Tour Report: Rest Home "Wasted Years"

From the abandoned chapel, it was only a few hundred meters to the abandoned retirement home, so it was only a short drive. There was a public parking lot right across the street, so that's where we parked the car and got our gear together for a longer exploration. The chapel was small, but being a former military facility, the rest home was a pretty big place, so we took a little more stuff with us.

There was a boom gate at the main driveway, but it was open. There were no fences and no signs that the access was prohibited, which is probably the reason that this place appears to be frequently visited by lots of different people - but I'll get to that.

Toeppi from "Fotodokumentationen" and I didn't really have a plan where to go first, so we just went from one building to the next and checked if it was worthwhile to explore. We found the kitchen and a dining hall, a water bunker for fighting fires, a heating plant - and of course, a lot of rooms where the senior citizens lived.

Especially the residential buildings offered a few memorable sights: Right behind the main doors, we found beautiful tile mosaics which depicted cities in the area that the individual houses were named after. These houses looked like large bungalows and had probably been built sometime in the 1970s. The flat roofs predestined these buildings for water damage - and the water damage took care of the decay. It was beautiful!

As I've mentioned, the area was far from being fenced off, and since it was a beautiful sunny Sunday, there were a lot of people around. We saw other urbexers, graffiti sprayers "working" on the walls of the heating plant, people walking their dogs or just taking a stroll and a lot of families with small children - the place must be like an adventure playground for kids... One of the families had decided to make the theater their playground. This theater is one of the most beautiful rooms in the entire place, but they didn't think to move; the children kept running around, so we decided to go on without taking photos there and check out the small indoor pool before leaving for our final location.

That summer, I returned together with my wife and managed to check out the rooms that Toeppi and I had missed this time - we even found the air-raid shelter in the basement, but that's a story for another blog post :)

To find out about the history of this place and to check out all the photos, click the button below.