PDP #247: Gardiner of Ghosts

There's something profoundly disturbing about an empty city. They're centers of civilization, home to thousands or millions of people, anchors of our way of life - if one just stops and goes silent, it's the best clue yet that something is seriously, seriously wrong. A subset of that is the abandoned and empty urban highway. If there'd been some disaster, you would think that the highway would be clogged with the shells of broken cars that didn't quite make it - but if the city and the road are entirely empty...

When I took this photo, the Gardiner Expressway was closed further west for reconstruction work. It's one of the very few times I can remember seeing the Gardiner closed off - fifty years after it crashed through into downtown, plenty of people don't like it but there's nevertheless the question of where all its traffic would go if it was gone. I didn't realize until later that this entire photo is dead - no cars, no people, no birds. Nothing.

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