Resplendent Decay: A Few Shots of Oil City

Oil City, my birthplace.  I wish you could see just how steep this street is.  My grandmother used to fret that a car was going to come sliding down this steep street in the winter and come barreling straight into the front window of our house...

There's a lot of abandoned property here--though not as much as you find in the towns of the Monongahela Valley.  A lot of houses in Oil City just LOOK abandoned; they've actually got people living in them.  And they're big.  And they have a lot of nonsensical doors opening onto porch roofs.  Upstairs exterior doors to nowhere are pretty much a feature in most of these homes.  Our house has a door in the bathroom that opens onto a three-story drop.

When we were kids, the round tower on the top of this house served as a kind of landmark.  It used to be so lovingly maintained... Now everything looks like an abode of witches, or vampires, or goblins.

 The dereliction is such a waste, such a betrayal.  But who can maintain a house like this in the local economy?  I think this place went from private home to funeral home and now back to a private home--or maybe an apartment building.  It'd be weird to live in a house that used to be a funeral home...