Shenandoah woods was a neighborhood that used to house staff of the Naval Air Warfare Center in Warminster and the Willow Grove Joint Naval-Air Station. In 2011, the entire neighborhood shut down and all of the residents were forced to evacuate their homes due to plumbing issues, faulty street and lot layouts, and economically or socially undesirable land use. To this day, every structure in Shenandoah woods continues to sit, rot away, and be vandalized. Urban explorers visited abandoned neighborhood in Warminster and prepared stunning photos.
A lower density redevelopment for residential use, which was a plan for the land back in 2013, proved to be difficult to achieve due to lack of interest in the land by housing development companies. Builders are deterred by the land’s environmental conditions that included the presence of volatile organic compounds such as trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene. The Environmental Protection Agency also deemed the site’s drinking water to be contaminated, following tests. As of 2016, the Navy has removed two tons of the toxic compound from the land, but further cleanup is still required.
The neighborhood was very repetitive and featured countless rows of identical townhomes, some with mangled garage doors or roofs falling in. There were once around 200 abandoned houses in this Warminster PA abandoned neighborhood. In recent years, many have collapsed or mysteriously burned down.
As for 2022, this entire Pennsylvania neighborhood is sitting eerily silent and abandoned. When the NADC Warminster and NAS Willow Grove were shutdown from BRAC these houses were supposed to be handed over to the township to become low income housing but the soil is contaminated as the homes were built on top of NADC’s old dump.The houses were supposed to be demolished but has been delayed because of the contaminated soil.
