Writing about “Meadowbrook” yesterday led me to searching for some online images to remind me just how creepy that spot was, and to see if I could demonstrate just how Mad Max like my teen years were there on Mitchel Field.

I did find some pretty cool images.

Immediately behind my house, back in the mid/late ’70s, was a series of shabby looking trailers surrounded by a tall, secure fence. It was a drug rehab center, the patients (or were they inmates?) of which used to hang out on the fence and try to get us bad kids to score deals for them. And right behind that rehab center was an old brick building that was in complete disrepair: holes in the ceiling, no doors or windows, etc. This was our key badness hangout, and I was absolutely thrilled to find a series of pictures of its interior online. The murals that are pictured on that page were really surreal to us at the time. We didn’t know why they were there, but they provided cool backdrop to our nefarious teenage wasteland.

I wrote about the Perimeter Road being a semi-abandoned gravel path that went around the old base. Here is what it looked (and I guess still looks) like. It was great for dirt bike riding.

This page has some shots of some of the creepy old buildings on the base. They say they don’t know what the one on the bottom is: we always called it the incinerator (and I think accurately). It had this huge metal drum inside it that you had to drop into from the top. It was a cool place to hang out and smoke cigarettes.

But the best place for hanging out and smoking cigarettes was the bunker. We also had a dirt bike trail with awesome jumps that went over the top of the bunker. Very, very cool. Our parents would have killed us if they’d known where we were spending our time after school each day.

Note: See this article for more recent photos, taken by me, when I returned to Mitchel Field as an adult, many years later.