When the world ends, our cities will crumble and be reclaimed by nature. At least, that’s the popular image. But you don’t need to wait for the apocalypse to see how things will crumble. You don’t even need to leave civilization—there are plenty of glimpses of the post-apocalyptic world hidden right among us.

10Public School 186

It would be impossible for Manhattan’s Public School 186 to be any more in the middle of civilization. Businesses are open across the street, there isn’t a free parking space in sight, and people stroll by nonchalantly. It’s boarded up, but it’s the trees growing out of the windows which give away the fact that no one has used the building for over 40 years. Inside, piles of rubble and scattered animal corpses complete the look.

The school was opened in 1903 but ran into problems in the early 1970s. Its floor plan didn’t meet fire safety codes and the ground floor doors had to remain open at all times to ensure that children couldn’t be trapped. Those open doors soon led to problems. Criminals robbed parents at knifepoint and a teacher’s aide was raped in a classroom. When fire inspectors found that the fire alarm didn’t work in 1972, the school was marked for closure. It shut down in 1975.

The building was due to be renovated in the 1980s, but the Boys and Girls Club of Harlem that bought it decided to demolish the building and start again. Residents petitioned to save the building, but the owners say that it would be too expensive. While they battle it out, the building continues to look increasingly like a set from I Am Legend.

9North Brother Island

Located just half a kilometer (.3 mi) from Manhattan in New York’s East River is a bird sanctuary known as North Brother Island. In the 1880s, people with infectious diseases were quarantined there at the Riverside Hospital. Its most famous resident was Typhoid Mary, who died on the island in 1938. The island later housed veterans from World War II and was the base of a drug treatment center. In 1964, the last people left and it was closed to the public.

A few people have been let back onto the island between September and March when the birds aren’t nesting. Among the thick vegetation that now covers the island are huge brick buildings, bungalows, and a chapel. One classroom still has dozens of old books scattered across the floor. The buildings are all slowly being hidden by trees and ivy.

Christopher Payne, a photographer who was given permission to visit the island, described it as “what would happen if people left the planet.” He described the atmosphere as a sense of being disconnected from the rest of the world, though it turned out to be impossible to forget how close the rest of New York City was. “I could hear the Mister Softee truck sometimes,” he said.

8Miami Marine Stadium

Naumachia were mock naval battles that took place in flooded coliseums in ancient Rome. Gladiatorial combat is a staple of post-apocalyptic fiction (you can thank Mad Max 3). So if you want to host your own dystopian naumachia, Miami’s Marine Stadium is the perfect venue.

The 6,600 seat arena was opened in the 1960s as a venue for speedboat racing. It was closed in 1992 after Hurricane Andrew and has since become a haven for graffiti artists and freerunners. It’s an imposing, poured-concrete structure. The stadium’s designer said that he had intended to create “a piece of sculpture on the water reflecting on what nature was providing us.”

There’s debate over what to do with the stadium. The Friends of Miami Marine Stadium want to see it cleaned up and returned to use. Others believe it should be left as it is, a monument to the graffiti artists who have adopted it over the decades.

7Box Hill Brickworks

Melbourne’s Box Hill Brickworks adds a steampunk theme to its derelict charm. The brick-making plant was built in 1884 and operated for a century. It was closed in 1988, but its brick chimney still towers over the local landscape.

The real charm is hidden inside. Mazes of walkways hover above masses of rusting machinery. There are even hand-written sales records scattered in an old office. The site is a time capsule of technologies. A tramway and blacksmith’s shop are essentially unchanged from the 1880s.

The world-gone-to-hell atmosphere is completed by the landfill on the same grounds. It looks like a normal grassy field—except for the plumes of flame that occasionally burst from the ground. When methane from the buried waste isn’t exploding by itself, local youngsters have been known to drop matches into sinkholes to trigger blasts underground. This all takes place very close to people—the barbed-wire fence for the brickworks borders a park that is usually full of playing children.

6Bloomingdale Railway

If you’ve ever wondered what urban hiking will be like once the end comes, Chicago’s Bloomgindale Railway will give you a fairly good idea. This three-mile-long abandoned railway is elevated above the busy city. After it was abandoned by Canadian Pacific Railway in 2001, its overgrown tracks became popular as a route for joggers and cyclists. In winter, it also offers the unique experience of cross-country skiing through the middle of a busy city where every street is plowed.

The feel of an unattended city isn’t going to be around for much longer, however. Search for Bloomingdale Railway and half the pictures show a train track being reclaimed by nature. The others are artists’ impressions of the mass restoration project that will soon turn the track into a modern park and walkway. While undoubtedly good for Chicago, those who have come to love the railway over the last decade have said that they expect to be nostalgic for the post-apocalyptic landscape.

5Tower Of David

Centro Financiero Confinanzas is an unfinished skyscraper in Caracas, Venezuela. Construction began in 1990, but a 1994 banking crisis left it incomplete. The 45-story building has a heliport but lacks elevators, utilities, windows, and railings. Since the 1990s, 3,000 squatters have made their home in the unfinished shell. The “Tower of David,” nicknamed after its chief backer who died in 1993, is now the world’s tallest slum.

Motorcycles are used as taxis to carry people up the first 10 floors, and it’s on foot from there to the 28th. No one lives any higher than that, but it is possible to get to the top. There’s makeshift plumbing and electricity in some areas, but it’s the economy that’s sprung up inside that makes it feel like a set from a dystopian movie. Stores, beauty parlors, daycare centers, and even a dentist cater to the residents. Some apartments look cozy, even if the corridors that lead to them are faded and cracked from disuse.

People salvage metal from the higher floors. Others lift weights just feet away from a dizzying drop with no safety rail. Teenagers use the lights from their cellphones to navigate pitch-black stairways. The community has a bad reputation and the people are wary of outsiders. Yet right outside this little world, the surrounding streets look like a typical modern city.

4Insurgentes 300

Mexico City’s Insurgentes 300 is a building that went to war with the forces of nature. While it’s technically still upright, you couldn’t really say it won the fight. It’s nicknamed the “Canada” building for the 30-meter (100 ft) word that once ran down the side in giant letters. From the outside, it looks like a deteriorating shell, but behind the broken glass there are all sorts of professions that put the building to some sort of use. Every type of criminal—from lawyers and accountants to drug dealers and prostitutes—use Insurgentes 300 alongside dance teachers and screen printers.

It was once home to 420 offices, but half of these have since been converted for use as housing. The building has a 10-degree inclination due to structural damage from an earthquake in 1985. The authorities ordered it evacuated, but the occupants declined and have been fighting to have the structure repaired for 30 years. Instead of maintenance, they’ve received only lawsuits as the building slowly decays around them.

3Red Hook Grain Terminal

The closest thing New York City has to a fortress is perhaps The New York Port Authority Grain Terminal in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Its concrete walls are 20 centimeters (8 in) thick, 12 stories high, and sheer. It’s a behemoth that looks perfect for fending off a hoard of zombies. In fact, a rag-tag bunch of survivors is pretty much all the building is missing to complete its post-apocalyptic look.

Inside, it looks like a cross between a factory, a prison, and a temple. It’s eerie from a distance, and in fog it looks downright sinister. Several pieces have collapsed into the river, and others look destined to follow. New York’s grain economy was already on the decline before the building opened in 1922. It shut down in the 1960s and is known as the “Magnificent Mistake.”

The building is extremely popular with urban explorers, though it’s difficult to get to. One explorer says that it requires research, persistence, and creativity, but mostly nerve, “since you don’t know what you’ll find inside or who might stop you before you make it in, and the repercussions that come with that.” Even if you’re not interested in the building, the journey may be worth it purely for the amazing sunset you can watch from one of the many shattered windows.

2The UK’s Cold War Tunnels

England doesn’t have an official second city, but Manchester and Birmingham are the most commonly suggested candidates. That’s perhaps why each of them is home to miles of underground tunnels built during the Cold War. They’re very literally a glimpse of the apocalypse, since that’s exactly what they were built to withstand. They were also built in secret.

The bunkers under Manchester were tunneled by Polish workers who couldn’t speak English so that they wouldn’t be able to tell anyone what they were doing. It once housed several months’ worth of tinned food designed to keep VIPs alive in case of an attack. In Birmingham, many of the entrances to their system remain classified.

1A Lot Of Meatpacking Plants

Founded in 1867, Armour & Company was once one of the United State’s largest meatpacking companies. It fell into decline in the late 20th century, and in its wake it left abandoned plants all over the country. One is a skeletal brick building in Fort Worth, Texas, which was ravaged by fires in the 1970s. Demolition was attempted and there’s a section of wall missing.

It turned out that the building’s steel structure was so strong that it was cheaper to just leave the rest standing. Today, it looks like a prison. Guard towers were added in 2007 to make the plant look like a South American prison for the show Prison Break. The words Penitenciaría Federal De Sona were left above one of the doors.

Another meatpacking plant in Navassa, North Carolina was only open for a few years. Rumors began in the 1920s that the plant’s owner was found hanged in the middle of the factory. The building earned a reputation as haunted. Several people committed suicide there in the 1980s, cementing its supernatural foothold in local folklore.

Yet perhaps the most famous abandoned meatpacking plant is in East St. Louis, Illinois. It’s not far from downtown and has the added bonus of still being filled with old machinery. That includes its once cutting-edge refrigeration system. The plant once employed nearly 5,000 people and became a hotbed of racial tension due its segregated workforce. Since it was closed in 1959, it’s become an infamous beacon for those fascinated with the way the world crumbles.

Alan is tempted to take up urban exploration as it’s the only hobby that’s going to get better should the world end.

Nearly every city on Earth has them—derelict ruins, the cracked shells of concrete titans long vanquished and forgotten but for their towering silhouettes outlined against the setting Sun. Decades-old factories, abandoned train stations reclaimed by nature, even whole islands that once vibrated with the lives and dreams of generations, all cast by the wayside and left to rot.

But sometimes, the entropy of decay gives way to something breathtaking. Whether at the hand of man or by the slow creep of nature’s tenacious grip, some ruins end up in a surreal twilight between ash and phoenix, poised for something greater than anyone could have imagined.

10Kolmanskop

The story of Kolmanskop begins, as so many African tragedies do, with a diamond. In 1908, German settlers were trying to build a railway across the Namib Desert to connect the coast with the Namibian town of Keetmanshoop. One of the workers, Zacharius Lewala, stumbled across a rough diamond in the desert sands, and he brought it to his supervisor. News of the find spread like wildfire across the German colonies, and miners were soon pouring into the desert by the hundreds.

Diamonds on the surface are rare, but legend has it that in Kolmanskop you could walk the desert at night and pick the glittering stones off the sand by moonlight. A makeshift city was built right on the windswept dunes, and at the height of its boom, there were over 1,200 people living in Kolmanskop. Times change, however, and with the combination of dropping diamond prices following World War I and the discovery of more diamonds farther south, Kolmanskop’s popularity dwindled. Miners and their families packed their bags, abandoned their homes, and left the desert.

Less than 50 years after Zacharius Lewala found his diamond, Kolmanskop was a ghost town. But wooden homes in the desert don’t rot. Within a few years, sand had begun to drift into the open windows and doorways of the buildings as the Namib sought to reclaim its own. The entire complex is now a popular tourist destination, with half a century’s worth of dunes piled up inside the residences, ballrooms, theaters, and hospitals.

9Teufelsberg Listening Post

An artificial dome atop an artificial hill from a time of artificial fears, this abandoned Cold War–era radar post outside Berlin, Germany, rises from the forests like a phallic beacon shining its turgid light upon the pages of a confused history. Built in 1963, the listening post was used by the US National Security Agency to allegedly intercept military and diplomatic communications during the Cold War. Records are vague as to the exact nature of the work performed there, and with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991, the place was gutted, and the station was abandoned to the elements.

Perhaps even more interesting than the station itself is the history of the Teufelsberg hill on which it stands. The hill—the highest point in Berlin—is actually a massive heap of the city’s rubble from World War II, all dumped over a Nazi military college that’s still intact somewhere beneath all those tons of debris.

Since the listening station powered down in 1991, the facility has changed hands frequently. Each new buyer begins with an ambitious goal to convert the bulbous radomes into a hotel or resort or museum or what have you, but so far, every plan has fallen through, leaving the odd structures to serve merely as gravestones for the corpse of a past Berlin. The facility is currently off-limits, but trespassers say the view of the city from the top is incredible.

8Boston’s Long Island

Boston’s Long Island doesn’t want to be inhabited. Not to be confused with the similarly named island in New York, this 2.8-kilometer (1.75 mi) stretch of land in the Boston Harbor has been the site of numerous failed projects since its original colonization in the 17th century. Its rocky shores and overgrown hills host a derelict military fort, vacant hospitals, mysterious graves, and a laundry list of alleged government secrets.

The region’s violent history began in 1675, when English settlers shipped hundreds of Native Americans to the islands in the harbor and left them to fend for themselves on the barren rocks over the harsh winter of 1675–1676. Most of them died of starvation. In World War II, Nazi scientists were smuggled onto Long Island by the federal government as part of Operation Paperclip. In fact, the island is believed to be the inspiration for the novel Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane.

Most recently, the island housed a shelter for Boston’s homeless, but that was hurriedly closed down in 2014, leaving rows of empty bunks inside the old tuberculosis ward. Citing safety concerns as the reason for the island’s evacuation, Boston’s Mayor Martin J. Walsh closed down the Long Island Bridge and transported every inhabitant to the mainland, turning the island once again into a ghost town.

7Paris’s Hidden Railroad

In 1841, Paris was just wrapping its head around the idea of rail transport. It had recently finished a massive fortification project that ran around the perimeter of the city, and the military was looking for ways to get troops and supplies from the center of the city out to the strongholds. Strapped for cash, they turned to private companies to foot the bill for the railways, which soon radiated from Paris’s center to the outskirts in a star-shaped pattern.

The result was a mess. Each line was operated by a different company, and nary did any two lines connect. Passengers from the perimeter had to travel into the heart of Paris just to catch a different train at a different station that would take them back out to a different point in the perimeter—sometimes just a short distance from their original departure point.

So Paris decided to create the Petite Ceinture, or “little belt.” This line would form a circle just inside the city’s fortified perimeter and connect the other railways. It was a smashing success, and for nearly 100 years, it served as one of the main transport methods in Paris. Then, in the early 20th century, its rails and stations began to see less and less traffic, until it was practically abandoned by 1934.

In the intervening years, the line has remained nearly untouched. It’s now grown over with moss and ivy, and few Parisians even know it exists. Via tunnels, bridges, and man-made gorges, the Petite Ceinture winds and twists through nearly 32 kilometers (20 mi) of modern-day Paris, a hidden natural belt in the midst of urban sprawl.

6Holland Island

Nearly 400 people once called Holland Island home. Mostly fishermen and their families, the island’s occupants carved a living straight from waters of the Chesapeake Bay for centuries. But eventually, the sea stopped giving and started taking.

What was once an 8-kilometer-long (5 mi) island began to recede as erosion ate into the shoreline. Like many of the islands in the Chesapeake Bay, Holland Island is made mostly of silt and clay rather than rock, making it easy prey for the ceaseless force of wind and waves. The last inhabitants fled in 1922, leaving their homes and churches as bleak monuments to the people who once walked the island. Even those slowly fell into the sea.

All but one, that is.

The last house on Holland Island outlived its brethren by years, tenaciously holding its own on a wispy strip of land that goes completely underwater every high tide. It had help—for 15 years, a retired minister dedicated his life to preserving the two-story Victorian by surrounding it with timber, stones, and sandbags in a futile attempt to hold back the sea. Despite his best efforts, though, this strange landmark finally gave up the ghost and collapsed in 2010.

5Russia’s Tesla Towers

Reliable sources of information about these bizarre structures are few and far between. Located in the middle of a Russian forest, they’ve been dubbed “Russian Tesla towers” by most websites on which they’re featured. The towers are actually Marx generators, built to convert a low-voltage direct current into a high-voltage pulse. Systems similar to these Russian behemoths—although on a much smaller scale—are commonly used today to simulate lightning on industrial equipment.

The Russian generator complex was built by the Soviet Union in the ’70s to test insulation for aircraft. When the Iron Curtain lifted in the early ’90s, the rest of the world got their first glimpse of the hidden testing facility, and it’s been in and out of the public eye ever since. Technically, it’s not abandoned, since periodically over the years it’s been put back into temporary use by private research companies.

4California’s Glass Beach

Near Fort Bragg, California, is a secluded beach awash in the bright colors of emeralds, rubies, turquoise, and diamonds. But these aren’t gemstones littering the sand—they’re bits of polished glass from 100 years of dumping in the area. Starting around 1906, the community of Fort Bragg—along with other cities along the coast—took to dumping their garbage straight into the Pacific. While the paper was churned to mush, and the plastic presumably floated to climes distant and unknown, the glass remained.

It wasn’t until 1967 that Fort Bragg put the pinch on ocean dumping, but the seeds of transformation were already sown. Worked for a century by rolling waves and abrasive sand, the razor shards of glass eventually took on rounded edges and washed back up to shore as iridescent glass pebbles. Although glass isn’t a rarity, there are bona fide historic relics strewn along the beach: After World War II, auto companies switched from glass to plastic for the manufacture of taillights, which makes the odd ruby-colored glass pebble something of a collector’s item. However, Glass Beach is now a part of MacKerricher State Park, so it’s illegal to pocket any of the sea glass.

3Angola’s Ghost City

On an isolated swath of countryside a few miles outside of the capital city of Angola is a modern high-rise ghost town. Nova Cidade de Kilamba—usually shortened to just “Kilamba”—contains 2,800 apartments split between 750 high-rise buildings. It was built to house close to half a million people and comes complete with its own schools and retail section.

And it’s almost completely empty.

The miniature city was financed by a Chinese construction company and went from scrub land to completed project in less than three years. But rather than the influx of residents they probably expected, the only life to be seen in the entire 12,000-acre complex are a few Chinese workers (who live off-site) and a scattering of disoriented animals. According to the BBC, the problem is that Angola’s class structure consists of “the very poor and the very rich,” so there’s nobody in the market for a $200,000 apartment.

2The Maunsell Forts

Like metal beasts risen from the murky depths, the Maunsell Forts stand guard at the mouth of the Thames to this day. Although they aren’t quite as useful as they used to be, they serve as silent reminders of our turbulent past.

As the threat of German air raids over Britain in World War II abruptly became reality, the Ministry of Defence commissioned several sea forts to protect the country’s airspace. In addition to four naval forts, the army also built six forts for anti-aircraft defense. Three of these were dropped in the Mersey River, and three were put in the mouth of the Thames estuary. Of the three Thames forts, only two are still around—Red Sands Fort (pictured above) and Shivering Sands Fort.

The forts were decommissioned after the war and abandoned after their guns were removed. Most of them are now derelicts, leftover curiosities from a time of war, although one of the naval forts was later invaded by a lone Englishman, who declared it the newly minted Principality of Sealand.

1The SS Ayrfield

If you swim out past the mangroves of Homebush Bay in Sydney, Australia, and look to the northwest, you’ll see something incredible: the rusted hull of a 100-year-old steamer bursting with its own isolated forest sprouting from its decks like a post-apocalyptic chia pet.

The SS Ayrfield was built in 1911 and put to use as a collier, transporting coal from the mainland to coal-fired ships stationed out at sea. During World War II, the Commonwealth requisitioned the Ayrfield as a cargo ship to get supplies out to Allied troops in the Pacific theater. After the war, it returned to its domestic duties under the care of the Miller Steamship Company until it was retired in 1972 and sent to its grave in Homebush Bay.

For years, Homebush Bay has been the place where ships go to die. In fact, it’s where everything goes to die. From DDT to heavy metals to dioxin, the body of water has served as a chemical dumping ground for decades, choking out the native mangroves and turning a once thriving fishing ground into an industrial mistake.

It’s since been cleaned up to a degree, and now only a few rusted ships are visible above the waterline. The SS Ayrfield is one of the remaining relics of the bay’s turgid past, a poetic reminder that not everything that dies has to stay dead.

Eli Nixon is the author of Son of Tesla, a sci-fi novel about love, friendship, and Nikola Tesla’s army of cyberclones. He also has a Twitter.