The Fall of Halcyon Hall 
When
buildings are new, when properties are bustling with fanfare and
people, they seem so strong. Their walls appear built to withstand
decades, to endure generations. Walls that, you're certain, will
always be there. But this is fallacy, there is no escaping time. As
soon as a property falls vacant you quickly see how delicate they
were all along. No matter how masterfully crafted a place may be, it
cannot care for itself, and in the end buildings are helpless toward
the workings of nature and the wear of seasons. In this way, man-made
structures are not unlike the people who build them. Perhaps this is
why so many look upon forlorn buildings with sympathy or pity. They
see themselves in the ruins - The cycle of life played out in
shattered glass and disintegrated plaster. A corporeal declaration
that everything is temporary.
Rested upon its knoll, as it has
for well over a century now, Halcyon Hall is equal parts elegance and
frailty. Composed of wood and stone, intricate carvings, cracked and
broken, still adorn corners and peaks which stand in various stages
of collapse. The long pronounced lines of its architecture have
become discolored and bowed, a majority of the porch has caved in
from years of rain and snow, and the old courtyard has overgrown
into a small forest. To view the crumbling facade from the nearby
roadway is to be immediately struck with a sense of awe, as well as a
melancholy pining to have known in better times. A building that
breaks one's heart to simply gaze upon it.
Opened in
1890 as a resort, this grand hall served only a brief time in its
original role. By 1900 it was in use as an upper-class finishing
school for young women, and with its new purpose came a new moniker,
one it would hold until its final days – The Bennett School.
Students here were the daughters of industrialists, bankers, and
other members of society whose wealth permitted such an education. It
was here that young women would learn fine arts and languages,
horseback riding, and be schooled in all the lessons of societal
behavior and etiquette that would make them successful in their roles
as the wives of future industrialists and bankers.As time progressed, such an institution became increasingly viewed as archaic, and Bennett came to align itself more and more with that of a traditional college, but remained exclusively a girls' school. Those who knew the campus during these years often muse upon the building as if it were, itself, a being. That the warmth they felt when recalling their youth was not solely brought about by the friends and classmates who surrounded them, but from the building itself.
Throughout the 1960s and 70s, as the feminist movement grew increasingly mainstream, girls' schools as a whole found themselves regarded, by some, to be symbols of sexism. This shift in culture found a greater number of women attending unisex colleges with every passing year. During the early 1970s Bennett made a last-ditch effort to modernize by expanding to a four-year college, but the increased curriculum and new constructions needed for such ventures only worked to compound Bennett's financial problems, and by 1978 the school was forced to close its doors.
We
have documented Bennett for over a decade now, and with every year we've watched as the old place succumb more and more to
decay. Of all the locations we have filmed, few experiences have
influenced us as deeply as watching the sun rise within the old
school. Sitting upon frozen floorboards, enveloped in gloom, awaiting
the gradual rotation of the earth. It occurs gradually at first, the
utter blackness slowly evaporating to a murky blueish-purple. We
could finally see, but the world around us was still very pale, and
very cold. After some time this too changed, and a deep orange
crawled across the landscape. Warm, golden light reached into the
darkness, entering through the windows and numerous holes in the
walls. Though Halcyon Hall closed long ago, it is as alive then as it
ever was.
The rooms within the weathered building are littered
with reminders of the past, memories held tightly by a building that
sees few visitors anymore. Room numbers still present on the peeling
doors, claw-foot bathtubs sunken into buckled washroom floors, and all
around, beyond the fringe of human hearing, the sounds of girls
conversing in the halls between lectures.
Bennett, though
wrinkled and frail from many years of life, retains a glow of youth
just below the surface. Walking these halls today, you come to
understand that some places keep time separately from the rest of the
world. Friends still gather here, though in shared memories. No
matter how buckled and twisted they have come to be, the walls of the
Bennett School are is still where bonds were forged, lessons were
learned, and lives began. Existence may be temporary, but like a
stone cast into a vast lake, it creates ripples. Ripples that are felt
long after the stone has sunken to the lake floor. The very fibers of
Bennett's timber emit these sentiments and cast them in long shadows
across the dust-covered floors. The aroma of lavender and the sound
of a softly played piano is almost expected, even amidst the damp and
dimly lit halls which have so gently replaced them.


A light snow begins to fall.
The standing pillars of the courtyard porch number fewer and fewer every year.
Looking out from a frost-lined window, awaiting the rising sun.
This massive collapse gutted out much of the grand foyer, seen during better times in the historical image above.
A modern addition added later in the life of the campus. The most notable room within being the school auditorium.