Abandoned Trade School
Chicago, Illinois.
I visited Chicago for the second time while on my way back to Minneapolis
from Office Products Expo 1994. I was able to meet and stay with Mr Yuk,
who showed me this school. This site is in fairly good condition
since being abandoned several years ago, although vandals and taggers have
ruined much of it. The building is quite large, maybe even bigger
than the Buckner Building in Whittier, and has a lot of artifacts and random
stuff left over from the school days. It was quite interesting to see all
the different classrooms and instruction areas for different parts of the
school, as well as the administrative offices, storage rooms, and formerly
off-limits areas like the roof, elevator rooms, enclosed water tower, steam
plant, etc. The flooded basement of the admin section definitely
needs to have some boating action in the near future.
Some shots from the admin area.
Artifacts range from the relatively mundane like typewriter graveyards,
empty safes, and abandoned teacher's lounges to the really strange, such
as random radioactive "stuff" and hundreds of miniature spy cameras.
The large warehouse area was home to a few vehichles, apparently someone
got a little carried away with the paint stored there as well. The abandoned
scrubmobile looks kind of sad, if a mop-zamboni can look sad.
Culinary arts classroom, Publishing class, full textbook locker, wood
shop, and metalworking shop. A lot of the departments were arranged somewhat
randomly, with some of the carpentry classrooms in different sections on
different floors, the automotive department spread across two sections,
and some of the classes requiring the heaviest items (welding, plasterwork,
and some engine repair) on the top floor.
More stuff.
A model church in the plaster department, complete with miniature tags.
Some asshat thought it would be cool to spray his name absolutely everywhere,
but since I didn't bother to remember what it was or post any photos of
it, his juvenile attempt at immortality failed.
My favorite photo from the building.
No class tomorrow!