An abandoned garment-making plant near Green Mount Cemetery has become a lure to a band of adventurers who crave the thrill of its shadows and dank spaces.
Calling themselves urban explorers, these uninvited, but tenacious visitors slip into to the century-old Lebow Brothers plant on Oliver Street, where once-expensive suits and topcoats still hang on racks - left by factory workers more than two decades ago.
The explorers snap photographs and post them on the Internet, where they find a wide audience. "After a good day, I've had 100,000 views of the photos on my page on Flickr," said Chris Folsom, 31, an information technology worker from Catonsville who spends his days off exploring crumbling urban artifacts.
The Lebow site is classic gritty Baltimore- boarded, dilapidated, with weedy trees growing near the roof. It's also got a great story, having been padlocked with an unsold inventory of expensive menswear in 1984. Payroll records, rotary-dial phones, old computers and calendars remain suspended in a kind of industrial twilight.
Harry Lebow, grandson of the clothing firm's founder, said his family and several hundred employees worked in the building making expensive suits that were carried at Sak's, Nieman-Marcus and Barney's.
"We made a lot of cashmere sport coats and it is a shame they were left in the building for so long," said Lebow.
Lebow recalled that when his family operated the clothing business, the building was owned by local philanthropist Zanvyl Krieger. He sold the property in the mid-1980s to a corporation controlled by Abraham Zion of New York.
City officials have been pressuring the Zion family to fix up the building. The property was scheduled to be sold at auction in March, but the sale was called off.
"It is the hope of my client to develop it in a wonderful way," said Baltimore attorney Paul Mark Sandler, who represents the owners. "It will take time and capital."
Meanwhile, the old factory remains a Disneyland for urban explorers who relish the risk of visiting and photographing abandoned factories, schools and hospitals.
"The Lebow factory is one of the scariest places," said Chris Piergalline, 29, another explorer. "You have no idea who's taking up residence in it. The rain has poured in and the solid wood floor looks like waves of the ocean. You do get a bit of a rush from it - a random sense of excitement. It's the darkness, the strange noises."
