Hold the hot wax and spare the soap, these abandoned car washes have blow-dried their last vehicle and will no longer thank you for coming again.

Scentless In San Mateo

(images via: phillipalden/abandonedplaces/LiVEJOURNAL)

Hillsdale may not be what it used to be but this little slice of suburbia in San Mateo, California still boasts the 120-store Hillsdale Shopping Center and the convenient Hillsdale Caltrain Station. Perhaps the popularity of the latter has caused a drop in private auto ownership, thereby reducing business at the former Hillsdale Car Wash to an unsustainable level.

(image via: phillipalden/abandonedplaces/LiVEJOURNAL)

As photo-documented by Phillip T. Alden, the Hillsdale Car Wash appears to have been relatively recently abandoned and most of its machinery and signage is intact, if a little worse for wear. OK, maybe more than a little. One imagines the car-owners of Hillsdale will now have to search far and wide for a car wash that offers custom interior fragrances such as Summer Breeze, New Car, Baby Powder, and Jasmine.

Dry Down Under

(images via: Ryan Smith)

That’s not a car wash, THIS is a car wash and if any place NEEDS a car wash it’s Australia, what with all that red dust flying about. Flickr user Ryan Smith (RS 1990) captured this long-abandoned 1988 Kleindienst Euro-Combi car wash in Salisbury, a northern suburb of Adelaide, South Australia. As might be expected in one of the more arid areas of OZ, the car wash is more dusty than rusty. Sorry Mad Max, you’ll have to take your filthy Falcon XB Pursuit Special somewhere else.

Abandon All Soap

(image via: Detroit Liger)

Praise the Lord and pass the hot wax! Credit Flickr user Detroit Liger (Robert Monaghan) with this hauntingly beautiful image of a former Detroit car wash reborn (no pun intended) as a community church, then abandoned once more.

(images via: Detroit Liger and Houses Of God)

Located on on Mack Avenue two blocks east of Detroit’s historic Indian Village neighborhood, the “Gospel Hands Car Wash” has been shuttered so long it’s not certain whether it functioned first as a car wash and then as a church, or operated as a curious combination of both. Pimp my ride? No thanks, but how ’bout baptizing my Buick?

Cubs Club

(image via: I Hate Clark Street!)

It isn’t easy being a Cubs fan, and living within shouting distance of Wrigley Field ain’t no bowl of cherries neither. A few privileged car-owners have found a sheltered oasis just off Clark Street, however, as this long-abandoned Chicago car wash now provides a precious few parking spaces conveniently close to The Friendly Confines.

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Brushed Off 12 Dried Out Abandoned Car Washes

The childhood home of artist Ian Strange has literally landed right in front of the Art Gallery of South Australia as if it were picked up by a tornado and plunked there, Wizard of Oz style. The striking matte black structure is a detailed recreation of the 1920s suburban Australian home Strange grew up in, down to the scrolled ornamentation on the porch and a spigot clinging to one exterior wall.

Installed for the 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, the installation makes an intentional reference to Dorothy’s Kansas home and the jarring visual of it crashing in a place where it doesn’t belong.

This visual is a nod to both the continued intrusion of Western pop culture into Australia, and the disconnected nature of suburbia, a recurring theme in Strange’s work.

Strange previously explored the suburban house as a cultural icon in his series SUBURBAN, which involved drastically altering homes that were set for demolition and then burning the down, filming the entire process.

Drive-in movie theaters stand for the great American auto-centric suburban dream, though as time goes by fewer and fewer of the outdoor screens remain standing.

Driven Out

(image via: WebUrbanist)

On June 6th, 1933, as many as 400 New Jersey motorists looking to escape the harsh realities of the Great Depression for a while enjoyed Wives Beware, starring Adolphe Menjou, from the comfort of their automobiles. Though the 40 by 50 ft screen at Park-In Theaters in Camden is long gone (it operated for only three years), other relics of the Drive-In Theater Age still stand, if just barely.

The Drive-In Project

(images via: Gadling and Ego-TV)

According to travel photographer Craig Deman, “approximately 90 percent of drive-ins are closed from their peak in the late 1950s.” Deman is somewhat of an expert on the topic, having authored the hauntingly illustrated The Drive-In Project which documents the current state of abandoned drive-in movie theaters from coast to coast.

After The Last Picture Show

(images via: Debra Jane Seltzer, robert e weston jr and Paul A. Valentine)

They say “Life Is Sweet In Texas” but since the Midway Drive-In Theatre in Sweetwater, Texas closed things just haven’t been the same. The 230-car capacity drive-in was opened in the 1950s and like many drive-ins of the era, provided a large playground for kids and an outdoor seating area for families in front of the screen.

(image via: Nicholas Henderson)

The jagged faux mountain range painted in bold Indian red & forest green on the back of the Midway Drive-In Theatre‘s screen make it an easily identified landmark, even from far across the windswept plains of north-central Texas. Flickr user Nicholas Henderson captured the screen-back backdrop’s eerie essence above, looking little the worse for wear, on a bright summer’s day in 2011.

Lake Woe Begone

(images via: Darren Snow and Lowand77)

There’s not much left of Mt. Orab, Ohio’s Lake Drive-In besides its inimitable Fabulous Fifties main sign and the moldering wooden ticket shack. Indeed, the theater’s Happy Days indeed have long since faded though Richie, Potsie, Ralph and the Fonz still likely have fond memories of many a moonlit night… hey Arthur, don’t you think it’s about time you let those guys out of the trunk?

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Trouble Feature 10 Abandoned Drive In Movie Theaters

Hiding in plain sight to provide energy and light! That’s not Toronto Hydro’s motto but it could be – for the better part of a century, the Canadian utility’s policy was to design hundreds of electrical substations so that they would “blend in” with their surrounding neighborhoods. Though many have been decommissioned, many more remain.

Edwardian Electrical Edifices

(image via: John FitzGerald)

Toronto Hydro was established in 1911, the year in which electrical power from the massive new generators at Niagara Falls first lit up Toronto’s downtown streets. It became quickly apparent that (a) a network of substations was required to complete the emerging power grid and (b) Toronto’s citizens were not amenable to having ugly conglomerations of metal, wire and ceramic resistors plunked smack dab in the middle of their neighborhoods.

(images via: BlogTO and John FitzGerald)

Toronto Hydro set up an in-house team of unnamed architects whose purpose was to “clothe” the substations in the fashionable brick, masonry and woodwork of the day. The earliest stations, of which Duncan Station at 29 Nelson Street is the oldest (1910) still standing, were generally larger than homes and aped the size, shape and style of Toronto’s fancier office buildings and industrial warehouses.

(images via: BruceK and JohnnyGEO)

As these structures weren’t actually homes and businesses, sharp-eyed passersby noted a few differences that immediately set the substations apart… like bronzed, weathervane-equipped exhaust vents on the roof of the 2357 Danforth station (circa-1926) and ubiquitous “Keep Out!” warning signs displayed on all of them.

Glengrove Substation: “The Castle”

(images via: PhotoSensitive and BlogTO)

Up until the advent of the Great Depression, most of Toronto Hydro’s substations tended towards the grandiose both in size and style. The Glengrove substation at 2833 Yonge Street (south of Lawrence) opened in 1930 and was the penultimate expression of this philosophy.

(image via: Toronto Star)

Known colloquially as “The Castle”, the ivy-covered sprawling stone complex would look right at home on an English baronial estate. Oak doors, leaded glass windows and rough-cut stone walls all contribute to a real atmosphere of grandeur made even more majestic when night falls and interior lighting switches on automatically.

Stealthy Salt Boxes

(images via: BlogTO and Alice in Search of a City)

Things changed before and after the Second World War when a more subdued design ethos took Toronto Hydro back to its original mission re the substations: blend them in and avoid obtrusiveness. The new “plain jane” look was driven by economic concerns pre-war; then post-war when Toronto’s emerging suburbs began sprouting smaller, simpler “Salt Box” homes designed for the requirements and incomes of returning soldiers. Plain maybe, but note the white picket fence at 640 Millwood in midtown Toronto.

(images via: Toronto Star and TheStar.com)

Ironically, some of these substations have outlived their original neighborhoods and today find themselves standing out like sore thumbs after the surrounding homes have been sold off and knocked down. The sad remnant above stood on the southeast corner of Pharmacy and St. Clair Avenues in east central Toronto for decades until it was finally demolished in late 2010.

(images via: BlogTO and Google Maps)

We can attribute some of the credit for Toronto Hydro’s suburban aesthetic to one Harold Bodwell, a utility employee charged with the task of designing substations for Toronto’s new neighborhoods. Bothwell not only specified the style of the neighborhood substations but also dictated the grounds be landscaped and regularly maintained.

Oil’s Well That Ends…

(image via: Jon Lasiuk)

Things don’t always go as smoothly as Toronto Hydro would like and when rare accidents like the transformer vault fire above occur, the substations’ covers are blown sky high. Watch a video of the “event” here.

(images via: Jon Lasiuk and CityNews Toronto)

“Transformers are actually filled with mineral oil, no longer PCB’s,” explained TFD Division Commander Andrew Kostiuk, “and if it gets hot enough to catch fire it’s quite a spectacular fire.” So much for being good neighbors.

Hiding On Plain Sites

(images via: BLDG Blog)

Toronto artist Robin Collyer was the first to document the phenomenon of Toronto’s urban and suburban camouflaged substations, photographing a number of them in the 1980s. Collyer’s use of soft focus and black & white film creates an aura of timeless mystery around these stealthy structures.

(images via: BlogTO and International Metropolis)

Nearly 300 of these substations were built on residential streets in central and suburban parts of the Greater Toronto Area over a period of nearly a century, and about 85% of them are still in use. Roughly 45 of the substations have been decommissioned for one reason or another and a few have taken on new lives as retail shops – one north Toronto substation is now used by a religious denomination for their meetings others (the example above hails from the city of Windsor) have become small quaint stores.

Modern Electrical Living

(images via: BLDG Blog and CCCA)

One might say Toronto Hydro’s neighborhood substations are a collective working museum of the past century’s architectural styles and trends. It’s a concept easier said than done: the camo cladding has always come second to the main mission of providing uninterrupted electrical service to Toronto’s varied neighborhoods – a very close second, by appearances.

(images via: BlogTO and International Metropolis)

Years and decades pass but Toronto Hydro’s substation designers move with the times, not against them. The past half-century has seen faux-Georgian mansions with gabled windows and triangular plinths above the “door”, 1950s & 1960s ranch style spreads (another example from Windsor shown above) with asymmetrical rooflines, post-and-beam construction and decorative brick screening, and finally post-modernist 1980s styling that eschews brick altogether in favor of organic concrete and glass block accents.

(images via: Toronto Star and Paul Henman)

Other Canadian and American cities (New York City comes to mind) have employed urban camouflage techniques to put neighborhoods over infrastructure but Toronto’s record in both quality, quantity and history is particularly outstanding. Though individually these urban & suburban electrical substations are easily missed, together they represent a surprisingly studied effort by a large, faceless corporation to take into account the sensibilities of their residential customers. Shocking, eh?

The carefully-crafted streets and avenues of the suburban neighborhood rarely strike anyone as artistic, though they do demonstrate a certain orderly attractiveness. The artwork of Ross Racine takes the suburban landscape to a place it’s never before been: the realm of fine art.

(all images via: Ross Racine)

Racine creates fictional suburban layouts, giving them each the kind of detail and symmetry that one expects to see in an actual neighborhood aerial photograph. Lovely little houses with perfectly landscaped yards surround clean, litter-free streets. Each community boasts an appropriately nonsensical suburban-planned-community-sounding name: Goldenwood Shores, Hickoryglen Estates, Sweetwind Junction, Stonywater Cove.

But there are notable differences between the real thing and Racine’s created worlds. While an actual neighborhood may consist of sharply-defined blocks and lazily curving cul-de-sacs, Racine’s communities feature dizzying concentric circles, impossibly jumbled street systems, insane layouts, and roads that lead nowhere.

It seems that the artist has skillfully blended real aerial neighborhood photos with his imaginary renderings of communities, but the truth is so much more impressive. Ross Racine draws all of his works digitally and freehand.

Using no photographs or scanned materials, he creates the types of suburbs he sees in his head. The neatly-lined-up homes and the lush vegetation are all directly from the artist’s mind – though he does take a measure of inspiration from Google Maps and other aerial suburban snapshots.

These idyllic little scenes are a playful examination of the way we plot out our world. The imagery is recognizable to just about everyone who has ever used a computer to look up an address or directions, but it is warped in a fun and rather loving way.

To Racine, the suburb is a type of organism. It is both abstract and deliberate; chaotic and organized; global and local. Like nature, these man-made constructs are fascinating in their complexity. And like aerial pictures of real suburbs, Racine’s fictional neighborhoods manage to be endearing yet removed enough to highlight the over-consumption that defines our modern lives.