Albuquerque’s Abandoned Train Depot

1st street in Barelas, South of Downtown.

There’s a huddle of smallish buildings of mysterious function, interesting in a sort of urban rabbit-hole kind of way, but they’re nothing next to the cathedrals of the old traincar shops.

The whole joint has clearly been appropriated (at some indeterminate time between 1917 and 2045) by hoodlums and thrillseeking youth – high quality graffiti and low quality beer bottles being the chief evidence of such. No trains live there anymore, but the freight yard attached is still active, so watch out for bulls. Reports have it that they’ve basically accepted the hooligan pilgrims who visit the grounds: say you’re there for a school project and they might just let you stay. I got a friend that they gave a hard time to for a while – but they were there at night with drug and spraypaint, so you know.

Lock your bike to something and crawl under any one of the well-used gap in the chain-link to give your senses of aesthetics and generational identity the kind of proper cosmic fucking that your lovers never seem to manage.

It’s the light, really. It’s exactly what you might get if you shoved Nothing Gold Can Stay through a derelict shooting gallery and expanded by a factor of ten thousand things. It’s gold from the sunset, green from an impossible number of tinted panes, and dusty from Albuquerque’s hard baked soul.

An engaging but suspicious cat lives there, in an unexplained heap of archaic computer hardware and office furniture, broken apart by curious adventurers, dust mites, and whatever makes kipple kipple.

Apart from the cat and yourself, you’ll find yourself in the company of hundreds of pigeons, little coos echoing through so much space that the brain wonders for what besides beauty the thing could possibly have been designed. Way too much space and silence to imagine anything actually happening in there.

The floors are paved with bricks made for some special reason from wood – or perhaps they are just bricks so tired and abandoned that they have slowly become wood, buckling vein-like along meaningless lines.

Go there, and restore your faith in life to create senseless punkrock perfection.