Osco Drug on a wet night in June

There are many titles that I could choose to attach to this photo.  I believe it to be one of the saddest nighttime photos I've ever taken, and sadly prophetic as well.  This was immediately outside the liquor department entrance to Osco Drugstore, which used to be located in the now empty building behind Walgreen's on the corner of Providence and Broadway.  Earlier in the evening I had been to a photo exhibit at Legacy Gallery for some friends of mine, then we had gone out for a late dinner at Cornerstone Cafe.  Feeling restless and creative, I walked the rest of the way home and took photos as I went.  At the time I lived on McBaine Avenue, just a few blocks from Osco Drug.  This scene confronted me as I was wandering home.  One sad, rain-sodden shopping cart poised expectantly beneath a now sadly dated message..."Buy & Leave Film Here".  Buy and leave film here...fourteen years later this sounds like a tombstone message or epitaph for a photographic medium now nearly extirpated.  How many items in this story are now extinct?  Film is for the most part gone, local film developing is nearly gone, a large, centrally-located drugstore that also offered liquor, furniture, clothing, candy, and a somewhat discotechnical atmosphere is gone, Cornerstone Cafe has been replaced by a trendy dinner spot/club, Legacy is gone...one might even make the case that most metal shopping carts are gone.  Could William Carlos Williams have made the same poem about a plastic wheelbarrow? 

Puente's Barber Shop--Bayview

Another image from a cooler night in a much cooler place.  An attempt at some kind of visual or symbolic air conditioning.  The neon sign in the window of Puente's Barber Shop, on KK in Bayview, probably taken in late November or early March on a cold, misty night.  I'd pawn my eye teeth for a couple cool, misty nights right now.

Boulevard Theater, Bayview

Considering that it is 102 degrees as I craft this post at 8 p.m., I am going to continue the defiant tone begun in the last post.  A few hundred degree days have their place in any summer, as a way to test our mettle and to bring about the focus and introspection that a period of forced housebound hibernation can yield.  But two or three running weeks of upper 90s and mid 100s...my mind flees back to a cold, frost-gripped night in mid-November.  I was just starting to get to know my new, Mamiya 645E purchased a few weeks before at a camera store in Madison, Wisconsin.  I left the warmth of a Stone Creek coffee shop and spent an hour or two creeping around the darkened streets of Bayview.  This image has always reminded me of the spare, unflinching view of an Edward Hopper painting...he seems to have been one of the first American painters to produce canvases of nocturnal views of American towns and cities.  Since this was taken, the Boulevard has upgraded its signage, and I'm not sure if that liquor store is there anymore.