Alberta Tenements - Cleveland, OH

Though small, this apartment building, built in 1920, is perhaps one of my personal favorites in the Cleveland area. It's cramped rooms and incredibly narrow hallways are like those of old tenement houses in New York, where poor immigrants were forced to live.

After climbing into a second floor window to get in, one of the first things you notice is how much the floor gives under your feet. We first went up a floor to the third floor where conditions were even worse, so we decided to play it safe and just head straight for the basement. The basement was just like the rest of the floors, a long narrow hallway with three apartments on either side. I cant imagine what it must have been like to live down there. We walked around for a little while, checking out the different rooms. Some of them still had furniture in them. There were lots of random things laying about, like a single boxing glove in the first floor hallway.

We would have liked to have explored a little more and maybe tried to find a way onto the roof but the floors seemed as though they were going to collapse with every step we took.