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Scenery Gorn / Real Life

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  • Pictures of abandoned Detroit buildings are even labeled "ruin porn".
  • Abandoned resorts around the Salton Sea. The Salton Sea was created by accident in 1905 and saw massive development starting in the 1920s, resorts and marinas popped up all over. But having no outlet (all water which comes in ultimately evaporates) and fed primarily with agricultural runoff and prone to flooding, the water turned toxic by the '60s, and mass fish kills turned the place into a stinking cesspit and guests and owners alike packed up and abandoned everything rapidly. It's not only known for the gorn of decaying buildings but the alien landscape of cracked salt-encrusted, dead earth and isolated pools of unnatural green-colored water.
  • Abandoned nuclear missile silos, often full of vintage equipment, and partially flooded.
  • Abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike, abandoned via bypass in 1968. Now an example of cracked, wildly overgrown asphalt but still a recognizable highway. Principle setting for the filming of The Road.
  • Centralia, Pennsylvania, abandoned after an invasive coal mine fire undermined much of the small town and flooded it with high levels of carbon monoxide. Inspiration for Silent Hill. In reality, the town was never a big settlement and today most of the abandoned buildings have been demolished and disposed of in an orderly fashion, but there's still all the city block roads, some huge, cracked, smoking upheavals in the ruined Route 61 highway, and various black, smoking cracks in the ground surrounded by death, as the trees and foliage killed by the heat and gas drop all around and into them. A few longterm holdout residents defied the evacuation and continue to live in the town, which lacks any functioning stores or businesses.
    • As of 2013, there's a grand total of 7 people in the town, falling from an already dwindling 21.
  • Most examples are very large, very durable purpose-built buildings which could not effectively be retasked once they outlived their initial purpose, and have been too expensive to tear down. e.g. asylums (mental health isn't conducted this way anymore), sanatoriums (which were for long-treatment of tuberculosis), hospitals (based on obsolete technology), boarding schools (which are rare nowadays), factories based on obsolete products or manufacturing methods, and workhouses/poorhouses (good riddance).
  • Sometimes gorn is reversed. Adam Hats factory in Dallas lay derelict for decades, but then converted into trendy, high-priced hipster lofts without compromising its vintage exterior, which may explain why these structures aren't torn down.
  • Abandoned Six Flags New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina left it under 4-7 ft of brackish water for over a month, leaving most buildings and all ground rides total losses, even though superficially they appear intact. All abandoned amusement parks are inherent examples of this trope, as the dissonance of its joyful, cheery purpose is consumed alive by weeds, sun fading, and rust is readily apparent in almost any photo.
  • Many pictures of the Dust Bowl show tremendous gorn, the most amazing being cars and farm equipment more than half-buried in deposited dust; they appear to be melting into the earth itself.
  • Post nuclear-meltdown Chernobyl was one of the best real-life examples of this trope.
    • The nearby town of Pripyat is similar, but more in an eerie and deserted way. (Particularly with the new funfair that had just been built before the accident.) The animals seem to like the situation though...
      • As well as for tourists, Pripyat has become a destination for researchers from a variety of disciplines including ecologists and civil engineers, as it serves as a real-life example of what happens to a city after it is abandoned overnight (what species move in first, what materials degrade fastest without maintenance, etc.).
  • The Pontiac Silverdome had a rough ride after the Detroit Lions moved from the stadium in January, 2002. It fell into disuse, but was maintained well by the city of Pontiac until in 2009 when it was sold to a new owner. A year later, the Silverdome reopened, but in 2013, heavy wind and snow damaged the roof causing it to close once again. This, along with apathy from the ownership and the lack of major events coming to the stadium resulted in the Pontiac Silverdome to die slowly. It was until December of 2017 when it was hailed as a modern-day "ancient ruin". With the bowl now exposed to the outside, and all areas of the stadium filled with trash and covered with elements like moss and water, touring the Silverdome became every urban explorer's dream. Observe here.
  • Post-WW2 Hiroshima and Nagasaki probably take the title in that category.
    • Tokyo wasn't any prettier after the similarly destructive Operation Meetinghouse raid.
      • In fact in several older movies that involved the atomic bombings, stock aerial footage of Tokyo was used instead of those of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, because the Tokyo footage was more destroyed-looking.
  • Major disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, mudslides, and volcanic eruptions. See the photo galleries The Other Wiki has for Hurricane Katrina, the Great Haitian Earthquake, Armero, and Pompeii.
  • The endless footage of the collapse of the Twin Towers in the days and weeks after September 11th, and the pictures of the WTC site between the attacks and the clearing of the rubble.
  • Post-WW2 Warsaw. It's so damn impressive that they managed to rebuild it almost completely, even expanding it.
    • All firebombed European cities after WWII as well as some Spanish villages and cities after the Spanish Civil War.
  • For the first ten years after the eruption, the northern slopes of Mt. Saint Helens in Washington. Hundreds of square miles of blasted, gray wasteland covered in burned-out trees and rivers choked with ash and tree trunks. Even today, comparing the lush forests nearby to the colorless desert at the base of the mountain is rather sobering.
  • Any place there has been a recent forest fire.
    • One famous example, the Bitterroot Forest Fire. The scene is horrifying and tragic, however, the photo a journalist took is disturbingly beautiful.
  • Many places in Japan are starting to look like this after the 2011 earthquake.
  • Heck, many places in Japan looked like this before the 2011 earthquake. Gunkanjima is a Scenery Gorn tourist attraction.
  • The great Soviet Union, when it was still great, had a tendency to build massive structures in a unique function-over-form styling (or lack thereof). Then it wasn't great anymore, the money ran out, and they stopped building stuff that looked like it came out straight from Command & Conquer. More importantly, a large amount of the existing structures and the small cities surrounding them were abandoned, and now they are a favorite target for adventurous photographers. Witness the gorn.
  • Mountaintop removal mining.
  • Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, Illinois, which rotted away for over three decades before finally being demolished in 2012 and is most notable for being the mall from The Blues Brothers (it was already abandoned even then, hence why they had no qualms of trashing the place).
  • Fort Ord, an abandoned military base on the Monterey Bay, full of old beige post-war buildings now boarded up and being enveloped by nature.
  • A small example: in 2005 someone managed to strand their Mercedes on 90 Mile Beach in New Zealand when the tide came in. Tour buses would stop by it for the next year or so while it slowly disappeared into the sand.
  • Olympic venues can often become examples of this trope, particularly in cash-strapped nations. Stadiums are expensive to maintain, and once the Games are done the residents may simply just not use them or any of the other facilities, having no need for a bobsled track or rowing canals, and hence the stadiums are left to rot.
  • The Highway of Death, where much of the Iraqi army was utterly devastated while retreating at the end of the Gulf War. The result was an entire road of bombed-out husks lining both sides by the hundreds in a display that disturbed even the winners of the war.
  • The train cemetery located in the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat. These trains were used by mining companies at the turn of the century, then abandoned in the 1940s. The rusted, gutted, and battered hulks of graffiti-covered train engines, flatbeds, cargo haulers, and passenger cars go on for some distance, surrounded by an endless expanse of desolate salt flats and the silhouettes of distant mountains. It's one of the major tourist attractions in the region, and there's been a campaign to turn part of it into a museum for some time now.
  • Thanks to a Soviet-era irrigation plan which diverted the flow of the rivers that fed it, the Aral Sea has been steadily drying up over the past fifty years, with most of the former lakebed now becoming a massive expanse of desert. One of the consequences of this is that the various boats and ships that once traveled the lake were abandoned as the lake dried up, leading to the curious and haunting sight of ships abandoned in the middle of the desert, becoming rusted hulks surrounded by endless expanses of arid land. This haunting sight has been referenced in several media works, such as the recent Mad Max game.
  • The now-demolished Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio, perhaps the most famous abandoned mall after Dixie Square, was shuttered in 2008 due to the owners being unable to pay their electric bills. In 2015, urban explorer Johnny Joo snuck into and photographed the rotting (hence the nickname Rotting Acres) interior of the mall after a snowstorm, in which many sections were covered in snow due to the skylights either caving in from the weight of the snow or being shot out by vandals.
  • Three words: No Man's Land, the real-world inspiration for Tolkien's Dead Marshes. Let us paint a picture for you. Large stretches of what once was forest or green fields have been burned and blasted down to giant, crater-pocked mud pits, littered with barbed wire, dead bodies and pieces thereof, and strewn with bits of metal from bullets and shells — metal that still surfaces in these fields today under farmers' ploughs. The smell of death hangs chokingly thick across the land, interwoven with the stink of the mud to the point where one calls to mind the other — oppressive, sickening, inescapable. The scene is punctuated by giant wooden spikes formed of tree trunks mangled by artillery. Depending on the time and place in the war, there may be craters filled with chalky clouds that blister and sear young men's skin and eyes and lungs, or newly designed tanks — cutting-edge machines of modern warfare — stuck and abandoned, their metal carcasses left alongside the flesh-and-bone ones to be swallowed by the mud. Small wonder those who saw it and survived were never the same again.

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