PennSilverTaco's "Perfect 5-Lug Regular Cab" Build, Aspergers, and General BS MegaThread!

And this is the "inside" of the garage with the aforementioned "Jiffy Lube oil change pit"...

 

Well as a historical archaeologist I can tell you two ways to help find the answer to your question.

1) go to the documentary evidence. Look at old property maps, and follow the chain of title
2) dig for residential refuse. This would require a permit. Your surface survey yielded only materials related to the tire shop. Its more than likely it was only a mechanic shop. A closer examination of the surface level artifacts might uncover some materials more associated residential sites.

 

Bringing broken and/or obsolete TVs into the woods surrounding Centralia and then totally destroying them seems to be a tradition of sorts based on what I've read online, and I've lost count of how many TV carcasses I've found combined on both trips; This old Zenith appears to be over 40 years old. As such, I do not know if it was left behind 25 to 30 years ago by the last owner of the property, or if bored kids brought it up here in the last one or two decades and destroyed it. The amount of rust on the metal parts would indicate that it has been here for well over a decade...

 

When you say title, do you mean the deed to the property?

 

Inside the pit; I've seen plenty of houses with professional-style hydraulic lifts in the garage, but I've never seen a professional style oil changing pit like this one in a residential building, which further points towards a commercial property like a garage or gas station...

 

Yeah exactly. These property titles are publicly available. You can go to the county courthouse (or other administrative type of building-not always the courthouse) and ask to look through the archives. Unless you have a reliably old street address you’ll need to start by looking at historic property maps, find the spot, then search for the deed. Each dead references the previous deed and previous owners. You then search that document and so on. This is called a chain of title search. You can find out some really interesting stuff this way.

 

This might be helpful in your search.
Looks like the PA public GIS
https://gis.dep.pa.gov/emappa/

 

It is also entirely possible that this building had been collapsing prior to 1993, and that it was part of a residential property; The stretch of State Route 61 that was shut down and bypassed in the 1990s due to the underground mine fire is not far behind this property. One likely scenario is that the main house was demolished, but the government didn't bother to fully demolish this building since nature did most of the job for them...

 

So all of this is public record, and that info is at the Columbia County Courthouse? What sucks is that there is no address visible on the property, so I'd have to point it out to some county employee on a map...

 

Often, when government funding is involved in demolition, the gov’t won’t touch environmental hazard sites. It opens up a whole can of worms with environmental compliance and EPA regs. So a place full of motor oil etc, could have been left to rot because it was cheaper than dealing with it. Happens all too often

 

There are some ghost towns where vehicles were left in garages and they still sit there decades later, in obvious need of mechanical repairs if they are to be made roadworthy again, but in one piece and remarkably well preserved; Picher, Oklahoma is one such place...

Unfortunately, Centralia does not have any derelict vehicles in areas open to the public, because automotive archeology is something I truly enjoy!

 

This garage is rather rudimentary in design and looks like it could have been built in the 1940s, though the old Zenith TV is obviously a bit newer than that...

 

This place honestly looks like it fell into disrepair years before the entire Borough of Centralia was declared eminent domain (which was in 1993)...

 

Yet another obvious clue that this was a garage...

 

That's why suggestions by local folks to perhaps turn it into a National Historic Site fell on deaf ears. All those visitors & the area could sorely use tourist $$$. The powers that be won't touch it & have been passing the buck for decades. An open air graffiti-ridden garbage pit. An utter disgrace.

 

You know a TV is old when it only has one speaker!