Those Who Trespass Against Us

Last night, E and I went for a walk. We passed by this massive old condemned house, that has a terrific view by virtue of sitting on 2-story-tall concrete stilts. There were some signs up indicating it was going to be turned into condos, which made us sad because there is a shortage of unique houses, and plenty of condos. We decided to see if we could get in and look around once before it was torn down.

Climbing over the barbed wire (in clear view of the restaurant across the street was a bit more trouble than I wanted to go to, but surely a clever guy can figure out a better way in? I tried punching the street address into the combo lock on the gate... no dice. I tried sticking my housekey into the padlock on the garden gate and vibrating it... no dice. I realized a simple crescent wrench would allow me to lift the garden gate off its hinges, but I didn't have one and couldn't improvise something strong enough out of the PVC pipe and rocks around the ground.

Then we got lucky; I found a well-beaten little trail behind the billboard (oooh, foreshadowing!) which wound around to a completely out-of-sight gap in the fence. E and I ducked through, stepped over the debris on the other side, and went exploring.

It really is a totally sweet house. There's a section around the bottom that had an elevator shaft (padlocked), but there was a stairwell to the right of that with a BROKEN OFF padlock... We were going to look inside, but at that point an angry homeless guy stormed around the corner and yelled at us "You're not allowed to be here! You're trespassing! Get out!" So we took off running and didn't look back.