It’s not often that you can choose from dozens of cafes situated high above a crowded urban plaza, gazing out at the landscape from a table on the balcony, all for the price of a coffee. In Ho Chi Minh City, such views come cheap thanks to a highly unusual reuse project transforming a 1960s apartment complex into a sort of vertical food court. Set along the city’s pedestrian street, 42 Nguyen Hue finds a new purpose for a formerly abandoned concrete building that’s no longer well suited for habitation, inviting passersby to come up and explore.

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After passing through the ground-floor motorbike parking lot, you’ll be charged VND 3,000 (about thirteen U.S. cents) to use the elevator, which is refundable if you make a purchase at any of the places above. Then, navigate floor after floor of cafes, boutiques and jewelry shops, taking a moment to look outside each time. There’s Vietnamese cuisine, of course, but also sushi, Hawaiian poke and more.

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In the ‘60s, the building was a hip new place for important people to live, and its residents included government officials like the first secretary of the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington, according to Asia Life Magazine. People who can recall living or growing up there are often amused to learn what their old apartments have become. The interior layouts are much the same as they used to be, but the interiors are often divided between several businesses, with the living rooms offering prime spots with balcony access.

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The particular mix of cafes and shops at 42 Nguyen Hue is meant to appeal to millennials, and if Instagram is any indication, it’s working. The apartments are all over the #nguyenhue and #nguyenhuestreet tags. Given its condition, particularly compared to the gleaming buildings adjacent to it, it’s hard to say how much longer this experiment will last, but it’s a cool idea that could easily transfer to other vacant buildings in big, busy cities. You can find a guide to the building at Vietnam Coracle.

Top image via Vietnam Tourism Board – Facebook

The dark architectural equivalent of ‘Faces of Meth,’ these compiled Google Street View images of Detroit from 2009 through 2013 paint a poignant portrait of decay in the city. Entitled ‘GooBing Detroit,‘ a tumblr blog uses Google Street View Time Machine to follow the fast transformation of houses from cute and cheerful suburban residences to overgrown vacant lots.

Much has been said about the decline of a once-great city, and the seemingly diminishing chances of a comeback. The city’s 78,000+ ‘feral houses‘ are the stuff of legend, seeming to revert back to a wild state the way domesticated animals tend to do when left to their own devices.

The Street View images are often astonishing in the rapid transition in a span of just a few short years. A stretch of houses may have cars parked in the driveways, toys on the lawn and other signs of life all around in the first image, while by the third or fourth they’re barely discernible among the overgrowth.

While these images really drive home how much Detroit has lost over the last three decades, many residents aren’t ready to give up hope, despite the fact that the city’s population has declined from a peak of 1.8 million to just 700,000. There are indeed areas of the city that still thrive, but the question of an overall plan (either to break the city into manageable pieces or reinvigorate it as a whole) remains an open one.

A languishing, yellowed church in Washington D.C. underwent a dramatic transformation in every shade of the rainbow, with street artist HENSE using it like a massive urban canvas. The church is in a downtrodden area with the potential to become the city’s next arts district, and this project represents the hope for a more colorful future.

Dramatic and abstract, the project turns the former Friendship Baptist Church at 700 Delaware Avenue into an oversized mural just across the street from an abandoned lot set to become the site of a new art museum. Atlanta-based Alex ‘HENSE’ Brewer was commissioned to cover the church with paint.

The project not only brightens the neighborhood and gives it a sense of a new identity, it also draws attention to a structure that has been abandoned and overlooked for many years. Like many other abandoned building art projects, 700 Delaware Ave forces people to acknowledge urban blight in the hopes of encouraging action.

“Taking an existing building like the church and painting the entire thing re-contextualizes it and makes it a sculptural object,” HENSE told Design Boom. “We really wanted to turn the church into a three-dimensional piece of artwork. With projects like this one, we really try to use the existing architecture as inspiration for the direction of the painting.”

See more photos at Design Boom.

These castle-like structures, skeletal high-rises and rusting remains of the golden age of industry are monuments to themselves, still standing despite decades of neglect. Formerly factories, offices, corporate headquarters and industrial facilities, these 7 commercial and industrial sites contain clues to their former purposes among all the rubble, overgrown greenery, peeling paint and other effects of abandonment.

Abandoned High-Rises and Factories of Detroit, Michigan

(images via: bob jagendorf, meeshypants, nitram242, davescaglione, joguldi 1 + 2)

When it comes to Detroit, how can you choose just one standout abandonment? The city is, in and of itself, a jaw-dropping wonder of architectural decay. Once it lost its identity as a manufacturing mecca, Detroit also lost a large number of its residents, leaving block after block abandoned, with few signs of life in between. Once the fourth-largest city in the United States, Detroit is now filled with towering structures that have been left as they were when last used, often full of the ephemera of life. These include a number of high-rises – the most notable being Michigan Grand Terminal, pictured above with an overgrown lawn – and burned-out factories.

In 1950, Detroit had a population of nearly two million; today, while similar cities have grown exponentially, this one is down to less than 900,000. The fact that the city has become something of an urban Wild West doesn’t exactly encourage new residents to purchase decrepit properties and return them to their former glory. The number of abandoned buildings standing in the city currently numbers around 70,000.

Bethlehem Steel Factory, Pennsylvania

(images via: bob jagendorf, a.strakey, dandeluca, the seafarer, dave scaglione)

Once the second-largest steel producer in the United States, Bethlehem Steel began work on a large facility in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in the 1860s that was at the forefront of manufacturing innovation at the time. Its towering facilities made it a symbol of the industrialized future of America. During World Wars I and II, it was a major supplier of armor plate to the U.S. Armed Forces, making components of weapons like large-caliber guns. But by the 1990s, America’s steel industry began to decline, and companies like this could no longer compete with cheap foreign labor.

When Bethlehem Steel closed its local operations, it laid out a plan for its 163-acre site for cultural, recreational, educational, entertainment and retail development, to reduce economic impacts on a city that had long relied on steel manufacturing for prosperity. However, the company went out of business and the land was sold to a developer that has turned it into a casino. Ironically, the casino had difficulty coming up with the 16,000 tons of steel needed to build its new $600 million complex, so it only finished one building. Some of Bethlehem Steel’s old manufacturing structures were demolished, but furnaces and gas blowing engine house still stand.

Hasard Cheratte Abandoned Coal Mine, Belgium

(images via: wikimedia commons, intermayer 1 + 2)

One of the most popular abandoned sites in Europe among urban explorers, the Hasard Cheratte Coal Mine in Belgium looks a bit like a crumbling castle. The facility dates to the 1860s, and was formerly one of many such mines in the coal basin of Liege. Make your way inside and you’ll find the hulking remains of industrial equipment and heavy mining machinery and lots of long, dark brick-lined passageways. Abandoned since 1977 and now a protected heritage site, the complex still contains such small items as books and work gloves. The largest ‘castle tower’ sits over the deepest mine shaft at the facility, which plunges a mind-boggling 1,574 feet into the ground. See photos of the interior at 28 Days Later.

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7 Abandoned Wonders Of Commercial Industrial Architecture

70 nautical miles off the coast of Key West in Florida is a series of seven islands set among a graveyard of over 200 ships, crowned with a massive 19th century fortress that lay abandoned for nearly a century. The Dry Tortugas once hosted Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon and an influx of marauding pirates; today it’s a bird and wildlife sanctuary and a national park.

(top image via: nps.gov; above images via: ricsae 1, 2, 3)

In 1513, Ponce de Leon became the first European to discover the island, naming it ‘Tortugas’ for the many green, hawksbill, leatherback and loggerhead turtles he found there. He and many pirates after him relied on the turtles for meat and eggs. Between the 1600s and the 1800s, hundreds of ships wrecked on the surrounding reefs and shoals, and word ‘Dry’ was added to the islands’ name on maps to warn mariners of the lack of fresh water.

(images via: vladeb 1, 2, 3)

Construction began on the 45-foot-high, hexagonal Fort Jefferson on Garden Key in the late 1840s when U.S. Army strategists became concerned about the security of shipping lanes in the Gulf of Mexico, and it was still unfinished 30 years later. It was briefly used as a prison for Union deserters in the Civil War, but was besieged in later decades by yellow fever, hurricane damage and the fact that its cannons had become obsolete. It was permanently abandoned in 1907.

(images via: evragasa, bruce tuten 1 + 2)

Fort Jefferson and the rest of the 64,700-acre Dry Tortugas were officially established as a national park in 1992. Fort Jefferson remains the largest all-masonry fort in the United States. While restoration efforts have helped preserve it, the forces of nature and time continue to take their toll. The islands can be accessed by a three-hour boat ride from Key West, or a 45-minute plane ride.