Echoes of the Past: Exploring Abandoned Spaces with Blake Pfeil | Outdoors | Hudson Valley | Chronogram Magazine
“What the hell happened here?” High Falls resident Blake Pfeil asks himself as he sits before another vacant space. Pfeil, 36, is the host of "Abandoned: All-American Ruins," a podcast exploring and exposing abandoned places across the United States through storytelling. “I always come back to this question when I enter these abandoned spaces and I don’t think it will ever be answered,” he says. “Abandoned” is rooted in the idea of nostalgia for a time never known or “anemoia.”

Listeners join Pfeil every other week on an immersive and fantastical audio journey through these memento mori, and the question of historical record becomes just as much an uncovering of the American underbelly as it is an uncovering and reflection of his own experience.

The award-winning podcast is the flagship project of the All-American Ruins media consortium. Pfeil, a multi-talented artist decided to put a substantial amount of energy into the audio component because he thought it would enable people to access their imagination as a tool for healing, as it did for him many years ago. “A speaking voice is a direct line of communication. It starts with our breath which is maybe the most vulnerable place we can access,” says Pfeil. Pfeil is an audiomaker, writer, musician and performance artist.

As a child with an active imagination Pfeil was obsessed with old-time radio. It would be this and access to an abandoned dairy farm near his hometown in Colorado Springs that helped him to harness that imagination and at the same time gave Pfeil a foyer into a love of audio. “I learned inside of that space what it meant to have an imagination, create a reality, and to escape from the actual realities of life,” Pfeil says. “It shifted my whole perspective on things. I made friends with ghosts.”

click to enlarge Echoes of the Past: Exploring Abandoned Spaces with Blake Pfeil
Blake Pfeil
An abandoned cement plant in Columbia County.

His active imagination was a direct trauma response to growing up in a deeply conservative family whose regular attendance of the Presbyterian church caused inner turmoil with his deep attraction to men. “Being a young queer person, not knowing what it meant to have feelings for men, and thinking it was wrong, I needed to start inventing my own reality,” he said. It was also during this time the Pfeil’s nuclear family structure was falling apart. “I just could tell that the story we were telling the general public was the opposite of what was actually happening behind closed doors. I've found that this happens a lot.”

Fast forward to 2020 by way of transitioning from adolescence to adulthood, education, sobriety, 2016, and a divorce. Pfeil, like many, struggled with the consequences of being isolated and not knowing what the future held. All-American Ruins started as a way to privately pass the time as the world learned more and more about what the pandemic meant. “It was really hard for me. When we were all forced into this virtual stratosphere, a big part of being able to maintain a healthy level of mental, emotional and spiritual wellness was reactivating my imagination through audio,” said Pfeil.

So Pfeil started exploring and writing about what was happening in his imagination as he was roaming the ruins and he turned it into fantastical audio. Vulnerability is central to “Abandoned” and arguably is the reason for the attention and success it has garnered. “I transformed a feeling of isolation to a feeling of solitude. I was forced to examine many aspects of myself.” This solitude and Pfeil’s background as an audiomaker helps his curiosity, warmth and openness about his own life come through as he allows listeners to deeply connect with his experiences, like seeking a diagnosis for a mental illness he’d been living with his whole life, pathways to sobriety (sober for over a decade!), and sharing about his divorce. On the back of his neck, Pfeil has the word ‘grace’ tattooed. It’s a reminder to go easy on himself and others. “We are gonna mess up, we are gonna make mistakes. If we can have some grace for ourselves, it makes it so much more to be a human.”

click to enlarge Echoes of the Past: Exploring Abandoned Spaces with Blake Pfeil
Julie Novak
Blake Pfeil at the site of an abandoned resort in Sullivan County.

Outside of All American Ruins, Pfeil has a day job working as the operations and programs Manager for the TMI Project, a storytelling nonprofit in Kingston. Somehow Pfeil also finds time to engage in traveling, wandering, and feeding his cinephilia—Matilda is a favorite flick. He also hosts a “The Pfeil File” on Radio Kingston (Wednesdays from 9-11pm on 107.9FM) and also co-founded the band Macabre Americana, a folk-fusion band. Pfeil continues to work on himself through therapy and other pathways to his sobriety, and as someone who’s “always open to optimism,” is committed to showing compassion whenever he can. “We are all going through something and that’s something that I have been so grateful to explore through the kooky lens of abandoned buildings.”

Season 3 of the “Abandoned” podcast comes out this fall and listeners can hear new bonus episodes, Seasons 1 and 2, film, photography and more at blakepfeil.com.

Abigail Gierke

Abby enjoys being outside, meeting new people, and exploring the layers of their lived lives. Finding a story where it's not obvious is of particular interest. Listen here or reach out to tell yours.
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