Minneapolis / Saint Paul / Twin Cities urban exploration

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Action Squad + Abbotts Hospital

Scouting

This time, it begins with an email tip – Lola, a reader of this website, lived near the place, and thought we’d be interested in a vacant transitional care building. Good guess.

I wasn’t sure what transitional care even was, or how large the place might be – actually I figured that it was going to be small, or we’d have noticed it by then – but it was close by, and the rarer of the two big “I”s of great vacancy-exploring opportunities: Institutional.

So that Saturday afternoon, a few of us decided to swing by and take a look. Our directions were slightly vague, and we really weren’t sure what we were looking for. After a few blocks of circling the area and wondering aloud, I thought I saw something.

“Wait, is THAT it?”

“What? That place looks active.” She had a point.  From the street we were approaching the building on, all that was visible was modern-looking construction, with neat, square windows, none of them boarded.

This Mission is dedicated to Ninjalicious, & to his memory.

“But look, people have been tagging it.” They had - and although someone still cared enough to come out and cover the tags up with brown paint, there seemed to be too many of them, in too many unusual spots - often a easy sign of vacancy.

Then we drove past and turned the corner to get a view of another side of the building, and we knew we’d found the transitional care building we’d been looking for. If our tip + the location + the boarded-up windows now visible weren’t clues enough, there were even flags out front naming the conglomerate of buildings “City of Lakes Transitional Care.”

So we parked the car for a Walk-Around - to get a feel of the place, and to assess any potential access points that we’d be able to exploit when we came back by cover of night, with lights, cameras, and Action.

The first doors we came to had ominous warnings of police dogs being trained on the premises – a pretty effective tactic used to keep people out of large urban vacancies between residents, familiar from Hamm’s Brewery and Castle Ravenshit. It might be a bluff. Even if it’s not, like everything else in urban adventuring - and in life - it’s about calculated risk.

And by this point, I can already calculate that this place is going to be well worth the risk, police dog training or not. It’s old, and I love old brick buildings. There’s all kinds of crazy ventilation shit sticking up from the multiple rooftops – the one of my favorite things that once inspired me to record a song about them. And it’s covered in climbing vines – a favorite thing that got left out of the song. It’s a bunch of buildings built in different times, all clumped together. I know the basement will be amazing. I know there will be some kind of subbasement. I know we’ll love relaxing on the roof after hours of exploring.

And I know we’re going to get in. I know this not because Tyler Durden knows this, but because one thing Action Squad has taught me is that when it comes to getting in to a place, where there’s a will, there’s a way. And I know that the potential ways to get into a building go up exponentially with how complicated and sprawling a structure it is. A simple box building is easy to secure. A complex is hard. There are just too many ways that an inventive, experienced and willful group of adventurers will be willing to try, and able to think up. It’s like trying to keep mice out of an old house as winter comes on.

So I knew that this place was fated to be our playground. I just didn’t know how, yet.

When we'd finished checking out the dog-training warning sign, I noticed a small plaque bolted to the brick next to the door – declaring it a historical site, and calling it “Abbott Hospital.” Everything it said was jotted down for later Google research.

We continued around the perimeter, checking for chinks in the armor. And we weren’t having much luck – the Stevens Square neighborhood hasn’t been very pleasant for years, and whoever owned the building had done a good job crackhead-proofing it. Almost too good – when we’d completed our perimeter tour – which even included climbing up on some low rooftops – we still don’t have much to go on. I’m not willing to pry a board off of a window and then break the window behind it to gain access, no matter how tempting the place is.

There was just one potential access point to come back and try by darkness, and it wasn’t one I felt confident about - while I’ve done a little bit of Duke Nukem vent-crawling back at the U of MN and, more recently, in an abandoned malting plant, I’ve never gotten into a building through a vent like this one before. It wasn’t one of the Known Successful Routes. But I’d found a small vent cover that seemed likely to provide access, if I brought along a simple screwdriver to open it up.

So we loaded back in the car and went back to Headquarters, discussing what time the sun would be going down that night.

 

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