Black Hole Site, New Mexico

A "nuclear waste" site, as it was called by its owner, Ed Grothus, a former worker at Los Alamos Lab, who quit bomb work there for ethical reasons in the 1960s, and became a celebrated and entertaining anti-nuclear activist. The Black Hole was a dense collection of cast off instruments and appliances from the Lab, bought by Grothus over 40 years worth of surplus auctions. It was also a museum, in a sense, as he was reluctant to sell much of the inventory, and was an accomplished assemblage artist himself. In an A-frame building next door, Grothus established the largely conceptual First Church of High Technology, where he presided over Critical Mass. Ed Grothus died in 2009, though the Black Hole remained open for several years, selling off the inventory on behalf of his heirs, before closing, with the building demolished in 2022.