16 Comments Posted by simon

Blowing buildings like this up has been tried. EPA and others have issues with vaporizing asbestos, LBP, etc into the atmosphere.

Kill-joys.

My bet is on an eventual - very spectacular - fire.

I did not say "accidental."

i really like it! really good sens of humour!

This site is so depressing when you think of the subject matter being captured. Thank you for taking these photos as it give us an appreciation of what should never happen to kids.

I grew up in Millbrook and remember Bennett when it was a college. I went to some concerts and other functions there. It was a unique old building with some great turn of the last century features. About ten years ago, I passed through the town and was stunned to see the ruin it had become. I remember sitting on that hillside with a girl I liked when it was a mowed lawn. I couldn’t believe how ruined and overgrown it had become.
Now I run a civil and environmental engineering company that has worked on redeveloping some large, old abandoned properties. I can tell you from firsthand experience that Bennett is done. Whatever it once was, it cannot be put back together. If the developer is willing to pay $4M for the facility as a tear-down, then the cost of restoring Halcyon Hall alone must be several times that. Until you have done the work of putting one of these sites into useable condition, you really can’t understand the economics of it. This building CAN’T be restored. If it were right back in the condition it was in the seventies, it would still need to be torn apart and refurbished to be useable now. The plumbing, heating, and asbestos issues in the photos I have seen online alone would crush the project.
My experience has been that lots of casual onlookers want these types of “grand old buildings” restored because they make nice scenery as they drive past and local folks get very sentimental for the way it was back when, but very few of these people will ever put a dime to the massive cost of rebuilding it. If you think that Halcyon Hall would work as a hotel, then you haven’t done the math. If the place charged more than high end Manhattan hotels and was full every night, it would take decades to make even a meager ROI on rebuilding it. “Adopt a room?” That idea will work if people will pay a couple of hundred K per room and the rooms would have to be demolished and rebuilt anyway.
From what I have read (and I was sad to hear that the Round Table had folded) there are only two likely paths for Bennett. If the town is lucky, a developer will turn the property into something viable that retains some features of its past architecture. If you can’t find somebody to do that, or if well-meaning, but overly sentimental folks drive the developers off, then the ruin will end up as municipal property (town or county) and will crumble slowly for decades. I have seen way too many properties like this where passionate folks with good intentions run off the developers, celebrate their righteous victory, and then gripe for years after about why nobody will do anything with the ruin.
It is really sad to lose such a distinctive property, but Bennett failed as a college and nobody came up with a viable use for it over the last 30 years. If there was one, it surely would have surfaced during one of the real estate booms during those years.
And take it easy on the cranky caretaker. I knew him in high school and he was a nice (if somewhat intense) guy.

too bad you didnt manage to check.

huge waste. i hate waste of paper - think about the trees.
and also think about how much money would id be worth sold for recycling

what a waste..

incredible, gives me the creeps

i keep posting here hoping for an answer..do you ever take the printed word that you find out there with you?

do you take the books you find in the ruins? i mean, that's so sad to see them rot and they dont actually differ the place

extremely odd.

the seal thing is insane

thist tubeish item on the floor looks pretty strange

it looks incredibly sick.

i just hate to see books rotting away like this. but i suppose you attend to the urban explorer's rules very strictly, or what?