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The bank's exterior. Looks innocent enough.
I call this "the gateway to hell." Please note that it's about 20 feet from where I worked, and illuminated with only the flash of my camera. This particular room is about 50 degrees hotter than the surrounding rooms of the basement. It gets progressively hotter as you travel through the corridor, so I wasn't able to make it much further than the bottom of the steps. Let's dial things back a bit.
Most of the gigantic basement rooms are full of old, decaying machinery. These look like air conditioners of some type.
The only sign asking you to stay out of a room. These should have been posted on 90% of the bank's doors.
A little abandoned side office featuring George Washington, our first cartoon president. Not pictured: calendar bravely displaying the month of February 2005.
Round the corner and go down the steps to see the gateway to hell.
A basement bank office filled with nothing but garbage.
At one point in time this machine did something. Like strip the meat off of wailing babies?
If this was a Disney movie they would come to live and sing profitable songs when no one was looking :(
I think you use this to play Pong with mole men.
Now we explore the upstairs. Look at that classic old-timey font!
Every 20 feet on the staircase, there's a little small door cut into the wall like this, and a big one large enough to crawl through (and plummet to your death). There's nothing but pipes inside, and pictures of pipes are boring, so let's move on.
12th floor, completely gutted out. Like all the other floors on the building, it's completely uninhabited and all of the doors are locked. So it's a lot like Silent Hill, except with easier puzzles. I want to remind everyone again that this is not an abandoned building. I worked here.
We're on our way to the secret 13th floor, and the coolest room in the building. Sorry I made you wait so long. BTW, this door goes out to the roof.
Welcome to the room that time forgot. This is the most run-down room of SkyBank, and also the coolest. Judging by its interior, this room look like it was once the plush office of some evil plutocrat. If you're looking at the building from the outside, this room is right behind the SkyBank sign.
I am going to linger on this room for a while. Nice hardwood floors.
A boarded-up window, not an uncommon sight in Youngstown.
Note the little bathroom that was built into this alcove (which has 4 feet of clearance). What is the point of this? I thought it was creepy.
Doctor stuff from the 40s. I have polio now.
Giant doors that I assume opened to the roof at one point. I guess this was in case of any sudden stock market crashes; you could escape in your hot air balloon or kill yourself.
There was a hole here. It's gone now.
Bye-bye scary room :(
Mr. Zip, a shameless ripoff of Manic Mailman. The building has a mail tube like this running through every floor, which collects in a fancy box in the lobby. The tube and box are out of service.
The entrance to every ladies' room has a strange step-up for some reason. Maybe it's so us fellas can scope out those shapely ankles?
Fire safety instructions posted six months after my birth.
My last picture. This room is in the middle of the bank, and is completely locked-off. It's a huge, catherdral-esque room with garbage stacked high and metal tubes running this way and that. What the heck was this room used for?
I hope you enjoyed my incriminating experience.
March 12 2007, 01:34:18 UTC 5 years ago
Glad you made it out without being captured by some sort of time warp. :)
March 12 2007, 02:39:18 UTC 5 years ago
bill and karen and bury and me had fun lookeying at these
March 12 2007, 12:34:09 UTC 5 years ago
oh yeah, what exactly did you do at that bank anyhow?
March 12 2007, 23:29:25 UTC 5 years ago
March 13 2007, 00:03:16 UTC 5 years ago
March 13 2007, 15:17:36 UTC 5 years ago
I loved this entry. My dad used to work in that big brown building across from the Vindicator -- it's now a parking lot -- and I feel like most of my youth was spent exploring stuff like this.
Which makes me think I should go get a check-up soon...
April 26 2007, 07:44:05 UTC 5 years ago
Anonymous
April 26 2007, 09:27:32 UTC 5 years ago
Those are great for computer cooling since they allow passive cooling that still stabilizes the water temp just above ambient room temp.
I have one 70x70cm
April 26 2007, 21:07:30 UTC 5 years ago
1) damn it was funny
2) this post of pics of the old-timey, rotting building is AMAZING. Almost enough to make me want to visit Ohio. Almost.
Anonymous
April 26 2007, 22:07:18 UTC 5 years ago
Hey! We used to have the baby-meat stripping machine!
Or one like it. It is a 'burster' (not sure what the
official name was). It was used for breaking apart forms
after they were printed on continous feed line printers.
They were about as loud as you would expect out of a machine
that could take tender young flesh apart...
Thanks for the great SA article today, and what a Worker's Wonderland
you've found.
Anonymous
April 27 2007, 02:17:47 UTC 5 years ago
Dude, this is about half of how I spent my youth.
My parents used to be involved with St. Paul's Lutheran in St. Paul, so when the service was over, or at wedding receptions when I'd had my fill of cake and after-dinner mints, I would take off into the bowels of the church and explore. It's a pretty hugish place, and not in the Rob Schueller Crystal Cathedral way. More like the Cretan Labyrinth way. Obscure little rooms in distant corners of the basement, forgotten to everyone but the janitor, secret passages through which wiring had been threaded stuff like that. So I grew up with an appreciation for obscure, Lovecraftian old buildings, run-down or otherwise (labyrinthine though it may be, St. Paul's is actually kept pretty spic-and-span.) So I'm reading SA's latest job-humor entry (I love these,) and lo and behold, it contains a photojournal on one of my more obscure interests! Very nice job.About a few things:
The raised step into the bathroom is there because the floor had to be raised to accomodate ultra-modern plumbing (read: any plumbing at all.) The church my dad's family had their reunions at, Nakoma Heights Lutheran (my dad's family has been Lutheran pretty much since Luther,) had the same thing in its bathrooms, and since the reunions were only once a year, I would always, always trip over the little three-inch step since I never remembered it was there.
The last room you mentioned, with the pipes and crap, was likely the furnace room back when furnaces were giant steel octopus monstrosities. I'd guess that the furnace was either down in the center area or up in the alcove behind it. The whole thing has a wonderful evil-cult look to it, something I can only imagine was even stronger back when the tentacular, coal-fired furnace was dominating the room. Hey, is that a microfiche reader I espy?
I'm trying to figure out what sort of computer equipment that is next to the baby-processor.
I'd love to see some pictures from inside the Gateway To Hell.
Awesome job all around!
Anonymous
April 27 2007, 04:39:38 UTC 5 years ago
VERY cool building, and a funny front-page article!
That last room, I assume, is on the second or third floor. I'm guessing that the lobby was originally 3 or so stories high, and they hung a false ceiling to save energy and install forced-air heat. You can see the wires used to support the drop-ceiling, and there are fairly modern ducts running everywhere.Old buildings are extremely cool, but very energy-inefficient. Sad, but true.
Anyway, thanks for the update and the UrbExp pix!
-me
Anonymous
April 27 2007, 02:25:43 UTC 5 years ago
A Proposition...
I'll give you $100 if you'll steal that "Newsboys, Peddlers, & Solicitors" sign for me.Anonymous
April 27 2007, 02:30:20 UTC 5 years ago
Wow...
God, that's cool. I'd love hunting around that building. Probably wind up stealing old junk left and right... Typewriters, vacuum tubes, punch cards, god-knows-what.Closest thing I ever had to that was some volunteering at the local historical society. They have an interesting amount of old documents, photos & shit.
Did I mention that I sometimes get my kicks taking pics of old signs and buildings? Sad, isn't it...
Thanks for writing a funny article, documenting the building and sharing the pics. :)
-MIke
April 27 2007, 07:04:04 UTC 5 years ago
Re: Wow...
Man, that is just surreal.Anonymous
April 30 2007, 20:27:59 UTC 5 years ago
Great Photos!
Twenty years ago, My friends and I made a whole series of super-8 Kung-fu Movies in this building.I can tell you, In twenty years, It hasn't changed at all. Maybe it was Built old and decepit. I imagine some twenties style workman in porkpie hat and overalls complaining that the paint won't stick to the walls in THIS humidity....
There's Lots of sites like this in Youngstown that just could be so much more than what they are now...
Lou
www.SteelValleyOutdoors.info
May 8 2007, 07:33:16 UTC 5 years ago
Now I wanna move to the northern Midwest. California sucks as far as urban decay goes. SO goddamned jealous.
Also: you need to co-opt one of the rooms as your secret babe lair/fortress of solitude. The big one with all the metal tubes.
May 10 2007, 03:09:33 UTC 5 years ago
Anonymous
December 18 2008, 21:29:51 UTC 3 years ago
[Never been a good writer. :)]
December 18 2008, 23:01:16 UTC 3 years ago
Anonymous
December 19 2008, 18:50:46 UTC 3 years ago
Cheers!
Anonymous
December 20 2008, 00:45:54 UTC 3 years ago
Not to be nit picky but the floor that you have labeled as the 12th is actually the 13th. The 11th and 12th floors currently are occupied by a law firm.
December 20 2008, 03:14:52 UTC 3 years ago
Anonymous
June 23 2009, 21:04:01 UTC 2 years ago
I wonder how many people got this reference? At any point while you were exploring this place did your perspective change to the third person? By third person I of course mean a view in which you can watch your left ear and possibly part of your shoulder, but nothing actually, you know, in front of you.
September 27 2010, 15:03:04 UTC 1 year ago
Kalie, finance NYC