My Favorite Abandoned Place

I love abandoned places.  The intrigue, the mystery, the remnants of souls and life.  Abandoned buildings are okay, in fact there's an abandoned elementary school near my house that I'm dying to explore, but that's for another day...

The Walled City of Kowloon.  The kind of place one would only expect to find in the movies.  It's often described as lawless - simply titillating, no?

No, there was not actually a wall around it, but the perimeter was so marked it looked like there was.  The history of this city is incredibly interesting, and I highly suggest you look into it here at wikipedia.  I'm not going to get into all of it here, because let's face it, I'm lazy.  After China decided it wanted this city back, about 2,000 squatters fled to Kowloon for Chinese protection, and once they got there it was their city and they weren't going anywhere (well... until 1994 when the city was demolished).  The city became so densly populated that many parts of it never saw sunlight at all.

"The City's dozens of alleyways were often only 1–2 m (3.3–6.6 ft) wide, and had poor lighting and drainage. An informal network of staircases and passageways also formed on upper levels, which was so extensive that one could travel north to south through the entire City without ever touching solid ground. Construction in the City went unregulated, and most of the roughly 350 buildings were built with poor foundations and few or no utilities. Because apartments were so small—about 60% were 23 m² (250 sq ft)—space was maximized with wider upper floors, caged balconies, and rooftop additions. Roofs in the City were full of television antennas, clotheslines, water tanks, and garbage, and could be crossed using a series of ladders"

(source: wikipedia)

  This sunlit alley was a pretty rare thing:

Yep, that was a sunlit alley.  You mean you couldn't tell?

Anyhoo, without any authority governing Kowloon, crime was rampant!  Most of the residents lived there in peace though and tried to improve the living conditions there, and factories and other businesses did pretty well.  Did you ever see Batman Begins?  The narrows was inspired by Kowloon, as have many other books and movies have been.  Really, you should check it out.

As I mentioned before, the city was demolished in 1994.  The area where the city once stood is now a park and historical district.