Abandoned Places: Vulture Bunker

Travelling back to the Bay of Puck in Poland (remember the torpedo testing base?), we find another World War II era military installation. The Bay of Puck is formed by the Hel peninsula, a sand bar with delusions of grandeur. It actually plays host to several towns and is a popular tourist destination despite the fact that there are times that the peninsula becomes an island, unattached to the rest of Poland. However, it was of strategic importance during World War II, so the Nazis fortified the sucker with the Vulture bunker. Or series of bunkers. Basically, as soon as Germany took Poland, they fortified Hel with these bunkers -- the walls very from four to ten feet thick -- and construction on them was finished in 1939. The bunkers never saw combat.

After World War II, the Polish military put the bunkers to some use, but, at this point, they've mostly been empty and unused for decades.

Photos by Tomasz Jakubowski and used under the linked license.

Your bonus photos today are various abandoned houses in Virginia:

The "Dump House":

The "House of Five Black Doors":

And a church house (okay, a church, so a House of God):

Abandoned Places: The Urban Warfare Village

The town of Imber dates back over 1000 years. Its first known mention is in Saxon documents dated 967 and it had a population of about 50 according to the Doomsday Book a little over 100 years later. The village church, St. Giles, was built in the 13th century. Located on the sparsely populated Salisbury Plain, Imber never grew to be more than an isolated village, peaking in the 1850s with something over 400 residents. At the time of its abandonment, only 150 people lived there.

In the late 19th century the British military began using the Salisbury Plain to practice maneuvers, and the War Office began buying up all the land. By the beginning of World War II, the government owned most of the village. When the US military picked it out as a good place to practice urban warfare, the villagers were called for a town meeting and given notice that they had 47 days to evacuate the small town. Most of the villagers left without protest, many leaving behind canned goods and other provisions to support the war effort. Though told that they would eventually be able to return to their homes, the village has been vacant ever since. The urban warfare training by the US never took place.

However, after WWII, the UK did use the village for that purpose, training their own troops for fighting in the urban environments of Northern Ireland. During that time period, many of the buildings suffered damage from shelling and other types of explosions. Since the 1951 census, the population has been recorded as 0. With the exception of St. Giles church, the whole parish is owned by the Ministry of Defense.

Your bonus today: More photos from Ukraine!
In 1976, construction began in Crimea on the most expensive nuclear reactor ever to be built. It was not finished at the time of the Chernobyl incident and, then, was never finished.

Abandoned Places: Teufelsberg

Teufelsberg, or Devil's Mountain, was made from the ruins of Berlin. Literally. It is one of several mounds in Europe created after World War II from the rubble of destruction. What makes Devil's Mountain unique is that its site was chosen because of what's buried beneath it: Wehrtechnishe Fakultat, a Nazi military college that was never completed. At the end of the war, the Allies attempted to blow it up, but they found that the structure was so well built that it was easier to just bury it. By the time they closed the area to debris disposal in 1972, it was the highest point in West Berlin: 394 feet.

During the 60s, the NSA built one of its largest listening stations atop "The Hill," as it came to be known by the Americans who worked there.

There are rumors that Americans excavated shafts down into the ruins under the mound, but that has never been confirmed. The listening station was decommissioned in the 90s when the Berlin Wall fell. Although the equipment has been removed, the buildings and radar domes remain. Even though it's been fenced off and is actually guarded, the structures have been heavily vandalized.

The following photos are by Liam Davies and used under the linked license.

Also going back to World War II, your bonus photos today are from Torpedowaffenplatz Hexengrund, Nazi torpedo testing station they built in Puck Bay in Poland after they occupied it. Although the Russians briefly occupied the base at the close of the war, the facility has been abandoned since 1945.

And one more! The abandoned Toronto Power Company Generating Station.

The following photos are courtesy of Opacity.

Abandoned Places: Shi Cheng, the Sunken City

Shi Cheng, or Lion City, was founded nearly 1500 years ago and was once the probable center of commerce and politics for its district. Information about Lion City, beyond that, is somewhat sketchy (and here's a sketch of what the city may have once looked like):

In 1959, the valley in which Shi Cheng was located was flooded for the Xin'an River Dam Project, creating Qiandao Lake. As far as I can tell, the abandoned city was not discovered until after it was flooded and submerged during the creation of the lake. Or, maybe, the Chinese government knew it was there and just didn't care. They did dislocate about 300,000 people for the project. At any rate, the once prosperous city now lies at the bottom of the lake.

As an added bonus, here some pictures of the Sutro Baths, built in San Francisco in the 1890s as the world's largest indoor swimming pool complex. The baths operated through the 1960s when they were finally closed for financial reasons. Shortly after closing, a fired destroyed the building.