editorial writer {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. They know what they’re doing can get them in trouble. Even when it does not involve breaking and entering, the exploration of vacant buildings is almost always illegal – and often dangerous.
Urban explorer Andrea Cogliano, at the Central Terminal in Buffalo, keeps track of pending demolitions when looking for sites. At top, the former J.N.
Adam Memorial Hospital in Perrysburg. But that doesn’t stop Western New York’s urban explorers – urbexers for short – from venturing inside empty, seemingly abandoned structures throughout the region and elsewhere. Why? Because the combination of history, mystery, fading beauty and serious decay is irresistible.
You’ll find them on Instagram with handles like “dauntless obscura,” “mr.p explores” and “brokendownbuffalo.” On Facebook, you can follow Abandoned Adventures, Abandoned and Beyond Buffalo and Abandoned 716.
Not to mention the TikTokers and YouTubers like Joey/@Don Joey. Joey says, “I have been urban exploring since I was very young, but I really got into it during the pandemic. I remember my Tata (grandpa) used to take me and my brother on adventures to explore this abandoned railway building in Fort Erie (Ont.
). I was probably 6 or 7 at the time and I loved going there. A few years later, my mom and my uncle took me to explore the Central Terminal.
Those two missions were likely where.
