On New Year’s Day, I finally was able to enjoy the all-volunteer-run Meissner Nordic trails near Bend. This is a wonderful place, with miles of trails for skate and single track skiers. Be sure to donate to the volunteers if you visit. And bring your sunscreen and lip protection (my lips were cooked like burnt toast!).
I was recently in St. Louis, Missouri, and was blessed by a lovely snowfall that created opportunities for winter images, when the world around you gets quiet and you gaze and smile like a kid catching snowflakes for the first time. I had my Fuji X-Pro1 camera, with a Leica 24mm Elmar lens. This lens always delivers images that only can be found with Leica. Luckily, I was close to Concordia Seminary. I think it is one of the most beautiful campuses in North America.
(Click on each photograph to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.)
Paris? Toulouse? Perhaps Lyon? No, not really, but the city that is home to this park was profoundly influenced by its original French-American inhabitants, who named their town after their beloved king, calling it St. Louis.
Lafayette Park, also known as Lafayette Square, is the oldest public park in the United States west of the Mississippi River. It was dedicated in 1851, 10 years before the Civil War. It is found on St. Louis’ south central side. It remains a treasure for anyone who appreciates urban design and American architectural history. The former upscale neighborhood surrounding the park has been well-preserved, including the elegant French row houses and mansions. This is where the 1 percent called home in the city’s heyday.
I visited in early January and found the public space well maintained and used by dog walkers. If you visit St. Louis, visit this park and spend a few hours wandering the neighborhood.
(Click on each photo to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.)
It’s the heart of winter now. I need something to warm me up. How about some coconuts? (Click on the photograph to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.)
Just off Interstates 94 and 75, north of downtown Detroit, at St. Antoine and Piquette and Harper, stands the abandoned and crumbling Fisher Auto Body 21 plant. It closed in the 1982. It used to produce auto bodies for GM, then limos and ambulances, before finally shutting its doors. Its design was not compatible with auto manufacturing needs, and the industry had long changed, moving to single story, vast production plants, located throughout the country.
The plant has frequently appeared on blogs celebrating the industrial decay of Detroit, of which I would have to count this web site among them, except I am not celebrating massive economic de-industrialization in the Motor City. I found this on my own, just driving. The plant stood out prominently, and I circled back to it once I left the freeway. It was completely surreal to see it, standing next to apartment buildings still being used and across the street from functioning businesses and a warehouse. No one in those buildings coming and going seemed to look or notice the structure, as it had become part of their environment. I saw a couple of guys hanging out there, and decided they were either security or perhaps folks I didn’t want to meet with a lot of camera equipment. Scores of photographers have been here before me, and will come after me, and you can see the wreckage in very accurate detail on Google Street View.
For many, it is just another eyesore and reminder of what was, and also a visible icon of what a declining industrial city looks like. (Click on each photograph to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.)
Aventine Hill offers one of the world’s most lovely views of a great city. I came here on my last night in the “eternal city.” If you go to Rome, a stroll here from the Circus Maximus field is a must-do. (Click on the photograph to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.)
Rome has been on my mind lately. So I dug up some of my old shots from my only trip there in 2006. It was perfect, in every sense. Even the horrible trip coming back to the United States, getting stuck in Paris, getting harassed by French security officials, train stoppages and bus mishaps–it all faded in the dazzling memories Rome left behind. Here are tourists in Rome, quite of few of them in nuns’ habits. They were having a grand time too. (Click on each photograph to see a larger picture in a separate picture page.)
During my recent trip to Ohio and Michigan I stumbled accidentally on two meeting halls that served the needs of Czech and Slovak immigrants in the industrial Midwest, where many central and eastern European immigrants settled in the late 1800s and early 1900s. So-called fraternal organizations were common for Czech and Slovak immigrants in American cities in this era. Outside of churches or synagogues, this was where ethnic identity was allowed to flourish, celebrating the music and dance of the Old World in the New World. I found these two buildings very functional, and sturdy in a Midwest urban way.
However, hard times have fallen on Detroit, and the Detroit Slovak Home is a ghost, whose ethnic enclave has fled to the suburbs and all that remains is another abandoned building on Detroit’s east side, not far from the old Packard Plant. It was among many ethnic houses in Detroit, serving Polish, Lithuanian, German, Ukrainian, and Russian communities. The Bohemian National Home, or Sokol, Greater Cleveland’s Czech Cultural Center, in the Broadway neighborhood above the steel factory, still lives on to promote Czech culture. It too is in a lower-income neighborhood now that is experiencing economic decline.
(Click on each photo to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.)
Since coming back from Detroit in late September, I have reached out to five Portland area universities if they or their student groups might like a multimedia show on the realities facing Detroit. So far, I have not had any bites. I do not think the topic is of much interest to Portland area residents, as Detroit is nearly 2,000 miles away, and the realities facing a city with tens of thousands of abandoned properties and continued problems with public safety, poverty, and economic revitalization just do not register here. The Rust Belt and its many ills I think matter very little beyond the region that is experiencing continued economic decline for decades. But, I will keep working on this.
It still startles me how little people know and care about the pockets of distress in the United States, even though we still share the same country. This is not true all the time and everywhere, but for those pockets of intense decline and multi-generation poverty, it is as if we write them off as failed mini-states, doomed forever to failure. There seems to be an unwritten decision that just says, you are no longer worth it. And, for many in east Detroit, that looks a bit like what you see here.
(Click on each photo to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.)
I used to live in Eugene, Oregon, in the mid-1990s. I had not been back for nearly two decades to do one of my favorite bike rides, up Fox Hollow Road, out into rural areas by the millionaires’ high-priced mcmansions and rural homes, then back into town on the Lorane Highway. It’s a classic short ride, with great views of Spencer’s Butte and rural Lane County.
Colors were about at their peak brightness, but a bit brown because of drought. I saw more than two dozen wild turkeys that day too–the most I have ever seen in Oregon. I love this ride. I miss it, but not the pay level I had working as a reporter in that area. Ultimately I left because I could not sustain things. I always enjoy my visits there to see places I know and the people I once had as neighbors and co-workers.
A great list of area rides is published by the local bike advocacy group called GEARs.
What Beautiful Light 