The Psychic Temple of Long Beach

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Sometimes Interesting
psychic temple
Long Beach, California is known for its beaches and sunny weather. It has one of the world’s largest shipping ports and is a major player in domestic oil production. Douglas Aircraft chose the city to house its largest facility, and Henry Ford built Model A’s here. Astrologers and psychics established temples. The Psychic Temple became a Long Beach landmark for spiritual learning in 1905. When its founder was run out of town years later, it evolved into the American Hotel. For decades the building seemed to defy progress and barely escaped demolition. Thanks to the work of a passionate few, the hundred year-old building will have the opportunity to last another century. 
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Ochamchire Abkhazia: Casualty of War

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Sometimes Interesting
ochamchira-abkhazia-cover
On the east coast of the Black Sea, about 125 miles (200km) south of Sochi, sits the shell of a once-vibrant town. Ochamchire (also Ochamchira) was once a pleasant coastal retreat in Georgia, but an ethnic war following the dissolution of the former Soviet Union resulted in the territory becoming largely abandoned. Now the city is part of the Abkhazia Republic, and less than a tenth of the city’s pre-war population remains. With entire city blocks abandoned, Ochamchire is a shell of its former self. Today many of those who stayed are trying to take care of what’s left for a population that won’t return. 
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Sanatorio de Abona: Abandoned Leper Colony of Tenerife

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Sometimes Interesting
The Canary Islands are well-known for their warm weather and water sports. Largest and most populous of the islands is Tenerife, which offers hiking trails, historic villages, local pubs, sandy beaches, water slides, and a . Yet what you won’t find on tourism flyers is one of the more interesting places to see. On the Southeast coast of Tenerife, just up the hill from a newer small village, the remains of an aborted early twentieth-century sanatorium still bask in the bright sun.
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The Glass Bank

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Sometimes Interesting
courtesy Biz360Tours
It might be hard to believe the “Glass Bank” was once a visually stunning piece of architecture. Opened in 1962, the structure was entirely glass-walled before a 1980s renovation gave it a brutalist makeover. The building was penned by a famed local architect and served the city for more than four decades before hurricane damage forced the last commercial tenants to relocate in 2004. Over the next ten years disagreements between owners prevented needed repairs, and the financial crisis prevented any bailout. Only one man stood in the way of the building’s demolishment, but he couldn’t fight forever. The Glass Bank’s fate was eventually decided by the courts in 2014, and by early 2015 more than fifty years of Cocoa Beach history was demolished.
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Oklahoma’s Hidden Chalkboards of Yesteryear

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Sometimes Interesting
The Emerson School dates to 1895 and is one of the first public schools built in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The classic building is already rich in history, but a recent discovery of some hidden chalkboards offers a rare view into the classrooms of one hundred years ago.
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Buckminster Fuller’s Home in a Dome

By
Cary O'Dell

Guest Post Series

words & photos by Cary O’Dell It would probably look a little out of place in just about any neighborhood, let alone sitting on a grassy corner lot in the Midwestern college town of Carbondale, Illinois. This dome home–looking for all the world like a half-buried golf ball jutting up from the soil– certainly does stand out, surrounded as it is by far more traditional box-shaped one- and two-story houses. But it is more than just an incongruent eye-catcher in this otherwise typical neighborhood. It is a bit of Americana and a bit of history, architectural and otherwise.
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Abandoned Poconos Legend: Buck Hill Inn

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Sometimes Interesting
Built in 1901, the Inn at Buck Hill Falls was once the class of Poconos Mountain resorts. The thousand-acre retreat featured amenities such as an amphitheater, a 27-hole golf course, horseback riding, an indoor pool, swimming, and tennis. For decades the resort thrived, and would expand until eventually becoming a 400-room, 300,000 square-foot facility. The end of the Buck Hill Inn began with a downturn in business from the late 1970s into the 1980s. In 1990, the owners closed it for good. Numerous attempts have tried, and failed, to restore the century-old resort. In the meantime Mother Nature, scrappers, and vandals have been slowly tearing down what remains of the Inn at Buck Hill.
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Tunnel 51: Secret Racing Research Facility

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Sometimes Interesting
Laurel-Hill-Tunnel-entrance
This boarded-up tunnel in the mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania dates back two centuries. It was originally built by Carnegie and Vanderbilt for a nineteenth-century railroad, but hard times resulted in four decades of abandonment. In the mid-twentieth century the re-born tunnel spent time as part of America’s first Superhighway, before a re-routing of the Turnpike resulted in another four decades of abandonment. Today the Laurel Hill Tunnel is not abandoned; it has been re-purposed as a test facility by an innovative racing organization. Now an “Area 51″ of racing technology, the tunnel was the subject of multiple patents before witnessing a restriction of use by racing sanctioning bodies. The secret lies in aerodynamics.
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