Letchworth Village: Chairs

I've seen the hashtag #theresalways a chair on Instagram and it's mostly used with photos from abandoned places where there does always seem to be a chair. This is something I noticed in my real life explorations way before I noticed the hashtag, but that's a nice perk of the Internet—finding out that other people notice the same weird things that you do.

Even before I started creeping on actual abandoned buildings I was noticing the chair phenomenon in once-abandoned places that I took sanctioned tours of, like the Ellis Island Hospital complex or the Ohio State Reformatory. Obviously these places are well-maintained for tours but I'm not sure to what degree that they are "decorated." But once I started actually exploring truly abandoned spaces, I noticed that even when a place has been nearly stripped clean of things, you can still find at least one chair. 

The buildings we explored in Letchworth Village were full of stuff, and so I wasn't surprised to find a ton of chairs. It makes sense that institutions or hospitals would naturally be full of chairs, and maybe they remain because they don't have any obvious value to people that typically strip abandoned buildings of things like scrap metals.

However (like Kings Park) there were some really great vintage chairs left at Letchworth that my mom likes to chastise me for not dragging home—even if the moldy, asbestos-covered fabric chairs are long past their functional prime. I do think it's a shame that the plastic and metal institutional varieties are just left to rust or are covered in uninspired graffiti, but with all the uncertainty that comes with exploring abandoned places, it's somehow comforting to know that there is always a chair.