Notes on the empty pool at the Belmar, 1998
A closed hotel in Muskegon, a photograph nobody took, and the quiet feeling that you have been here already — in a dream you cannot quite finish.
I spent two nights last winter photographing an empty indoor pool at a closed Belmar Inn outside Muskegon, and I still can't say why. The fluorescents were on. The water had been drained maybe a decade earlier. My camera made no useful pictures — the light was too even, too flat, too honest — but I kept the room key in my coat pocket for months, like a receipt for a purchase I hadn't made yet.
What draws people to these places, I think, is not nostalgia but its inverse: the sense that a space is waiting for a memory that never arrived. The carpet's pink-violet ran up the walls, bleached by tube-light. A single vending machine hummed at chartreuse. Someone had stacked six plastic chairs by the shallow end.
Places that were designed for people, shown without them
The internet found a name for this before we did — liminal, mostly, though it never quite fit. The word means threshold, but a threshold implies a next room. What's uncanny about a drained hotel pool at 3 a.m. is that there isn't one. The lights stay on for nobody. The tile keeps its grout. You are, briefly, the only variable in a room that no longer expects visitors.