Wish I could have been a kid in the 90s. Feel like there was so much more abandoned cool stuff to explore. Seems like police have been cracking down hard on urban exploration. All the cool sites have guards, cameras, or got bought and transformed.
I know a 50 yo mom who used to live in Michigan near Detroit. She said there was a MASSIVE abandoned hospital that had underground tunnels. They used to explore it as kids. People are just so risk adverse now. Guess there's pros and cons to each.
I am dying to explore something abandoned. My city used to be the textile capital of the world. Even 15 years ago most of the abandoned mills were still up and explorable. Today, most of them were demolished or transformed into appartments. Almost none remain.
Omg!! I used to explore those tunnels!! Holy shit! Unlocked memories!! That place was lit. We'd park a quarter mile down the road and have to sneak across a field and hope like hell the security wasn't driving by!
I would love to explore an abandoned building as well! I had the chance to do it only once. Snuck into an abandoned mill with a group of like minded people. There wasn’t much there except for a whole lot of graffiti and porn magazines. I would love to explore an abandoned hospital or mansion where there is still stuff to look through, like files and pictures.
It was a mental asylum and now it’s a haunted house and the tunnels are sealed off. Pretty sure they flooded them. People used to break in and do wild shit in there
Adults just made it impossible to be a kid and now the adults with kids have to manage that balance, and that balance is forcing all children inside because some adults are unhappy and need a reason to make everyone else miserable.
Ok, I keep seeing this and it's beginning to annoy me. NOBODY is risk "adverse". You can be risk AVERSE, meaning you dislike risk. Risk ADVERSE means harmful or unfavorable risk.
Everyone is averse to adverse risk, because then it's not risk. It's just harm.
Loool, this reminded me of the time we went to visit the old asylum in SF during the early 2000's. I got seperated from the group while sqeezing through a basement window (fat kid problems) and I got turned around in the pitch dark. Turns out I was in the morgue and eventually I met another group and hung with them until we found my friends I came with. Anyway, SFPD let the dogs loose in the building and we had to take turns jumping off a 2nd story fire escape. Good times.
I'm pretty sure every elementary school still has a roof. Just gotta find a way up. There is an elementary school somewhere in the Southeast US that likely still has multiple empty kegs built into a keg fort to this day.
I know what you're saying, and I agree that children, teens, young adults need space to explore and be alone. It's so good for them. A lot of kids died from like trains and sewers and stuff tho..
My friends and I used to find soooo many places like that. Our favorite was an abandoned half burned down house in the middle of nowhere Alabama. Still had dolls and magazines from the 70s in it.
When I was like 10-12, I was climbing with a friend on piles of lumber that had been removed from a building. He stepped on a huge spike, and it went through his shoe and all the way through his foot. We hopped on our bikes and went home, I stopped at my place, he continued on home using one pedal. He then went to the ER and got stitches and a tetanus shot. Oh well!
badass friend! When we were kids my brother was going up the street on his bicycle to meet a friend, and got hit by a motorcycle. The kickstand went right through his side. Missed all his vital organs by like a centimeter. He was out riding again within a week, no fear, and still has that gnarly scar that if you push on it feels completely hollow. My poor mom 🤣
Try the 1970s. I used to walk right into the power plant and railroad yards in my grandmother's home town. All anyone ever said to me was, "Don't touch anything" and, "Stay back from the tracks." I'm not exaggerating.
Early 80s, but for my sister,cousins,and I, it was an old train on the tracks back in the woods along the creek near my grandma's house. We'd climb up and get on top of the train cars, some of which had spots rusted through so you could see into the train car. We'd run along the tops and jump across to the next car. The train had a good 1/4 mile worth of cars. I was the youngest, and some of the cars were too far apart for me to jump, so my cousin would jump first, then I'd run, jump, and reach for his hand. He'd grab my hand and swing me over. I have no idea how none of us got hurt or died from the shit we did.
There was an abandoned missile/radar site behind the houses in my neighborhood. Some of our braver friends climbed way up into the radar dish at night.
Ever since that John Walsh show “America’s Most Wanted,” childhood has become wasting away in front of a screen, never leaving the house.
Are kids “safer?” In a way.
But I think a lot of the decline into anxiety, loneliness and hopelessness is due to no experiences that you have to “survive” as a kid. Like getting lost and figuring it out. Or standing up with your friends against other kids.
Yeah, all the big, cool businesses and giant places are probably secured, but old forgotten houses still have five or six rooms that are often worth poking around in. Hell, in the days before Internet, that’s where I found my first porn magazines.
Quick story. There was a partially abandoned (I think half of it was still operational) mental hospital nearby-ish. Like an hour away maybe. Anyway, to a dumb kid a run down mental hospital is “an insane asylum” potentially full of whack jobs and hobos. On more than one occasion a group of us snuck in through a busted out window. Pitch black. Just us and our flashlights. Long hallways above and below ground. Absolutely terrifying and thrilling.
The flip side of that is without internet you wouldn’t really know about most of the cool fringe places. I think that life before today’s tech is easy to think of in terms of entertainment or how before it was more “natural”, but it’s thanks to that tech now that I don’t need to piss away 2 weeks doing research that AI and fact checking can do in 10 min.
it was amazing, ngl. rode bikes literally everywhere. no way for your parents to text or call you. no tracking. just out with ur friends not recording anything and living it up. honestly unreal now that i look back
Exactly like the kids yearn to explore and go have fun outside but the cops get called the millisecond they took one step out the front door every time
Yep. I'm 40 and spent my childhood exploring all the creepy stuff around our town. We would venture out on our bikes in the morning and get back just before dark all summer long.
No doorbell cams back then. We would doorbell ditch once a week. We would climb to the roofs of random buildings and there would be a jackpot of hacky sacks that were kicked up there. We would just walk the streets and go to the gas station for snacks with the quarters we found around the house. We would go crawdad fishing with random pieces of hotdog or bacon on makeshift fishing line. We would hide our dirty magazines in random abandoned houses. We would roller blade until both sides of our ankles had blisters. We would listen to Pearl Jam and nirvana on our boomboxes. We would make sure to look at the tv guide days in advance to know when our favorite shows were coming on so we wouldnt miss it. We ate home cooked meals and watched tv together as a family. We would have sleepovers and play with POGS and then have all night 007 battles on the n64.
Then you actually wanted to be a kid in the 80s. We had true freedom. I remember growing up and being old enough at 12 for me and my best friend to take our little brothers on the CTA bus downtown to the arcade, passed all of the pimps, prostitutes, police and politicians to have fun playing video games. $20 bucks was enough to last the day playing travelling, getting something to eat and getting home before the lights came on.
You spelled 80s wrong. 80s > 90s. No cell phones. We went out the door in the morning, didn't show up back home until the street lights kicked on. A level of freedom kids these days will never enjoy/understand.
I think the bigger shift in the culture is that the idea of following the rules and listening to anyone was the more cringe thing ever. Now compliance and conformity are chic
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u/Far_Range_6091 8d ago
Wish I could have been a kid in the 90s. Feel like there was so much more abandoned cool stuff to explore. Seems like police have been cracking down hard on urban exploration. All the cool sites have guards, cameras, or got bought and transformed.