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“Horse Trough – 4th and Lehigh”

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suburban station

Hank Gathers

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[Hank Gathers - From the inside of the Germantown City Hall]

Chester topography

[CHESTER CREEK, CHESTER, PA]

the modern navy

[1907 MACHINE SHOP, NAVY YARD]

the jerry built dock: or new functionality of our piers

Complicating the definition of homeless, a man inhabiting a Delaware river pier washing a floating dock he’s built.  Once built for massive material transfers, Philadelphia’s pier infrastructure is allowing for individual and secluded points of access to the Delaware River.

 

Gotta be freshet: on floods and the evolving high water mark

[THE FRESHET MARK]

Etchings and markings of nature’s force on the built form are not new.  Markings of river heights are equal parts hydrology, memorial and admonition.  Above is an etching on the south side of the westernmost pier of an ignored railroad truss bridge over the Schuylkill known at one time as the Arsenal Bridge.  The “freshet line” marks the highest the Schuylkill River has ever crested–17 feet–some 3.5 feet higher than the floods of Irene. The United States Geological Survey and FEMA still consider Oct. 4, 1869 a 100 year flood of record.  After this late sodden summer of swollen creeks and rivers, of hunkering down, of anxious portents of meteorological doom, formal etchings like these resonate even more.

“It’s good for the city…”

[DeANGELO BROTHERS CONTRACTORS BEGINNING FOUNDATION WORK FOR NEW FAMILY COURT BUILDING, AUGUST 2011]

“It’s good for the city. It’s good for all the women and children and juvenile delinquents who are going to appear in that building in 2.5 years.” –Pennsylvania Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille, January 2011

Ruins by a River

Harrisville Paper Mill, a photo by theanthracite on Flickr.

“Because most people are incurably romantic about ruins, Harrisville is the glamor exhibit of the Wharton tract. Nowhere have the Pine Barrens demonstrated more clearly their capacity to obliterate man’s handiwork than at this ghost town. Egypt’s pyramids have survived pitiless exposure to the elements through four thousand years. Many other monuments to ancient civilizations remain intact. But in less than a century Harrisville, New Jersey has been reduced from a prosperous, stoutly built industrial community to a cluster of fast-vanishing ruins and scattered piles of rubble.”

–Arthur Pierce, Iron in the Pines: the story of New Jersey’s ghost towns and bog iron

The Desire Lines of Atlantic City

What follows are a series of photos of desire lines taken from the Absecon Lighthouse, New Jersey’s tallest lighthouse located the northern end of Atlantic City overlooking the once-treacherous Absecon Inlet.  Desire lines are popular paths of least resistance often connecting activity nodes.  In urban places like A.C. with yawning absences, desire lines are often supersede gridded streets as the primary means of communication.  Desire lines figure prominently in the photography of Camilo Jose Vergara’s documentation of Camden, another beleaguered New Jersey city.

[LOOKING SOUTH-RHODE ISLAND AVE. IN FOREGROUND]

 

[LOOKING NE ALONG VERMONT]