I’ve always had a love for the city. Cities are places where so much has been built, by so many different people, and at so many different times, that no one person can possibly know all of it. I take comfort in that. I don’t ever want to know everything, because I want to always be trying to know everything. In other words, I don’t want to run out of new discoveries. I hope Cleveland always has new secrets for me to find.

As a kid, I poked around in drain tunnels, wandered every inch of train tracks I could find, and spent evenings walking through alleys and under bridges. Always drawn to the lesser-known areas. Around 2004 I started exploring abandoned buildings.

After a couple of years of exploring abandoned buildings all over Northeast Ohio, I started the website Great Lakes Urban-Ex with a handful of friends. I tried to maintain the site but it was a lot of work and I eventually abandoned the project. I held onto the domain until just a couple of years ago when I finally forgot to renew it and ultimately ended up losing it.

In 2018 I published my first book, Abandoned Cleveland. It had always been a dream of mine to publish a book. I feel incredibly fortunate to have been given that opportunity. I never imagined that wandering around abandoned buildings would have led to so much.

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