Paulsen Wire Rope.

Former Location, South Third Street, Sunbury

Paulsen Wire Rope manufactured heavy steel cables for bridges and cranes and other industrial uses for many, many years. I know that, according to local lore, their rope suspends the Brooklyn Bridge and other suspension bridges around the country.

Paulsen was bought out by Williamsport Wirerope Works in 2002 due bankruptcy. As much as I can find, WWW was bought out in 2004 and was reformed into Wirerope Works Inc. Anything after this, I can't seem to locate. Between then and now, the building was razed. It had been at least seven years since I was on this part of South Third Street so imagine the expletive that came from my mouth when I drove by. I had to double and triple check with family members about the building; "Wasn't there something there? What happened?"

A cousin used to live across the street and at night, when the rest of the world was sleeping, the windows at Paulsen Wire Rope were aglow and a slow, steady pounding noise would seep into the night air. On summer nights, the air smelled like metal and electricity.

I think this edit is too dark. Sometimes, I am a bit heavy-handed with my curves.

Welcome to the Neighborhood.

Tecumseh Trail, West Allentown.

The American Pastime.

Lebanon Middle School, Lebanon CT.
I am not particularly emotionally invested in baseball. I grew up only vaguely aware of the Philadelphia Phillies perpetual defeat. Football was the staple sport in my house and in my family; rarely was there a weekend when someone wasn't going to a Penn State football game. Football blared from the TV from late August until January, when the Superbowl's last seconds ticked down in the corner of the screen. Sure, I've been to baseball games (The Former Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Red Barons) and I understand the basic premise of the game. I won't ever ask what quarter the game is in, I vaguely understand stats, and occasionally I listen to a game on the radio if I happen to catch one. It was only recently I admitted my love of football to the outside world, as sports were a symbol and part of dominate culture in the U.S. that was really alienating to me. They still are part of that culture, but more recently I've found myself able to relax and enjoy them. Games are better digested live, instead of through a TV screen. I look forward to going to IronPigs' and Penn State games when I move home.

But I don't love baseball. I feel like I should love baseball, given it is America's Pastime and everyone knows that I like to be a good American . There is something about it that is closely linked to early 20th century history, the rise of leisure and the middle class. It's kind of romantic, in the context of history. I don't really know anyone who doesn't know who the Babe or Jackie Robinson is or why they're Important. Honestly, I'm totally winging this from my impression of baseball in America but it seems so closely tied to democracy in a way that I can't quite put my finger on. I also suspect that it's tied to the American dream. Movies like The Sandlot and Field of Dreams are gleaming examples of this; work hard and you, too, can have success and fame and prosperity, despite whatever obstacles of class and race you will have to overcome!



Mount Carmel Little League Baseball Field, Mount Carmel PA.
Baseball diamonds dot the American landscape. Rarely can you drive through a small town that doesn't have something resembling a baseball field, be it overgrown or perfectly manicured. It is something huge when a new stadium goes up or an old one comes down. There is something strangely magical about standing at home plate or on the pitcher's mound of ANY baseball field, be it Fenway Park or the field down the street with no lights or bases. One can't help but feel connected to something bigger than themselves, as the baseball diamond is so pressed and adhered to the collective memory of the U.S.



Pitchers' Mound, Framingham, Ma.
Over the past year or so, I've taken notice to baseball fields, photographing them if I get the chance to. I love the way dilapidated or DIY'd backstops look. I like the freshly combed dirt, the overgrown outfield, and the geometry of the diamond from the corners of my eyes when I'm standing at home plate or on the pitchers' mound. While baseball diamonds are designed to function the same way and hold a specific sport, it is endlessly fascinating to me their immense variation, which is tied to location, class and level of skill of the teams that play on them. I find them to be really amazing things to photograph and awesome spaces to occupy. I recently started a flickr set, Playing Fields, where I'll put any and all future developments in this strange, totally-out-of-context interest of mine.

Build it and they will come, right?

Greetings from Asbury Park.

The Paramount, Asbury Park.
Tuesday morning, around 10.30, I filled my gas tank at the WaWa out on 100, punched in Asbury Park, New Jersey into a borrowed Garmin*, and pointed my car east on I-78. I've spent little time in Jersey, with the exception of a vacation here and a bus trip to NYC there, my life generally has been spent ignoring the eastern neighbor of Pennsylvania.

My interest in Asbury Park, admittedly, was sparked by my intense love of Bruce Springsteen. His first 4 albums invoke imagery of a gritty seaside town and it's former glory as a place of summer play. Around the time I fell in love with The Wild, the Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle, I read Fourth of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land by Daniel Wolfe. Fourth of July is a detailed look at the strange, strained history of Asbury Park. Founded by James A. Bradley (our headless statue below) in 1871, it was originally billed as a place for the moral to come and be rejuvenated by the healing waters of the Atlantic, as well as to worship in the Methodist tradition.



James A. Bradley
The history of Asbury Park is outlined and colored by the religion's strong hold on the city's progress, intense racial divide and by Springsteen's lyrics. I thought about this as I rolled through the town's wide flat streets and gazed across lots of raised buildings along the famed Kingsley Street, the town's main drag that runs parallel to the boardwalk and to the Atlantic.

I didn't really know what to expect when I decided to make the trip. I knew that a lot of the iconic buildings had been knocked over or left to decay. I didn't really expect new businesses going in along the boardwalk or the open spaces or the strangeness of the old seaside hotels being used as places of residency. New condos stuck out among dilapidated two-story hotels and the flat space the defined the beachfront.



The Casino.
The boardwalk is anchored on one side by the iconic decayed facade of the Casino, which is currently undergoing construction. At the other end, is the newly revived Paramount theater, it's gorgeous detailing brightly re-painted. Most of the old buildings along the boardwalk have been re-faced or raised in favor of new development. I was surprised to see the incredible amount of empty lots and open spaces, waiting for developers to come in and revive Asbury Park to it's pre-car glory.



Sunset Avenue Pavilion.
I parked close to The Stone Pony and spent the day dragging my sandaled feet along the boardwalk. I ended up at the Ocean Grove Pier, looking up and down the Jersey coast. It was a comfortable day and the sun was high and bright above me for the two hours I poked around. By the time I was finished with photographing the boardwalk, I had acquired a nasty sunburn. I took to driving around the town and debating taking a swim in the Atlantic for five bucks. My skin, in protest, throbbed, even with the air conditioning blasting. I decided to head home, despite wanting an ice cream and a dip in the ocean and more photographs. The drive home to PA was uneventful and I made notes of the names of places in New Jersey I should explore while I'm living at home.



The Stone Pony.


* I generally avoid using GPS-thingies but I wasn't up for getting seriously and painfully lost in New Jersey. The cliche of "What exit are you from?" is acurate; the interstate system is windy, difficult to navigate and fucking enormous.

"But in a Larger Sense We Cannot Dedicate, We Cannot Consecrate, We Cannot Hollow This Ground."

Audio Stop Number Three: From Eternal Light Memorial Looking Towards McPhearson's Ridge.

Last weekend, A. Kilton and I headed to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania for a nerdy weekend full of Civil War History. Pointing the car further west into the state, we took route 222 to route 30 (the Lincoln Highway, appropriately), which takes one through the southeastern region of PA, through the heart of Amish country and over one of the widest parts of the Susquehanna River. It felt like August on Saturday, a haze hung on the horizon line as mid-day temperatures reached nearly 85 degrees. After a brief stop over at a Sonic Drive-In and a nice long winding trip to the center of Gettysburg, we rolled into the newly built visitors' center around 1. We drug our feet through the center and the gift shop, gawking at the embroidered pillows, Lincoln Attired Boyd's Bears, and other tasteless overpriced items that gift shops offer up to consumers in the guise of "cute" and "historic". We purchased The Travelbrains' Gettysburg Expedition Guide, some much needed soda and headed out to start the tour.

I should probably also note that, no matter what we do, no matter how fast we do or do not travel, no matter the determined departure or destination time, we stretch seemingly short trips into hours. 2 hour trips become 4. A cross-country trip would probably take us years. This is why it took us nearly 6 hours to complete a 3 hour audio tour. We split it up over the two days we were there so it wasn't as long but by the time we got to the site of Pickett's Charge on Sunday, I was more than content to buy my Union kepi, type in the directions for a return stop to the Sonic into the Garmin and get the hell out of Dodge.

While trying to find the first stop on the tour (the writers and producers of the CD clearly assume that you know what you're doing and how to navigate the roads of an otherwise generic small town in Pennsylvania, making things more difficult than they need to be), it took me very little time to figure out that I wanted to photograph the strange transparency of a place like Gettysburg. I wanted the photographs to talk about the beauty of the landscape and how it intersected with this Really Important History as well as a booming tourist industry. I wanted to talk about the strange experience of coasting at 35 miles an hour through rolling hills and grassy fields with about 100 other cars and buses, witnessing the same view of history, trying to picture the immensity of the three day battle at Gettysburg that changed the course of the Civil War.



Audio Tour Stop Number Two: Oak Ridge.

I say "I wanted to" because I didn't go with my gut instinct when I left my apartment on Friday morning saying "You forgot something" and managed to neglect checking the battery in my camera and leaving my battery charger tucked away in my desk. Nikon being the company they are, decided to manufacture no two camera battery chargers the same and thus, my camera died about 10 minutes into the second day.

Anyways, it had been a long time since I'd been to Gettysburg. My twelve year old brain didn't remember the immense amount of space or the beauty of the landscape. It also didn't recall what a strange point of intersection that Gettysburg is. History, tourism, reenactment, landscape attract a strange, wide-ranging group of people. Families with bored teenagers, Union and Confederate reenactors in full costume, bikers bedecked in their finest leather jackets (PA's state roads are long and smooth, with uninterrupted views), older couples and newly weds (or at least newly-in-love), ghost hunters, history buffs, the curious and the greyhounds.



Audio Tour Stop Number One: McPhearson's Ridge

Without a camera to pressed to my eye, I had problems processing what I was witnessing; without a frame to, well, frame things, my brain went to other places. I spent the time while A. Kilton was out wondering around at every other stop, stretching my legs and groaning over my sunburn, thinking about what it means to be in a place with a "living history", debating the pros and cons of being a Civil War reenactor, considering my next path of research obsession, going over a list of things to take photographs of next time I'm there. I also spent a large majority of the time contemplating just what exactly I wanted to get from a trip to a Civil War battlefield, besides a sweet coffee mug with the Gettysburg address printed on it, a nasty sunburn and a nice new hat.

I wanted to experience the feeling of Something Huge Happened Here in 1863 while shifting into 4th gear in 2008. I wanted to feel that so-called living history that is touted in tourist brochures and on billboards. I won't say that I didn't have really amazing time, because I did, I just didn't get that overwhelming Important feeling that I had hoped for. And I won't say that I'm not interested in going back, because I definately am. I want to go to the reenactments this summer. I would love to expand my Civil War battlefield tours to Antietam and Vicksburg. Hell, I'd love to do a Civil War road trip, marking off each important battle with a stop over for meandering, picture taking and thinking about History. I just had expected to feel something bigger than me, bigger than now but it fell short. Or maybe I did.

Looking out across the view from Devil's Den from Little Round Top, watching small figures get in and out of their cars, I thought about the manufactured sounds of cannon and rifle fire on the guide CD and tried to picture what this place would be like without roads and tour stops. Like A. said "I want a history filter so I can actually see what it would look like then, without all of these people and cars and paved roads everywhere. I think I'd actually get it then." Experiencing history in a car with a CD makes it just that much more difficult to understand. It removes the sense of place from that place so much that the only thing you can hear is fake cannon fire and the occasional slam of a car door, not that quiet suggestion of Important that I usually get from a place so heavy with past. The 19th century battlefield is just a blur along the 21st century landscape witnessed like everything else: from a car, filed away with vacation photographs and fake parchment copies of the Gettysburg address.

That said, I am glad that Gettysburg has this weird, esoterric culture surrounding it and it's past. I'm really glad it didn't go the way most places of the Civil War went, as examined in Killing Ground: The Civil War and The Changing American Landscape. I actually love that an otherwise po-dunk Pennsylvanian town has a bright spot in the history of the U.S. I love the giftshops and reenactors*, the kitsch and the strange intersection of now and then that goes on there. I'm just not entirely sure it brought me closer to a better understanding of the United States and the world in 1863.



Audio Tour Stop Number Six: Virgina Memorial.

*A. Kilton and I actually had a conversation at one point in the car about the merits of dating a war reenactor. Could you really date someone that was a Confederate? What about a British soldier? Does that say something about them?

Although, given my propensity for rejection of gender roles, I've been pondering the strange possibility of becoming a Union Infantrymen or if I could ever ride a horse, a member of the calvary, since they have better jackets. It's an expensive hobby to get into but also strange and wonderful. I've since added it to my List of Things to Do When I am Independently Wealthy.

More of The Steel

The High House.

During World War II, large guns for battleships were produced at Bethlehem Steel and then heat treated in this building. They would stand the guns end on end and either heat them up and quench them with water or chemically treat them. The building is so strange to look at, given it's scale and mass. Driving across the bridge behind it, you can damn near see in the windows.

Eventually, the parking lot for the casino and a hotel will sit where I was standing to take this photo.

On the right is the Iron Ore Bridge and the faint skeletal structure of the casino it's self.

Blast Furnace Profile

Bethlehem Steel. It's better and more informative in it's full version here.

Blast Furnace B

I'm really, super excited about the experience of photographing Bethlehem Steel. It was fantastic and interesting and overwhelming. I want to talk about it more in detail but I wanted to post this because I think I'm in love with it. I have two others that I like and plan on sharing in the nearish future but I think this one is going in the steel frame for class.

I'd really really love to continue photographing there and examining the space as it changes and morphs into it's future. I think documenting that process is probably as important as photographing it as it was. To document as the site steps out of it's former self is really interesting. I am excited to do something with that idea, to make it into pictures.

Also, since I shot square for so long, my mind is blown at the way a panoramic can convey space, obviously. I feel like this format can (and probably will) be used to inform and expand Coal Hunkie even further, since I feel it was one of the things missing from the project. There's probably a thin line with the format between really interesting and hokey. I'd like to think I have a better eye than to make it hokey.

"Home is at Once More Initimate & More Isolated Than Place."

Shikellamy State Park Overlook Panorama with the confluence on the West Branch (left) and North Branch (center) of the Susquehanna River, along with the boroughs of Northumberland and Sunbury, Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, USA. Shikellamy State Park Marina unit on Packer Island also visible.

I was writing something recently and had to fact check the population of the town I grew up in. Wikipedia, much to my unsurprise, offered me Northumberland, Pennsylvania's very own Wiki. I knew most of the sparse information on the page but it was this photo that sort of left-hooked me to the brain.

"Home", the actual geographic location, has been shifting and moving since I left Northumberland when I was 13. Even now, "home" refers to different places, depending on my geographic location. "Home" when I’m physically in Medford, refers to my parents' house, in Allentown. "Home", when I’m in Allentown, could mean either Northumberland or Medford, depending on the context of the conversation and whom it's with. For example, when my father asks me "how long are you going home for and when are you leaving?" he means home as Northumberland. If my grandmother asks, "when are you going back home?” she means Allentown. If my mother asks me the same question, she means Medford.

It’s also interesting I’ve stopped calling here, where I am now, Boston and prefer to call it Medford, even though I’ve only lived in the apartment for a few weeks. Is that a sign of content-ness with location? That specific place, its title seemingly so important. I get fixated on place names and fall in love with them easily but that's another post for another day.

Deviations aside, I look at that photograph and I know, without even thinking about it, what it feels like to cross that bridge in the foreground, where it goes, and how it gets me to the places that are so familiar to me. I know that the sewage treatment plant is to the right, that underpass is too low for some trucks that come through town and what the French fries used to taste like at the Front Street Station. I remember unspecific moments that took place at unspecific times with such detail, I get overwhelmed by recalling smalls, the temperature of the air and the exact location of the scar on my best friend's face. School hallways, cracked sidewalks, quiet, dimly lit stores: all of it so prevalent in my head that it seems like it just happened yesterday.

Sometimes, if I’m a passenger (rare) in a car and my eyes are closed, the road will turn and bump a certain way that feels like driving up to 428 Nottingham Drive, on Strawbridge road and I will think I am headed back to that white sided bi-level on the hill. It is strange and unsurprising how deeply embedded the streets of Northumberland are in my head and body. That place is the back of my hand, the landscape of Home. It is familiar and very present in my memory and yet so removed from my everyday life, I am shocked to know, to discover that it's still home in it's place in my head.

Watching that photograph load was surreal. My brain clicked and recognized it immediately but experiencing it so removed from that place physically, on a public webpage that anyone can see, wasn't something I was prepared for. While it's a public place populated by 3,800 people, it always felt more private, a little darker, laced with bitterness and so linked to those formative years. To see it laid out in facts disconnected memory and emotion from home and let me see it, objectively, for the first time, for a mere second since I left. A small town, buried in the mountains of Pennsylvania, occupying 1.6 square miles.

Unremarkable but still Home.