I’ve shot this before but liked the sky this time. This is the century-old Central State Hospital dairy barn in Pineville, Louisiana. It’s many decades disused but is now the focus of a renewal effort as a historic local structure.
Canon T8i / 850D, Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5 DC Macro
ART 1.20, Affinity Photo 2.1
And just to destroy any residual sense of romance associated with this shot… 
Here’s the Google Street View imagery of the area:
That’s a four-lane divided highway between me and the subject. I was standing by the Stop sign in the grass just right of the foreground road. I had to shoot between cars…
Very nice! Its just as important what you don’t include as what you do, and you’ve found a really nice balance here.
Thanks!
I’m told years ago there was a tunnel under the original highway so the cattle could come down and use a pasture across the road. That old pasture became a lake decades ago and the dairy closed, both at least as far back as the middle 1960s, maybe earlier.
Nice and picturesque for a state hospital! The one near me had a ominous victorian flair, more reminiscent of the Addams Family house…
an overhead shot can be seen here, doesnt have enough foreboding looks from this angle.
This state hospital is closed, or at least almost closed. It ceased its original purpose decades ago, but a few programs of various sorts utilized some of the buildings for a number of years. The last of those are being moved to new facilities right now and demolition has started on the run-down, mostly dilapidated buildings.
IMO the grounds have inherent potential in terms of ‘lay of the land’, but who knows what’ll happen. I saw a 2 year-old Facebook post of a plan presentation from an SFC urban planning firm, but I don’t know if that went forward or what. I’m sure whatever is done, there won’t be enough open greenspace inlcuded. Every square meter will be ‘developed’ for revenue purposes, most likely.
Here’s an earlier shot (before the roof was replaced) from the same viewpoint, but under “darker light”.
Despite being taken after 7 PM in September, I sweated far more taking this shot than shooting today (July 6) around midday. It was unbelievably humid that evening!
It is interesting in the way that different societies consider age.
Many years ago, the company I worked for was trying to get some work from an American company. Their CEO came to see us, along with his wife, and we had dinner at our CEO’s house.
The Americans complemented their host on their house, and the wife said that they had a house so old, that she thought it might be haunted. On enquiring, it turned out that it had been built in 1931. What she hadn’t realised was that the house we were in was early Victorian, built almost a century before her house.
It goes the other way too, we had a Japanese girl staying with us as part of an exchange. One day I took her to York Minster, she was entranced because, she said, “We don’t have buildings this old in Japan”. This was something I hadn’t realised, though I thought of Japan as an ancient culture.
(What she liked best in York though, was Betty’s Tea Room, what I like best in the National Centre for Early Music, when I say I like 80s music, I mean the 1580s)
Yeah, we “Americans” (and I somewhat include Canada with the US) don’t really know old like Europeans. We literally are the new world. But your old stuff seems to fit into the landscape much better than our newer old stuff. A moss-covered hut or dry stone wall just has far more authenticity than a rusty “old” chain link fence… 
My elder daughter used to have an American boyfriend. In the course of one conversation, I pointed out that the house we then lived in was built before America declared independence…
My house was built about 1980 but given our climate – and other factors – parts of it almost look like they were built in the 18th century… Rain, humidity and near-tropical (if admittedly not year-round) heat can wreak havoc on structures.
