Largest Abandoned Factory in the World: The Packard Factory, Detroit

Packard was a premier nameplate in the United States, mentioned in the same breath as Duesenberg, Cadillac, Pierce-Arrow, and Lincoln. The crown jewel for Packard was the Packard Factory, a 3.5 million square-foot complex sprawling across 35 acres. In the years following World War II, the Packard Motor Car Company struggled to keep pace with the larger automakers that had purchased smaller companies to form “the Big Three.” Those not part of the Big Three had to merge to stay competitive: Kaiser and Willys formed Kaiser-Willys, Nash and Hudson formed American Motors, and Packard joined forces with Studebaker. The experiment was short-lived, however, and Packard ceased to exist by the middle of the twentieth century.

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Shipwrecked: MS World Discoverer Cruise Ship

Sometimes Interesting

Hidden in a remote bay of the Solomon Islands, the beached wreck of the German-built Liberian Cruise ship MS World Discoverer slowly rusts. Built in 1974, it served multiple owners faithfully for over 25 years.

In April of 2000, the ship struck an uncharted reef formation just off the Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean.

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Budget Cuts: Detroit Schools

Sometimes Interesting

Over the last decade attendance in the Detroit school system has experienced a 50% decline, dropping from over 170,000 students to just 83,000 enrolled. Fifty-nine schools were closed in 2010. In February of 2011, city legislators approved a bill that would close another 70. Despite the closures, there will still be over 70 schools operating in the Detroit School district.

If Detroit didn’t have money to operate the schools, it comes as no surprise the city didn’t have the funds to raze them either. Dozens of abandoned facilities stand vacant around the city, a grim reminder of the declining population and industrial importance of Detroit.

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Agdam, Azerbaijan: Ghost Town of War

Sometimes Interesting

Chances are you haven’t heard of Agdam. Founded less than 300 years ago, it doesn’t have much history. Its location is of little importance and nothing historically significant ever happened there. Until 1993, that is, when the city came under siege during the Nagorno-Karabakh War. Forty thousand people were forced to flee when forces shelled the town. Eighteen years later the town sits vacant, still a part of the Armenian buffer zone.

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St. Francis Dam: Worst U.S. Engineering Disaster of the 20th Century

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The collapse of the St. Francis Dam in 1928 is one of the worst catastrophes of the twentieth century. Today it is an engineering disaster case study. Just before the stroke of midnight on March 12th, a dam 40 miles northwest of Los Angeles containing the largest reservoir in California catastrophically failed. What would soon follow was a massive wave of destruction that would ultimately destroy much of Ventura County and claim the lives of nearly 600 people.

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Medical Firsts: The Story of Phineas Gage

Sometimes Interesting

The year was 1848, and 25-year-old Phineas Gage was earning wages as a railroad worker in Vermont. His task was to blast rock to clear the way for new railroad tracks. On September 13th, one blast detonated prematurely and shot a 4-foot metal rod through Gage’s skull. Miraculously – and without the benefit of medical technologies we have today – he survived and managed a full recovery.

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Hotel that took 25 Years to Build: The Ryugyong

Sometimes Interesting

North Korea has not historically been known for progress or leading the world in anything. In the mid-1980s they wanted to change that perception by building something massive, something that would be world-renowned. The project would symbolize progress for North Korea and introduce new, Western investors. The government decided to build a hotel – taller than any in the world – and in 1987 construction on the Ryugyong Hotel began. It was intended to be completed in 1989 in time for the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students, but developers would face nearly every conceivable hurdle and by 1992 the project was abandoned.

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Abandoned coal mining town in Siberia: Kadykchan, Russia

Sometimes Interesting

Deep in the Magadan region in remote Siberia, a coal mining town known as Kadykchan was built by Gulag prisoners during World War II. At its peak, the town housed nearly 11,000 residents. By the early 1990s, the decreased demand for coal and the fall of the Soviet Union would see the town start to decrease in importance. A mine explosion in 1996 killed six people and prompted ownership to shut down the mines altogether. Today, there are fewer than 200 people left in this remote town. There are no services, winters are extremely harsh, and the only way into town requires traveling on a ghost highway.

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