About half of all marriages end up in ruins. A few start out that way.

For some couples, abandoned buildings — train stations, warehouses and century-old churches, often found in declining or deindustrialized cities — are proving the perfect haunting aesthetic for their weddings.

Call it a twist on something old, something new.

Sarah Budzowski Lentz , 27, a registered nurse, and Evan Lentz, 28, an accountant, chose to have their wedding reception in September 2017 along the banks of the Cuyahoga River, in a Cleveland neighborhood called the Flats.

The ceremony was in a church and the reception in a standard reception hall, “so we wanted to do something that was kind of unique for our photo,” said Ms. Lentz, who is from Independence, Ohio. The riverbank provided an opportunity to have photographs taken behind a gas station and strip club, near an area with abandoned warehouses and steel mills.

The setting was “kind of old, and destroyed, and crumbly,” she said, adding, “I thought it had a nice contrast: the formality of us with the background of something kind of forgotten.”