You spend thirty minutes commuting congested highways from Monday to Friday in an effort to arrive at your office by 9. Forty hours a week dedicated to bureaucracy, paperwork and feelings of under appreciation. Working for a paycheque to provide food, material goods to accumulate, feelings of contentment. After supper you sit on a couch and expose your mind to images of other people's equally mundane and boring lives for entertainment, reality television they call it. Put a group of immature young adults into a house, give them endless alcohol and sell it as a TV show. When you tire of this voyeurism, you jump into bed and repeat this life cycle for another day. Welcome to Ontario Abandoned Places. Take a trip to the past when life was much simplier. Men woke at dawn to tend to their land. Children played outside until bedtime rather than hide their faces behind I-Pads and cell phones. People read newspapers in coffee shops. You could walk down the street and chat with seniors sitting on their porch. You knew the names of all your neighbours. Television shows taught family values, you watched them with your parents: Dukes of Hazzard, Waltons, Little House on the Prarie, The Equalizer. There still exist places in Ontario where one can walk through the front door of a house and lose themself in the past. Houses built with handcarved bannisters and trim, slowly succumbing to the elements, long since abandoned. Places where you can find items left behind from the 1950's, newspapers left on the table discuss the Second World War. Time stands still here. We give a voice to the people of yesterday, the memories that are slowly fading from the map, a way of life being forgotten. We welcome photographers, explorers, heritage enthusiasts and those looking to get in touch with their past. By contributing your own photographs to the website, you can establish a reputation to earn access to places that we can't show the general public. We despise thieves - people that take items home from locations. If you're a treasure hunter or graffiti tagger please run, don't walk, as far away from this site as possible. You are not welcome here. Ontario Abandoned Places is the largest source of abandoned locations in Ontario, it is also a community where you'll find many likeminded invididuals. If you'd like to join the site, you may Register For An Account. Like any reward in life, access is based on your contributions. We're looking for people willing to EXPLORE the past - something you can't do by holding your camera out the window of your car. |
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