Abandoned Arlington: 360 Blues & Tattoos

Abandoned buildings are fascinating. I think they are, anyway. What they are now, what they were, and everything in between. Google Street View and the “timeline” feature can help unlock a place’s history and tell part of its story.

I recently did a recent blog post about an abandoned Putt Putt in Arlington, which spurred an interest in photographing abandoned buildings. Once you start looking for these, they’re easy to find, although sometimes they can blend in with their surroundings fairly well. This one, though, definitely stands out, but it can be difficult to see unless you’re looking for it. You can barely see it as you’re driving down 360. It’s off the access road and sitting on a hill, which makes it harder to see from the highway. It was the splashes of brightly-colored graffiti that caught my attention, though. I drove past this place many times without noticing it.

According to Google Street View, the building used to be 360 Blues & Tattoos. The popular tattoo shop moved to a new location on Cooper Street sometime around 2010. As for their former location, it appears to have been nearly empty since then, although possibly briefly used as an office building. It remained in fairly decent condition, at least from the shots on Google Street View, until about 2019, when graffiti started to appear. Sometime in 2022, it became a graffiti magnet — one section is even tagged with ’22, probably indicating the year it was put there.

Today, graffiti is plentiful, and the building has patchy overgrowth to match. It’s not the best-looking building in town, but not the worst, either. For better or worse, it’s part of our town and who we are.