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How anyone ever thought these would 'work' is beyond me.

I know of more than a few people who far from being skeeved out, would posively relish that mental image of the jiggly fat guy. Google 'fat admirer' or 'BBW'. My own SO falls under the second classification by the way. Or for a more in-depth examination of corpulence and eroticism, try www.dimensionsmagazine.com, www.abundancemagazine.com or www.bigfatblog.com for a real education...

;-)

rich, you said, "I worked in a footear warehouse."

Em . . . . . . . . . . does this mean you sold spare body parts from a warehouse?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Probably far too big and heavy to be worth moving. I worked in a footear warehouse as a student and above the adminbuilding was the former accounts / payroll department which had been abandoned for about 30 years.

Along with ancient adding machines and refrigerators were a couple of huge Victorian safes just like this one. I can't imaging rhat they would be especially 'safe' by today's standards (especially if someone has taken an oxy-acetylene torch to the locks!) and I doubt the scrap value comes close to covering the cost of dismantling and removing it from the building if there's no pressing need (ie redevelopment).

What a terrible story Anon.

I think that many people's persistent, negative impressions of large institutions stems from their frequent use as 'dumping grounds' for those that respectable society didn't want to see in the early / mid 1900s. Pregnant teens, those suffering from various physical disabilities or just disruptive children from poor families all ended up in these wards. As one example, apparently Pennhurst was full of deaf and blind kids who were misdiagnosed as educationally subnormal and who would live full and productive lives today.

I can't imagine experiencing some of these places as a barely-aware, severely retarded person let alone as a relatively 'normal' person shoved in one for whatever political or social reason. fifty years ago myself, my girlfriend and many of those I know and love would have very likely lived out their lives in such places. That's a sobering thought indeed.

All the institutions I have worked at or visited have had water towers. The place I am at currently has two water towers, but there are still a large number of folks who live there.

I worked at a facility in Oklahoma about 15 years ago that was being downsized and closed, and they were doing a number of repairs and beautification projects on the entire campus as they closed it. I never could quite understand why, because after they shut it in 1993 or 1994 they have never used it since, so all the money spent on beautifying the even-then unused sections of campus went down the proverbial toilet. I could understand working on the inhabited areas of campus, but they were doing all sorts of work on the closed sections as well.

Anyways, one day I was working in one of the homes with some of the ladies and we received an overhead emergency page to one of the nearby campus parking lots. It turned out that one of the contract painters had neglected to secure his safety harness when painting on top of the water tower, and he fell many, many feet to his death. He left a wife and several small children, which was horrible enough, but the real tragedy to me was that the place was closing within a year or two and not only did the money get wasted on painting a water tower that would soon be obsolete, but there was a terrible, terrible irony that someone ended up dying in such a futile endeavor.

OK, so what other cheerful memories do you want me to bring up tonight? :-)

The work and attention to detail expended on industrial buildings in the 19th and early 20th centuries was nothing short of wonderful.

Somehow I can't imagine today's functional structures holding the same visual appeal a century from now. Corrugated iron and concrete blocks may be cheap but architectural beauty is priceless.

Even sadder, then, that so many of these buildings from the golden age of industry are now flattened without a second thought or a backward glance.

This has the feel of an incredibly detailed pencil sketch about it. The sky is fantastic. I soooo want this pic for my bedroom wall.

Oh, rich, you are marvy! :-)

We don't have water towers like that in the UK. If we did, I could well imagine associating them with watch-towers or similar....

I don't know why, but this one looks rather creepy.

Another fantastic post by Lynne. It seems that people assume that the ECT, chemical coshing' and neglect of their worst institutional nightmares still goes on, even in the modern age of human rights lawyers and formal, written procedures for everything.

All through my school years we were expected to take communal showers in a room very similar to this following games (physical ed) lessons. No-one ever called these dehumanising or exploitative, despite the fact that at 14 or 15 years old we were seeing one another as naked as the day we were born. And as far as I know they are still in use to this day.

Frequently the showers were cold because the education authority that funded the school couldn't afford to heat the water. No word of a lie. And a good friend of mine who was, erm, rather larger than average (about 25 stone, or so he later told me) was often on the end of abusive and foul-mouthed comments from other students. He sucked it in and dealt with it. Wrong of course, but certainly not unusual.

My point being that if they could 'subject' a load of 15 year-olds to this just a decade ago, is it so terrible that it happened in psychiatric establishments?

Motts, thank you so much for that link about UK asylums. I share Chocobo's gratitude. In my experience, and as I've said before, anything that becomes obsolete or surplus to requirements here tends to be torn down long before it has chance to decay and becomes interesting, due to ridiculous land values and Government policy which insists on the re-use of any piece of 'brown-field' land for hundreds of overpriced shoe-box apartments. I had no idea that any of this stuff had survived... my Mom told me childhood stories of poking around a vast abandoned institution near Warrington, but that has long gone and only the water tower remains.

I've become fascinated by the idea of exploring derelict asylums, since ours were once possibly even more ornate, more impressive, and more brutal than those in the US, particularly during the early 20th century. The stories are heartbreaking - of girls committed to these places for the 'crime' of falling pregnant, or suffering from autism, epilepsy or any number of now-managable conditions. It was very easy to end up in the 'looney bin' and never see the light of day again. Even though most of them are down South, far away from my city, I'm encouraged by their mere existence and may even be tempted to pay a visit.. My interest in UE was sparked by a 'mission' (with a friend) to the abandoned BBC TV headquarters in Leeds city centre before that too was reduced to rubble. We had an amazing time snooping around recently vacated newsrooms and TV / radio studios and I hope t enjoy many more such experiences. Thanks a million for this site, and for helping fire my interest and stimulate my imagination...

Cold water was always a possibility if the state didn't provide adequate funding for enough electricity or if there was a cruel staff member in charge of showers. This did happen in the community as well, however. Rather than thinking that institutions are a separate and specified place, it's important to keep in mind that in reality "an institution is not a place, it's a state of mind." This is a quote from Tom Pomerantz, a psychologist who does training programs for staff who work with folks with intellectual disabilities. Having worked in schools, hospitals, group homes, nursing homes, foster homes, private homes, and institutions, I assure you that what happens "in there" also happens "out here." Right now, in fact, if you do not live with your own family you may even be safer in an institutional setting (at least for folks in MR/DD settings) because of the many, many, many pairs of eyes that look at you every day, a minimum of three times a day. If someone has so much as a pimple and the previous shift does not write it up they can be in serious legal trouble. This does not happen in other settings because you don't have the same number of people coming through on a daily basis. That is the positive and the negative at the same time.

In group homes or private home settings some pretty horrible abuse happens and can continue to happen for a long stretch before someone discovers it. And hopefully it will be discovered before someone has died. In institutions today the staff have to do body checks at shower time every day on every single client and they also do a brief lookover at every shift change because they know if something is found that they didn't report, they will be called in to explain it. This doesn't mean they strip them down and do a cavity search - but they MUST do a quick check and make sure the person doesn't have any obvious cuts, bruises, "booboos," nicks, etc. I get incident reports every day over pimples and shaving nicks and mosquito bites and hangnails. I get incident reports if someone bumps into someone else or falls down and there isn't any apparent injury. I get an incident report if someone sneezes too hard.

As is the case everywhere else, abuse still occurs in institutions, just as it does in the house next to you and maybe even your own home. But I can pretty much guarantee you that it will be found much quicker and an end will be put to it much more quickly when you have lots of people whose job it is to watch to make sure you are safe and that your injuries are explainable. If there is the slightest doubt, we send staff home or to another area until an investigation occurs and abuse/neglect is ruled out. If someone has advanced osteoporosis and their t-score is so far off whack that you can't believe they are able to bear weight without snapping and they then break a bone, we are still going to do an investigation, because we owe it to the people we have said we would watch out for.

Abuse happened and happens, but it is decreasing as the culture that created/supported it changes. However, if people continue to look for ugly things and believe the worst of everyone, pretty soon that is all that will exist for them and they'll be as trapped in their own cynicism as some people seem to want to believe that every single resident of an institution was "trapped".

I am not "pro" or "anti" institution; I am "pro" or "anti" the attitudes and behavior of the people who work there. This mirrors the outside culture. Simple as that. If you are lucky enough to have a family with the love, the means, and the resources to take care of you, that is usually the very best place to be. But for the rest of us we should be lucky enough to end up where the majority of the people who work truly care about us.

http://www.universalli ... rticles_poems.html

I remember being deathly scared of water towers when I was young. I thought I had gotten over it.

My father used to sell mimeograph machines to local education authorities in the days before schools could afford photocopiers. The smell of the ink was lovely... I remember getting the blue print all over my hands when our class teacher gave us worksheets that weren't quite dry :-)

I think we may still even have a couple of these machines (more modern, mid-80s versions of course) lying around in the garage or basement! Incidenally my old man moved on to selling photocopiers and laser printers as each subsequently superseded older technology...

No no-slip socks? That's insane! This year I am playing the part of an institutional risk manager and I chase people around (and hector them to death!) to find out why injuries occurred. People are in serious trouble if they let other people go without shoes and socks on living areas where there are lots of other folks who use wheelchairs. And at night if a fall occurs we chase down staff to make sure they had no-slip socks on people. "Penny wise, pound foolish" ;-)