The Dominoes After-Midnight Club began in the Summer of 1995. Basically it started with a bunch of friends who partied after work, most of whom were late-night pizza delivery drivers. We usually turned up at the old Biloxi Bay bridge with lots of beer and much to talk about. At the same time, the abandoned Hospital building in Biloxi was well-known in town as a cool place to party, provided you could sneak into it without getting caught by the police or reported by the neighboring residents. The old Hospital already gained notoriety when somebody died there after falling into an open elevator shaft, or when two kids OD'd after breaking in to get high, find ghosts, and instead found drugs abandoned in the hospital's pharmacy. It was at one of our bridge parties one night that someone brought up the idea of trying to get into the old hospital. That, in early September, 1995 was the first lurk of "the club". They then told their friend John (who, with colleague Scot, already explored abandoned buildings and derelict cargo ships in Ft Lauderdale a decade prior), and a week later he joined them in the next visit to "the hospital". That night they got in successfully and spent hours exploring the dark littered halls by flashlight, pumped with adrenalyn and thoroughly engrossed with fascination and the natural thrill of a treasure hunt.
It was in this spirit that the Club was born.
The hospital soon became the after-midnight hangout for the gang, and for some of them, the experience and adventure of "lurking" the dark unfamiliar building and shedding light on a time capsule became a far more meaningful endeavor. John realized the historical value of this kind of exploration, and began to treat the "lurks" (adopted term for this kind of exploring) as an academic mission, collecting information and applying the present-day experience to the rich past of the building. The next step to this unique premise would be that the Club would find another location for exploring, one which was more historically significant. Apparently, Biloxi suffered an impressive roster of abandoned, neglected buildings that qualified as salvagable landmarks owing to their architectural and historical value. This lead to other lurks, in the White House Hotel (1996), the Tivoli Hotel (1997), and the Greenvale Mansion (2004) in Long Beach, amongst other adventures. The internet was the natural choice for archiving all the research collected by the Club, and John launched the Club's first website early in 1997 for the sole purpose of gathering this information & making it available to everyone. By this time, the DAMC was established as a true organization and membership swelled, mostly by people who were just excited by the thrill of crawling around the old buildings.
To our relief good fortune came to some of the same buildings which we feared would be wasted and destroyed. The Biloxi Regional Medical Center was renovated as a state administrative building by 1998, and the following year a sincere and diligent effort to restore the White House Hotel began. By this time, John was able to shift the focus of the Dominoes After-Midnight Club towards preservation awareness of the locations and archiving their histories by more conventional means, working with other local groups to insure that other local historically significant sites do not go neglected, forgotten, and eventually bulldozed.
In spite of the club's new directions, we have not forgotten where we came from.
Celebrating the twelfth anniversary of the Dominoes After-Midnight Club in the Summer of 2007,
John led brand new club members along to another great lurk, the White House Hotel on Biloxi Beach. This building reminded us why we started doing this in the first place. We had plenty of beer, plenty of flashlights, and a great time.
A SOMBER POSTSCRIPT
A tenth anniversary celebration or any other kind of nighttime lurking was put on hold indefinitely as Hurricane Katrina roared into the Mississippi Gulf Coast in August, 2005. The catastrophe changed the coast and the DAMC in ways either obvious or imperceptible in the midst of the devastation. As 2006 neared its end, the Club (and its website) had honored a respectful year-long hiatus from lurking the ravaged Mississippi Gulf Coast and now returns to its original mission.
Enjoy our monthly updates,
exploring Biloxi's 'abandoned' history!
While we're on the subject of History, Click Here
if you want to see what the original DAMC website looked like, from about 1996.
Or,
Click back to the Main Page.
At the top of the page is the old Wesson/Lemon House on Holcomb Blvd in Ocean Springs, removed in 1997 (One of our earlier, stranger Lurks; now the site of Chandeleur Cove). Other photo is old C & O caboose 900220, on a siding at the Ocean Springs depot for weeks until she was moved to city hall as a static display and painted red in 1997 (moved again, across town, in May 2001). Before that happened, we spent many after-midnight evenings in the caboose, watching the trains go by on the CSX main and pondering what our next lurk might be. In a sense, it was our first 'clubhouse'; We thank those responsible in Ocean Springs for its preservation.
DAMC Home White House Hotel Old Biloxi Hospital Gold Shore Casino Office