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Year: 2001
Location: Southern Barrie
Status: Probably completed by now. Edit: It's a highschool.
Accessibility: Probably irrelevant, since it's most likely a finished building now. When we were there last no doors had been put on and many walls were unfinished, so there were entrances all around the building. The only barrier was a six-foot fence around the property.
Hazards: It was actually pretty safe so long as one could resist the temptation to play with the big, fancy machines scattered around the place.
July 5th, 2001
One fine old night, Dain Bramaged and I were out looking for a drain he'd reported seeing in his area. We'd had no luck finding it, but when we came across a large, well-lit construction site surrounded by an all-too-passable fence, we were overjoyed to have found something to do.
We entered the site through its large, no-doubt-soon-to-be-extremely-fancy front foyer area, and began mucking about down various hallways and rooms, enjoying ourselves to no end. I know it's pretty hard to get worked up about construction sites, but I think they have a certain inherent charm -- everytime you go back, things are different. You can watch a building grow and speculate about what it's going to be from hints and features in its architecture. Besides, to be fair, this building really was a beauty. There was expensive machinery everywhere, an unfinished single-story elevator shaft, full lighting via jury-rigged trouble-light chains, shower rooms, scaffolding galore, a giant high-ceilinged room that we guessed was a gymnasium of some sort, and a fully-furnished machine room on the second floor. Only one door in the whole place was locked, which turned out to be where the construction crew kept spools of cable and other assorted thingamies. Asher and I were later to discover that this room was going to hold the building's roof access one day.
So Dain and I mucked around a fair bit, lamenting our usual lack of photographic equipment. The only time we split up in our exploration was at one end the lower floor, when I went off determined to find a basement (there wasn't one), and Dain was attacked by a mouse. I swear to god, you can't leave him alone for five minutes without some tiny rodent making an attempt on his life. It was terrifying, but luckily we both survived and made it out of the building to fight mice another day.
I soon decided that Asher had to see the place before it was finished, so about a week later I returned to the site with her and a few disposable cameras. Lots of work had been done -- I could have sworn there was an entire section of the first-floor entrance which hadn't been laid when I was there last -- but there were still plenty of entrances. For some reason I decided to enter the building this time not by the main foyer but by a nearby smaller room with no exterior wall. Soon after setting foot in here, we realized it had been a mistake: that entire end of the lower floor had recently been whitewashed. We slid across the floor into a hallway and managed to skid our way over to a barrier put up in front of the whitewashed hallway, which we guiltily climbed over. We surveyed the damage: we'd left a twin set of muddy footprints from outside, through a room and down the hallway, thoroughly wrecking the whitewash job that had been done. It would have to be done again. We chastised ourselves quietly (and lamented the few rooms this development prevented us from accessing in good conscience) and moved into the foyer, which is, to be fair, where we should have started.
I pointed out interesting features to Asher as we made our way around the lit areas and shone our way through the unlit ones with our glowing auras of holiness. Um. Eventually we bored of the first floor so we went to the second (not by means of any completed staircase, that would be far too easy -- rather, we climbed a dizzying sort of squiral scaffolding that had been set up for the construction job). Here we mucked about with the unfinished bathrooms and shower stalls, climbed all over the giant equipment in the machine room and otherwise acted foolish. We constantly speculated about what the building was to be, and decided it was probably some kind of sports or exercise centre. The smaller rooms were likely to be offices or some such thing, and the larger ones gymnasiums and the like.
We climbed a ladder that had been set up to access the roof and ran around there a bit. At one point I started crossing a wet iron girder that was set up between the two sides of the roof, but quickly decided it wasn't worth the effort and made my way back.
We ran around a bit, looked at equipment and spied through a few hatches, then we essentially called it a day and went home. Fun for the whole family was had.
Asher surveys a supply-closet-to-be
I think I was trying to take a shot of our footprints. I must have aimed high. This is the still-wet whitewashed hallway and one of the ghetto trouble-lights.
A poorly-lit phone closet. We all love phone closets, right?
A slightly better-lit phone closet. I'm going to stop using disposable
cameras.
A shot of Asher against the infinite void of one of the building's
gymnasiums.
Machine Room Madness! Everybody loves blowers!
Mmm, look at those ladders. My flash could have been aimed better here,
but it's a
nicely-obfuscated Asher next to some machinery --
which you can actually see in this photo, sans Asher.
Another corner of the machine room. Will the bloweriffic madness never
end?
A neat blue machineriffic doohickie.
I'm not sure what this is, but it looks roofy.
This is part of the scaffolding we climbed to the second floor. I
honestly have no idea
if this image is properly-oriented or not -- every angle I've put it at
looks equally horrible
and vertigo-inducing -- so I've left it the way Asher originally had
it.
This is a shot inside of one of the larger machines.
The scary ladder going to the roof.
Asher coming back down from the roof. You can still see whitewash on the
bottoms of
her shoes.
A roof hatch with what I believe to be an infiltrator trap on the top.
When Dain Bramaged
and I were here last we had opened this hatch and inadvertantly spilled
several small pieces
off of it in so doing -- someone may have decided to put something on it
again to see if
people were messing with it. Or something.
.