Yes, you can very easily 'abandon' a chimney. It can be costly to remove a chimney and old chimneys are much more frequently abandoned than removed because of this.

I have an abandoned chimney in my house. Not a big deal and quite common in many older homes.

Thanks! Now, instead of abandoning it completely, any reason I shouldn't be able to duct my kitchen range hood through there? (The location is perfect and the chimney looks nicer than a standard cap thing--it's on the front of the house and would be very visible. The original ducting was lost in a bad earlier remodel.)

@Fori. Did you end up ducting your kitchen range hood through your abandoned chimney? I'm looking into costs/benefits of fireplace and maybe chimney removal. Removing the chimney would add space in my kitchen. It currently cuts into a corner. Thanks!

Hi. Um, well...no.

I did an addition and put the kitchen over there instead (where the chimney from the OTHER fireplace sticks into the kitchen but there was space too work it into the plan). The fireplace and chimney I was asking about were completely removed, recovering a 12'x3' strip in my living room. It was part of a large project so I don't know what the cost would be if we'd just done that. But the removal wasn't a big deal. We were having floor guys and roofers over to do the addition anyway and our roofing material (chunky cedar shakes) patched and matched well. (So did our 60+ year old topnailed oak floor.)

(I had to kill that fireplace. It didn't match the other fireplace it was in full view of, and--more importantly--it had been very messed up over the years and would have required a pretty much total rebuild to make it look complete anyway.)

Thanks. I'm in the contemplative stage of remodeling our 76 year old home. It's less than 1500 SQ. We don't even use this fireplace because there is a visible crack in the masonry. We live in SoCal-another reason to remove it.