Never Recycle a Building
In most fictional works, it's normal for an abandoned place to be left undisturbed until the protagonists need to utilize it. Sure, there might be a layer of dust everywhere, but the building can sit around for decades without anyone claiming it, renovating it, or outright demolishing it. If The Voice instructs the heroes to find an Abandoned Warehouse from fifty years ago, they can rest easy knowing that it'll still be there—just break the lock, clear out the cobwebs, and continue advancing the plot.
May be justified if the location is haunted.
How much of this is Truth in Television varies widely. In highly-populated areas with thriving economies, this will almost never occur; if an Abandoned Hospital is sitting unused for any period of time, someone's going to exploit the local abandoned property laws to claim the land and build something,[1] even if that "something" is just a parking lot. On the other hand, structures in depressed economic areas, remote locations, or disaster zones can lay untouched for years, simply because no one is around (or wants to be around) to care. But even in places where buildings do stand vacant for long periods of time, they're rarely truly vacant. Squatters, trespassers, and homeless people will take up residence for a time, usually being driven off at semi-regular intervals by the local authorities. And there's always stray dogs/cats, raccoons, and other wild animals.
A notable variation is having an abandoned room inside a frequently-used building. This one tends to be more fanciful than factual, as any reasonable custodial staff would have access to blueprints and schematics showing where everything is. For a room to remain undisturbed for decades would normally require someone (or something...) actively protecting it.
Note that this trope refers to abandoned areas that are untouched for long periods of time. Areas that are allowed to decay but are still frequented by the homeless, criminals, or local kids don't count.
Abandoned Warehouse, Abandoned Hospital, Haunted House, and Ghost City are popular subjects for this trope. See also Abandoned Area, Ragnarok Proofing, In Working Order, and The Constant.
Examples of Never Recycle a Building include:
Comic Books
- Figures in Marv Wolfman's 1980's Teen Titans story "Who Is Donna Troy?" Apparently a burnt-out building sat in that condition for about 16 years, and Donna's childhood doll was still in a room of said burnt-out building and not carried off for nesting material. And this is a key clue used by team detective Robin to track down Donna's origins, though Donna's super-intelligent big sister apparently never did.
Films -- Animation
- Carl and Ellie's house in Pixar's Up. It appears to have been abandoned for quite some time when Carl and Ellie first meet inside as children, and it remains that way up until they buy and refurbish it after their marriage. Egregious because World War Two (and it's accompanying dual housing shortages—one during the war, and one after) happened somewhere in between there.
- In The Princess and the Frog, Tiana's father sets his sights on an abandoned mill as the place to set up the restaurant he dreams of starting. Not only was the mill empty for some time before he announces this, it remains empty for another ten years or so, while Tiana grows up and saves the money so she can buy the mill for the same purpose after her father dies. One of the things that kicks off the plot is that as soon as she tells the men selling the mill that she's able to afford it, she's informed that someone else just happened to outbid her on it. Given how the men are jerks who suggest that Tiana couldn't handle running a restaurant because she's black, Fanon has taken to the notion that Tiana was simply lied to about the competition.
Films -- Live Action
- Disney's Tron: Legacy begins when Sam Flynn, the son of Kevin Flynn, is spurred to investigate his father's disappearance decades ago. Sam's search takes him to Flynn's abandoned arcade, which has been sitting intact for the last 25 years on the outskirts of town.
- It makes sense that the building is still owned by the Flynn family, or at least Encomm, who have kept the taxes and utilities up to date (the power is still connected, for example). And the arcade was obviously shut down and dust-proofed in an orderly way. Why no-one has broken into it & stolen all the valuable arcade cabinets is another question.
- It's implied by Expanded Universe material that Alan has been paying for the upkeep for the same reason he kept the pager. Of course, this brings up the Fridge Logic of why he didn't investigate the place and find the improvised laser lab himself.
- It makes sense that the building is still owned by the Flynn family, or at least Encomm, who have kept the taxes and utilities up to date (the power is still connected, for example). And the arcade was obviously shut down and dust-proofed in an orderly way. Why no-one has broken into it & stolen all the valuable arcade cabinets is another question.
- In It's a Wonderful Life George & Mary Bailey move into an old abandoned mansion which until then had been used for the local teens to throw rocks at.
- Probably because it's a major deathtrap, the abandoned firehouse in Ghostbusters remains conveniently available until Venkman et al need a place of business.
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Spengler: I think this building should be condemned. There's serious metal fatigue in all the load-bearing members, the wiring is substandard, it's completely inadequate for our power needs, and the neighborhood is like a demilitarized zone. |
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- Inverted in The Shadow (1994 film version): Big Bad Shiwan Khan uses his Mind Control powers to hide an entire skyscraper mega-hotel in plain sight by convincing everyone that it's a semi-active construction site.
- Slasher Flick Hell Night takes it place in a manor which has been abandoned for 12 years.
- The Victorian mansion in Mousehunt. Justified as the mouse drove out everyone who tried to live in the house. Exactly how long is that mouse's life-span?
- The Abandoned Hospital in Accepted has just been sitting around for who knows how long, before the kids decide to turn it into a fake college.
- It hasn't been abandoned, but the video-rental store that holds a vital clue in Men in Black II is still there after twenty-five years, even though most people moved on to DVDs years ago.
- The Blackwell Hotel in See no Evil. Justified because it was just a hobby to its owners and after it almost burned to the ground, they lost interest in it.
- In Double Impact, after officially teaming up, Chad and Alex, as well as their 'Uncle' Frank, set up in an abandoned villa in Hong Kong.
Literature
- At the end of Arthur Machen's The Three Imposters (1895) the protagonists stumble upon a mansion that's been abandoned since at least the eighteenth century. It's within walking distance of London and completely accessible to passers-by yet is still untouched except for the natural processes of decay slowly corroding the furniture, tapestries, and other unlooted decor.
- After the Full Moon Garage in The Dresden Files is abandoned due to the lycanthrope biker gang that owned it being slaughtered, it is left relatively untouched... because other bad guys like its convenient location and run-down appearance for their own dirty work. Harry finds himself revisiting it.
- The Riddle House in Harry Potter is abandoned for the most part due to Voldemort killing the original owners, who were his own family. A few families try to live there but find the place creepy, so the current owner only keeps it for "tax reasons".
- In one of the early NUMA Series novels, the heroes figure out how a massive drug smuggling operation is being run and speculate as to where the drug handoff will be made. One character invokes this trope. Another immediately shoots it down, pointing out that abandoned warehouses are hard to come by in major port cities.
Live Action TV
- The Hyperion Hotel has been sitting abandoned quite a long time until the title character rents it in Angel. Of course, the demon in residence there might have had something to do with it.
- In the fourth season Connor also moves into what appears to be an abandoned natural history museum, full of dust and stuffed wildlife, complete with working electricity.
- In Fringe, the Mad Scientist returns to his lab in the basement of a Harvard building after 17 years and just has to dust the place down before getting back to work; not only has the space been left unused, but all the equipment is still there. Considering what Walter and Bell get up to down there, that might have been the smartest thing to do.
- Another example of Never Recycle a Room can be found in the fifth season of the new Doctor Who series. In this case, of course, there really is something protecting the room.
- Gotham City in the Adam West version of Batman had some serious problems with abandoned factories and warehouses. It's almost like they wanted them to be taken over by criminals.
- Nash Bridges and his elite police unit have usually claimed a building that the city of San Francisco had lying around unused. In the fourth season, this was a former floating cannery that was later converted to a nightclub and later seized in a drug raid. It proves to be a decent place to set up shop, being spacious and having a place for everything they need. The only downside is a tendency to play "Disco Inferno" with no reason or explanation.
- The characters in Highlander always find a empty warehouse nearby when they need to fight. While this is usually plausible, there is at least one case when they manage to find one close to the Seine in the center of Paris, in an area where it would need TARDIS-like features to fit.
Video Games
- SimCity 2000 takes this trope and makes it go as fast as lightning. The moment tenants move out of a building, it is instantaneously transformed into a dirty, run-down ghetto shack, regardless of what it was before. Sometimes a new building will appear on that site, but usually not.
- This depends all on how well one plays the game. The building remaining as run-down ghetto is a direct indication of lack of skill at managing one's city.
- In Constructor and its Spiritual Sequel Mob Rule, if a building is left without a tenant for a long time, it will be settled... by a six-foot cockroach. Needless to say, the neighbors are a little concerned about bad influence on their children (you know those roaches).
- Par for the course in the Suikoden series. In almost every game (3 and 4 being the exceptions), the hero's army takes over such a structure to serve as their headquarters. The second game even has the hero's army claim an entire Ghost Town.
Web Comics
- Kesandru House from Sluggy Freelance; justified since it's infested with ghosts. Luckily, our heroes are used to dealing with worse.
Western Animation
- Code Lyoko has the kids going to an abandoned factory every episode. There's never any presence of demolition crews, and the plot only revolves around saving the factory from destruction when it's some attack from XANA.
- At least in the animated series. The non-canon spin-off comics have one story with a demolition crew about to raze the Factory, before being thwarted by the kids.
- There is also the Hermitage, a posh house in the woods that is left abandoned for 10 years. However, there are some hints of squatting (vandalism, tags on the wall...) and since the first time Team Lyoko visited it XANA was playing poltergeist, maybe this chased any squatter earlier and gave it a Haunted House reputation.
- The Factory is actually a fairly close reproduction of an abandoned Renault factory on Ile Seguin in the Seine River, in Boulogne-Billancourt outside Paris. It was shut down in 1992 and demolished by 2005; the island currently awaits the construction of some sort of cultural project, probably a large art museum. (The show's factory mainly differs in color scheme; the original factory was mostly white on the outside, while the show's is more beige.)
- Parodied and averted in The Simpsons, where Homer tries to hide in an Abandoned Warehouse only to find it's now no longer abandoned.
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Homer: Doh! Stupid revived economy! |
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Real Life
- As linked in the description, there's the entire city of Pripyat, Ukraine, site of the famous Chernobyl incident. Hadn't been touched between May 2, 1986 and the Battle of Chernobyl on February 24, 2022... and abandoned again on March 31, 2022. Of course, there were some illegal excursions.
- Abandoned room example: The Crypt of Civilization, a giant airtight time capsule at Oglethorpe University, was forgotten about for thirty years after its sealing in 1940. As it's not supposed to be opened for another 6000 years, somebody'd parked some furniture in front of the door, hiding it from notice for decades.
- Urban Exploration is a phenomenon springing up all over the world where such abandoned structures are explored and documented by private persons. It turns out that abandoned buildings may very well be there, but they're not gonna be untouched for a long time. Squatters, vandals, paintballers and graffiti artists (sometimes all of them at the same time) will see to that.
- That part is subverted by some Abandoned Hospitals, where equipment that was left behind decades ago—wheelchairs, bed frames, even iron lungs (read: pickup-truck-bed-sized loads of scrap metal, on casters for your convenience) have remained in place for decades.
- A notable variation is the city of Ordos, in China's Kangbashi District. It's a "new" city, built by local officials beginning in 2004 to show a healthy annual GDP, but is was almost completely abandoned until it was completed in 2016; by 2017, over 300,000 people lived there.
- Many ghost towns (at least the ones that aren't tourist attractions) are this.
- In Mexico, when a drug dealer is arrested, all property in his name is "secured" until it can be proven it wasn't made with dirty money. Such is the case of one discotheque named "frankie oh", property of Benjamín Arellano Felix, which has been abandoned for years; at one point the entrances were blocked to stop people from going inside. In the later years publicity has been hung outside the please to prettify it a bit. More details (in Spanish) here. [dead link]
- In Evansville Indiana, a couple discovered that an office building that they sought to buy had an entire second story that had been sealed off for over 70 years. Even with much of the furnishings removed it still contained several fireplace mantels, a stack of old cancelled checks dated between June and December 1930 and and other tidbits related to the hardware company that made use of the offices in the second story.
- Sunnyland, an Abandoned Hospital in Tallahassee, Florida. It wasn't recycled for decades due to the expense of demolishing a building filled with asbestos.
- ↑ unless the cost of cleanup and demolition are exorbitant.