Across the street from Adrian Ledezma, the swanky Trinity Green apartment complex loomed large. To its right was the rusted circa-1920s Atlas Metal Works building, which is destined for demolition.
But where Ledezma stood, under the tattered canopy of a nondescript, crumbling building in West Dallas’s Fabrication Yard, there was no movement. Inside, graffiti coated the walls. The floor was covered with debris. On this Saturday afternoon in June, it was 95 degrees outside, but Ledezma was not deterred.
“I feel kind of a rush every time I step in an abandoned building,” said Ledezma, 30. “You just feel at peace, at least with me. Because as the world outside evolves, the inside of the building remains the same.”
This was one of the tamer abandoned buildings in which Ledezma had found himself. As an urban explorer, or “urbexer,” Ledezma makes it his mission to seek out forsaken properties in Dallas and beyond. He documents them before they decay further, or, in many cases, get torn down to make room for new developments.
He takes photos and videos of these neglected structures — he’s found his way inside everything from a vacant mansion to a theme park to a funeral home — to post on his Abandoned Dallas social media accounts. He’s crawled through drainage tunnels at the Baker Hotel in Mineral Wells and climbed atop a silo near Trinity Groves. He’s found sheet music strewn across the (now-renovated) Pearl C. Anderson Middle School and oxygen tanks in a decrepit nursing home.
Urban exploring is a hobby for thrill-seekers worldwide, but what drew Ledezma was the architectural flair of the buildings of yesteryear. He fawns over details like clawfoot bathtubs, penny-tiling and ornate baseboard moldings. “It’s almost like a free museum for me,” said Ledezma, who lives in Frisco.
It’s finding the buildings that’s the tricky part. When Ledezma started exploring more than a decade ago, he used public urban explorer forums, but “once one person gets a hold of a location, that translates to a hundred more people,” said Ledezma. “Then these buildings start getting vandalized severely.”
Now, when Ledezma stumbles across a new place, he adds the coordinates to private, crowdsourced Google maps. Sharing addresses publicly is considered a major transgression. “Not everyone’s gonna follow the urban exploration etiquette, which is take pictures, leave footprints,” said Ledezma.
Even with this network, those in search of the decrepit face a unique challenge in a fast-growing city like Dallas: “Sometimes I can’t get enough content from Dallas itself, because there’s really not much left,” said Ledezma. Recently, he’s traveled to places like Alabama and Oklahoma to find new spots.
“Once a building goes abandoned, the highest bidder bids on the land and it’s gone real fast,” he said. “Whatever buildings remain are just trashed. It’s almost not even worth documenting.”
The lack of locales for urban explorers is a side effect of the Dallas development boom, said Norman Alston, an architect and the president of the board for Preservation Dallas. “It’s getting a little harder and harder to find buildings that someone’s not ready to do something with,” he said. “If you own a piece of property in Dallas, you’re sitting on a lot of money.”
Take, for example, the opulent, French Chateau-style home at 10323 Inwood Road. After the $4.7 million mansion was mangled by the EF-3 tornado in 2019, it became a destination for local explorers. Ledezma got there early — there was still a TV set up in the bedroom, and a thick glass table with a wrought iron base in what was once perhaps a living room.
When he came back a week later, the table was shattered and the TV was busted. He reveals the address only because the circa-1999 mansion has since been demolished. “It’s just grass now,” he said.
More recently, Ledezma ventured to a stretch of homes in the Bishop Arts District. The site of the midcentury properties — most of which, too, are now rubble — will soon be a major apartment project. David Preziosi, the longtime executive director of Preservation Dallas and now the executive director of the Texas Historical Foundation, believes that when structures are torn down, “it’s more than just losing the building,” he said. “You’re losing the history of that site and how it developed and how it was part of the history of Dallas.”
Ledezma has had brushes with law enforcement for trespassing but has never been arrested. Cops are usually more lenient, he said, when they realize he is doing no harm to the property. There are also other dangers to contend with, like squatters or asbestos that could cling to his clothes. “I kind of just assume the risk and hopefully everything turns out for the best,” he said.
The risk that goes into the making of the photos and videos is part of the appeal, said Ledezma. “I think everybody kind of just wants to see what nobody else sees,” he said. Kathryn Holliday, an architectural historian and the founding director of the David Dillon Center for Texas Architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington, said it can be exciting to feel as though you’re on a “forbidden journey with the photographer.”
“The photography is really powerful because it asks us what story that building can tell,” she said. “Whether it’s a story that is about to end, and everything that’s happened in the building is now about to come to a halt, or if the story is that this building is somehow going to be renewed, or returned to life.”
The stories, however, go beyond the buildings themselves. In one abandoned McKinney house, Ledezma found a fridge stocked with vintage Dr Pepper cans and a closet full of clothes. “That’s half the fun of exploring stuff,“ he said. “You kind of put a picture together of what this person may have been or what they may have done in their life.”
Though Ledezma’s chronicle of disrepair mainly attracts morbid curiosity, it can also lead to action. Last year, Ledezma posted a video exploring the Oak Cliff United Methodist Church, a designated Dallas historical landmark that closed in 2015. Just months later, the Dallas Landmark Commission voted unanimously to certify a finding of “demolition by neglect,” meaning that the owners could be fined unless they brought the deteriorating building up to code.
“If I can save one building, or bring awareness to where something happens to save the building,” Ledezma said, “then I feel like I’ve kind of done my job.”
