gone means it is torn down, and I tell you so.I built a whole section at the back for the gone ones, because a lot of the famous abandoned places people ask me about are not there anymore. Randall Park Mall is an Amazon center now. Six Flags New Orleans was finally cleared in 2026 after twenty years sitting in the water. AstroWorld came down in 2006. Those are good stories and I tell them, with what stands on the ground today, but I am not going to send you to an empty lot and call it a field guide.The places run from the ones everybody has heard of to the ones you have not. Bodie, the gold town up in the California hills that the state holds together but refuses to repair, left exactly as the last people walked away from it. Kennecott, a fourteen-story copper mill at the end of a sixty-mile dirt road in Alaska. Cerro Gordo, the silver camp whose ore paid for early Los Angeles. Centralia, the Pennsylvania town sitting on a coal seam that caught fire in 1962 and will keep burning for another two hundred years. Then Atlantic City, the Salton Sea, the old Borscht Belt hotels rotting in the Catskills, the Packard plant in Detroit, Bethlehem Steel, Sloss Furnaces, Gary, Youngstown, Flint, and Cairo, the town at the bottom of Illinois that was supposed to be the next Chicago and now holds about fifteen hundred people.It is made to be used, not just read. There is an index that lists every place by state, so if you are cutting across Ohio or dropping into California you can see what sits on your route at a glance. There is a second list sorted by whether you can actually get in. There is a map with all twenty-four marked. And there is a checklist page, so you can tick off the ones you have stood in.What's inside Three sections, twenty-four places, one to a page. Part I, ghost towns and vanished settlements. Nine places: Bodie, Rhyolite, Kennecott, Cerro Gordo, Terlingua, Old Cahawba, Thurmond, Bannack, and Centralia. Part II, faded resorts and tourist towns. Seven places: Atlantic City, the Salton Sea, Sutro Baths, the Borscht Belt, the Poconos, Coney Island, and Hot Springs. Part III, industrial ruins and company towns. Eight places: the Packard plant, Bethlehem Steel, Sloss Furnaces, Gary, Youngstown, Flint, South Bend, and Cairo. Appendix, gone entirely. Six demolished sites, with what stands on the ground today. The guide also includes: A state-by-state index, and a second index sorted by access status A US map with all twenty-four sites marked A printable "places visited" checklist A short page on how to read the access ratings, and a plain safety page Forty-six pages, with photographs and maps inside. It reads on a phone in the cab, on a tablet on the couch, or printed on plain paper for the glovebox. Forty-six pages.Every place in here was built to last, and meant it. What decides which towns are still standing and which are just lines on a map is hardly ever dramatic. It is a mine closing, a road moved a few miles over, a company sold to someone who never went there. This book is a record of what that looks like on the ground, and a way to go and see it before the next one is gone.— Allan Hopkins, Allan's Abandoned America
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