Abandonment Issues: Duplex on Deux

For a long while now, only one half of the Duplex on Deux in Trenton, Ontario, has been accessible. We have stopped by regularly both before and after the visit captured in these images. In the winter months, even approaching the door of the unaccessible unit was difficult due to snow covering the broken staircase and exposed nails. In the summer months, thick bushes and thorns had overgrown the doorway and crumbling stairs. Still, we continue to push through and check it every single time we pass by, with no success as of yet. It is noteworthy to state that we do not break into locations. We return to spots such as this time after time, playing the waiting game, and hoping for an entry point to reveal itself. It is a lesson and exercise in patience and persistence.











These interior shots are of the eastern unit only, and were taken in early Spring of 2011. A kids goalie mask sat on the rotting wooden deck of the accessible unit, with a Toronto Raptors basketball hoop towering on an angle over the grassy driveway like the leaning tower of Pisa. How long has this sports memorabilia gone unused, we wondered aloud?

Inside, a water heater stood ominously in the doorway to the kitchen, a foreboding presence. Wallpaper fragments have fallen from high above and rest in pieces on the brown carpeted stairs, in other places, they hang from the ceiling, clinging on for dear life. Much is the same with the tiny remnants of toilet paper hanging from the empty roll on the holder beside the toilet, in the blue bathroom. The large kitchen is completely empty, but for the half open blinds on the windows, and an empty glass water jug on the floor.

Nothing else fecal matters


Shit ain't like that


Second class citizen


Something comes over you


Feeling out of place


The grass isn't always greener on the other side of the grow-op


Upstairs, pretty much everything but the master bedroom had been painted bright pink, and a pink shoelace hung from a doorknob inside one of the rooms. I peered eastward out a bedroom window and looked down onto the leaning basketball hoop. As I turned back around, I saw a NERF basketball hoop hanging from the back of the bedroom door. Game on. I pulled a folded piece of paper containing our days prospective location list with GPS co-ordinates from my back pocket and crumpled it up, then I closed the door and Ninja IX and I played a friendly game of hoops.

Sad clown bad drugs


The winds of shit


Footsteps on floorboards, please don't come in my room, please don't come in my room.


Laced


Hoop dreams


NeRF


The twists and turns


A few months later, while approaching the unaccessible unit, a pick-up truck pulled up beside us and parked. A pair of plaid jacketed men sat and stared at us silently from inside the truck. We passed the camera back and forth pretending to shoot everything from close ups of flowers to the expansive landscape, and down the long dirt road in the opposite direction. We aimed the camera at everything but the house, and didn't actually take a single photo. It became obvious that they were going to wait us out, so we left.

click here to check out all of jerm & ninja IX's ABANDONMENT ISSUES