The School for the Special Salmon Part I

Because of my work I got involved with a building project. It was about demolishing an old school and some adjacent tree houses and replacing them with modern high rise blocks of flats with a nice view over a river.

The school was from the 1960’s, a very unspectacular building with a red brick facade. It was called Lohipadon koulu (School of the Salmon Dam) and it had been a school for children with special needs. A waterpipe had burst in the basement, and the school was no longer fit for use.

I didn’t even photograph the school’s exterior. Thanks to Wikimedia Commons, we know what the place looked like.

A new school building had already been built across town, and the kids had moved out. Planning for the new houses wasn’t quite ready yet, so the construction company owning the school had rented out parts of it to different companies and organizations. They had all been evicted except for a boxing club which still used the gymnasium as their training premises.

The construction company gave me a tour on the premises related to my job. When it was over, I told that I photographed abandoned buildings as a hobby, and asked if I could come again later.

“Oh, sure. Just keep the keys, we don’t really need them. Come anytime you like and spend as much time as you like.”

I was so amazed, that I didn’t even manage to catch an exterior shot of the building.

I entered the school through the first door I saw and this was what I found. I thought this looked promising.

The first few rooms were extremely messy, broken up and contained all kinds of stuff. I thought it was a good sign, but it pretty soon turned out, this school was very much different.

I next stumbled in a small room left untouched since the school moved away. This had probably belonged to a teacher. Either someone teaching a very specific subject or someone doing student councelling.

Right next to the entrance I used was a strange room. It looked either like a storage or the school’s woodworking class, but there was no trace of any machinery left. Even the door frames had been taken away, which resulted in probably the most dangerous emergency exit I had ever seen in an abandoned building.

If the previous school was full of surprises, this one really didn’t disappoint either. Could someone please explain, what a Nokia sign is doing in a former school?

This room definitely had something to do with woodworking. Such a modern tv here.

Oh dear. Their coffee must have gotten quite cold by this time.

So school was out, and they left in a hurry. The machinery has been taken away, the rest has been left behind.

I may not be a specialist in designing buildings, but I think this one was particularly badly designed. It was really a maze and full of dark corridors like this. The walls are pastel coloured as is the floor, but I don’t think they’re original.

Like always someone had gotten the urge to write on the blackboards.

Here you can perhaps catch a glimpse on what the exterior was like. A part of the school had just one floor, some wings had two storeys.

All in all I think this was a rather boring school. It offered very little to photograph but did contain some big surprises, the first of which was the Nokia sign. And I’ll get to the second one right at the start of the next post.

You May Look But You May Not Enter

The summer was over, leaves fell and darkness poured to Finland. I returned to my studies and the days were now so short, that you really couldn’t consider any photography realated adventures at all. Not that I had anything to photograph. My friends hadn’t tipped me about any new abandoned placess, and the ones I found myself were inaccessible.

For one reason or another as a part of my strange adventures I ended up becoming a group leader for a theatre party’s tour to Eastern Finland, an area, which I rarely visited. All in all the visit was close to a catastrophe: there was drama among the group members, who barely spoke with each other by the time the show was about to start. Two performers fell ill, nobody had signed the bills for the accomondation and meals, and nobody in the party was authorized to do that. Oh, and we also had to guard one of the performers so that the person would not behave too unprofessionally.

Apart from that it was a nice getaway from my hectic everyday life. We stayed at a very beautiful old building, which had been a municipal home for elderly people and was now rented out for tourists. We got there late in the evening, had dinner and while the sauna was getting warm, our host wanted to take us for an evening walk.

“There’s something nearby you might like”, he said, and led us into darkness. We walked some way along the highway before turning to a dark alley surrounded by trees.

At the end of the alley we found this. A long two-storey building, which, our local guide told us, was a former mental asylum. Built in the 50’s it was closed down the previous year, and was looking for new owners.

The blinds were shut and the place was clearly empty. But there was still electricity running, signs were warning about camera surveillance, the doors and windows were intact and it was too dark to explore an abandoned building. Besides it was late and we had a performance the following day.

These photos and a third one with our group at the main door were the only ones I took this time. But a thought crossed my mind: Maybe I should visit Eastern Finland more often.

The Quiet School by the Market Square Part XI

There was a third staircase in the back of the wing which housed the three gymnasiums. This was far smaller and more difficult to access than the two main staircases, but we used this one to go down to ground floor, as we hadn’t been here yet.

We left the stairs at the first floor gymnasium, where the wall bars were again partly dismantled. On the table was a strange device and a note telling, that they are measuring the amount of radon gas in the air.

Next to the gymnasium was a small room with yet more sports equipment.

Down in the basement we found toilets. Someone has practiced german on the toilet stall wall. That one almost says “Shit, my tank is broken”. Almost.

The basement housed the schools woodworking class. It was rather empty.

There were still some glue and paint left from the last lesson.

There was cleaning equipment in the closet, but the pupils really didn’t bother to clean up after painting their assignments.

Instead they painted the walls here, too.

There was a small and worn out back door at the end of the small staircase we used to descend the building.

Below the gymnasiums was a small apartment, which had probably originally been the caretaker’s. It was common to build a caretakers aparment to schools back then, as it was very common for the caretaker to live in the school building. My primary school caretaker still lived at our school in the late 90’s before he retired. His successor didn’t move in and the apartment got a new use.

Nobody has lived here in ages, either. It looks rather like an office – perhaps that of the school curator or nurse. Some items also hint that this one has been in student union use.

The apartment really wasn’t that big. But they weren’t in the 1930’s.

The kitchen is no longer there. This is what the hints of the student union times are: games and a Coca Cola lamp.

The apartment had a kitchen / living room and one very small bedroom. A box from the woodworking class with paint and stuff has ended up here.

The apartment had a second entrance with a place for coats and a closet with food. Could someone explain what this thing with pickled cucumber is, as this is only the third house I have thoroughly explored and the second one to feature cans of this stuff?

The ground floor lobby was smaller and darker than the others. Maybe because the entrance took space from the big glass windows that the other floors had.

One more room in the basement. This one was most definitely used by the student union, as there were couches and games. Those old wooden tv sets were still common in schools in the early 2000’s. And classes didn’t have their own tv sets. When the time came to watch a movie about once in a semester, the teacher got a tv and rolled it to the classroom in a large cupboard with wheels. When that happened, we always knew something special was to come.

One final climb up the stairs…

…and we were back where we started from on the ground floor. All in all the visit took several hours and by the end of it it was quite difficult to breathe.

So what happened with this building? The part on the left housing the gymnasiums along with the middle part housing the lobbies and the two first columns of windows on the right housing the main staircase and some small classrooms, were preserved and renovated. The awful Minerit coating was removed and the school was plastered and painted white like it originally was.

The gymnasiums are still in use as sports facilities, and an annex which houses the municipal swimming pool was built to the old building. It starts right at the wall and covers the area where this photo was taken.

The rest of the building on the right side of the picture was demolished about a year after our visit and replaced with a block of flats, which doesn’t fit there at all. And so the story of the once so graceful landmark of the city came to a partial end.

You can view all the photos from my visit to the school in the gallery.

The Quiet School by the Market Square Part X

Here’s another collecion of pointless sentences together.

“Rescue my guinea pig! Please”

“Yeah, Yo Man”

The biggest sentence on the blackboard is Swedish, and says that you can’t eat that much, while the old sign begs for silence.

In addition to the collection of birds featured in an earlier post, the school had a collection of eggs. But which one came first, the egg or the chicken?

This is yet another of the plain crazy sights in this school. A caravan of birds led by a duck, a skull and a turtle. One poor birdie has even lost its head.

This bird has been left behind – or is flying ahead towards freedom. Who knows.

The glass box now contains glass jars.

A close up on the poor, headless bird.

And one on the skull. Google tells me that was a horse. Do you agree?

A box on the floor contained eggs, which had survived whatever had happened here.

A jar on the window board contained something really gross and slimy. I mean what is that? And what purposes could it have possibly served in a school?

Quack!

On the fifth floor we found yet another small lobby built in the 50’s expansion, and another shower room.

The lobby also had a storage room for sports equipment.

So this is as high as it gets. We now start our journey down the stairs. The basement’s still left to explore. That I’ll leave to the final post from this building. Then you will also learn the fate of the place.

The Quiet School by the Market Square Part IX

The journey through the school has been really interesting, and it has gotten more and more interesting the higher the stairs we have climbed. The lower floors were just full of stockpiled stuff or empty classrooms, but the upper ones are in a much more authentic shape. It’s almost as if schoolwork had stopped just yesterday.

Welcome to the chemistry class, where most of the stuff has been loaded out on tables and then left behind.

The floor was littered with tiny metallic balls. An experiment on magnetism gone wrong?

The backroom of the chemistry class contained more old stuff. The classroom really has been well equipped – in the 50’s.

I think I did say that nobody had broken into this school. No doors or windows were broken, but the bottle here suggests, that someone had found a way in. Or then it was used in teaching chemistry. I can still recall us being told to count in high school, how much pure alcohol a bottle of vodka contained. “This is all you need to learn on this course”, the teacher said. And yes, she asked us to calculate it again in the test.

Now playing: Alice Cooper – Poison.

The backroom was shared by the chemistry class and auditorium, which had also something to do with chemistry and / or physics lessons.

This one doesn’t need translation. And hasn’t gotten too old.

The label says H2SO4, which is sulfuric acid. It should be transparent, but this bottle seems contaminated – or the label is lying.

This beautiful origami seems a little misplaced here.

What is this? And how do you use it?

Another decorated trashcan. This one says: “The traffic ministry informs, that you may get lost in this bin”.

The horror of every high school pupil: the language studio. The equipment has been dismantled. They surely did not try to use these antiquities in another school?

So this is where they have been listening the decades old listening exams in Swedish we found in the teachers’ common room.

Another piece of wall art made by graduates from 1993. The ones who have drawn this in their late teens are now almost 50 years old.

Another spectacular mural.

These were once a mainstay of Finnish schools. Now they have become a rarity, and people are willing to pay huge sums for them.

The Quiet School by the Market Square Part VIII

In this class we can see the grim reality of the school’s digitalization. It’s no wonder there were so many floppy discs in the school, as the computers were this old. I think that one might still run Windows 3.1. It looks like someone’s been training to write with their toes.

In the neighbouring class the blackboard has been torn down just for the fun of it. It hasn’t landed very far.

This classroom had once served as a literature class. This poster is about war literature, and although it’s not said here, the quotes are from the Unknown Soldier.

A Lord of the Rings themed mural really was suitable for the literature class.

In this classroom we found these bright orange chairs. Once a very common sight in Finnish schools, they have disappeared since my childhood, as schools have been renovated and rebuilt.

Another interesting formation of school desks.

The amount of maps left here suggests, that this once was a geography class.

The back of the classroom featured newspaper cuttings from news items concerning the Israel-Palestine conflict, EU peacekeeping operations in Sudan and women’s rights in Africa. On top of it all was a school photo from 1973.

We’ve reached the top floor. The high school classes were here. The doors are still labeled with names of subjects, although I don’t think they were current information at the very end.

I have never really seen a high school or higher education building without an image of Che Guevara made by the students. His legend really lives on.

Another futuristic mural by the students. Nobody cared for the tables in this classroom, yet all the chairs had been taken away.

One more boring classroom, where “Jyrki don’t push” is written on the wall. Finns will understand this, others may not. After this room things started getting even more intersting.

The Quiet School by the Market Square Part VII

The fourth floor corridor was pretty much like all the previous ones.

The long metal bars have been used to hang large charts to the front of the class. I hope the teacher was away, when they came down.

The blackboard had been removed, but was still in the class. A strange display had been built on top of school desks. I wonder, what that scene is all about.

The shock of the school closing was too much for this poor chair, who fainted.

One alphabet was not enough for this classroom. They needed two.

Another thing the pupils had been given the chance to leave their mark on, were the dustbins. Someone has given his or her schoolmates the chance to cheat in the German verb test with this one.

Welcome to the former arts class. This classroom and its backroom were largely empty, but did contain some memories from better days.

I’m not sure, how this was done. I’m not sure even if it was complete. But it certainly was a good fit in this strange, empty gallery room.

The backroom was far more interesting. Not all the coffee machines in this school had found their way to the first room. My question is, how much coffee did they actually drink in this place?

These look healthy. The transparent liquid was used to preserve the surface of coal and chalk paintings, the brown bottle is nitric acid used at least in metal etching. The bottles are very old, as the company manufacturing the transparent liquids changed name after a takeover in 1992.

The backroom housed another set of slides. I don’t know if this is from the art lesson or the sex education lesson.

Can you spot the differences?

Why these were in the art class was another mystery to me. Perhaps they were used as materials for assignments, as there were not many current laws left in those anymore in 2005.

Imagine finding this bakery box and expecting a treat – and finding broken and disfigured ceramic statues.

The Quiet School by the Market Square Part VI

Up, up we go again

And so we are reaching floor four out of five.

Is it just me, or is the pupil art getting more spectacular the higher up we get?

A wall full of aphorisms. Lovely.

The expansion built in the 50’s featured two more floors on top of the two original gymnasiums. They contained a third gymnasium and two new lobbies. And this set of stairs, which was pretty airy.

The rules for using the school’s premises.

The stairs next to the gymnasium door led to this strange low room with a staircase.

And the staircase led to the showers.

The floor is original from the 50’s, I guess. The bathroom of my former apartment had a similar one.

The window in the shower room. They had the best views in town. This really should have been a sauna.

The third gymnasium. Here, too, someone has dismantled a part of the wall bars.

The door at the back of the hall led to this small storage space.

We could have easily taken a volleyball match. There were two balls and a net left.

A view back. The light coming from the windows beautifully aligns with the door. The small door on the left also leads to the showers.

Apparently a circus school has trained here. The instructions tell them not to leave money or other valuables in the locker room, as there have been thieves.

So much for the third gymnasium. In the next post we’ll explore the fourth floor a bit more.

The Quiet School by the Market Square Part V

After the teachers’ common room we found some more wall art. Wonder why unicorns and rainbows always go together.

This one looked like another classroom, but judging by the furniture it was rather a student union’s hangaround place.

This paper might explain, why the school was abandoned. It’s a wellbeing survey, and the pupil tells, she’s not enjoying the school. She says that the school building is in a bad shape and asks for the lessons to be held in the lower floors of the building, as the air conditioning is so bad on the upper floors. She also wants more parties.

Her arguments were pretty valid. We started our exploration trip before noon, when the sun was still going up. We reached the upper floors in the early afternoon. It was hot and it was difficult to breathe. A three hour stay in the building gave me a cough, an aching throat and thick, bitter slime started filling my sinuses. The building wasn’t healthy.

This floor contained classrooms on the left side of the corridor and offices on the right side.

Someone had reduced the school’s computers to scrap.

In this classroom they had apparently taught programming.

The high school principal’s presige has taken a hit.

This is one of the craziest installations I have ever seen in an abandoned building. A swan has been placed on a chair in a cleaning closet. Someone has written “lower class pupils smell” on the floor. And the sheet of paper on the door reads as follows:

“The cleaning department of the town of Hamina has decided to standardize the color coding of cleaning cloths.

Yellow cloth: toilet seats
Red cloth or brush: wash basins of showers and toilets
Blue cloth: tables and other layers
Green cloth: wash basins and layers in kitchen.”

Dear sir. I accidentally used the green cloth in the toilet. So sorry. Please do not fire me. I mean, what the hell?

Someone has put in the effort to pile all but one of the school tables in the back of the classroom.

I just don’t get the logic. Why put everything there?

This painting was made two years before the school closed. It seems that the pupils were allowed to paint the walls long before they decided to close the school down.

Another lobby, another bird collection, another gymnasium. In the next post we’ll explore the top floors.

The Quiet School by the Market Square Part IV

Next we found the teachers’ common room. Here they had removed almost nothing. All the stuff left behind was still there.

At this point we realized, that even a high school had been in the same building. The bunch of papers on the floor includes application instructions to universities, the Finnish army’s newspaper, a telephone catalogue and loads of other stuff.

I bet that the people who had left this mess behind had spent their decade-long careers complaining to pupils about the mess inside their school desks.

The teachers’ lockers. On the building history report of the school I read, that those had been original and built in the 30’s. They had lasted all these years.

Modern electronics never reached this school. They were still using overhead projectors and apparently slide projectors, too. These were from the art history lesson.

Those tapes look interesting. But what on earth was Microsoft Works? Everybody knows it doesn’t work 😉

Oh, it wasn’t that interesting at all. A 20 part series on historical Finnish authors. Poor pupils.

Now this surely was pure torture for everyone. All the matriculation examination listening exams on Swedish from 1985 to 1989. And some language teachers actually used these still in the mid 2000’s, when I was in high school.

Schools really didn’t have advanced technology in mid 2000’s. I remember our high school biology class getting the first video projector in 2007, and this school closed down in 2005. Floppy disks and cassettes were pretty outdated, though, even by my standards.

It seems some of the teachers didn’t even bother to pick up their mail in a while.

Now this is beautiful, sad and nostalgic at the same time. The remnants of the last coffee the teachers had back in 2005.

At the back of the teachers’ common room we return to normal. Most of the things have been taken away, some have just randomly been left.

In the back of the room were also the blueprints to the brand new school where the pupils and teachers were due to move.

Hamina is a strong city of Finnish baseball. But I never knew the school had their own baseball kits, too. When we had to play this, our own t-shirts were good enough.