My wife and I revisited Houston in March (2023). The weather was too wet to visit NASA, so I suggested we revisit the Fifth Ward. She is very patient with my photographing grungy neighborhoods and industrial sites. The light was soft and gloomy, my favorite for urban decay exploration.
Tower 26 Railroad Junction
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Lyons Avenue view north |
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Tower 26 diamonds |
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Tower 26 junction view west from Mary Street |
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Waiting for the light to change, Mary Street |
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View east from Mary Street
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Tower 26 was once a 2-story railroad control tower. There is no building any more, but three railroad lines still cross here. Google Maps shows the location. Early in the 20th century, this was a complicated network of intersecting rail lines, all manually controlled.
Note the handsome wood construction. "The tower architecture gives unmistakable evidence that it was built by Southern Pacific (SP), resembling many other SP towers,"
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Brooks Street cottage (Gold 200 film, Kodak Retina IIa camera) |
A group of cottages on Brooks Street formerly had their backs to the railroad tracks. I photographed them in late 2022. As of March, they had been totally removed and the land was freshly graded.
I took the railroad photographs on Kodak Portra 160 film with a Pentax Spotmatic camera and the Super-Takumar 35mm ƒ/3.5 lens. Takumar lenses were top grade in the 1970s and are still totally usable on film and on digital. The Spotmatic camera's light meter works in stop-down mode, meaning the viewfinder darkens as you stop down. For best results, be careful to avoid large areas of bright sky in the measuring area. I still have the correct mercury (mercuric oxide) V400PX batteries for the meter. The camera and lenses are reliable and compact, well-suited for urban decay.
3 comments:
Once again, I am visualizing my gallery wall in my industrial loft. That photograph of the diamonds has captivated me. Thanks for the Tower 26 story, too--railroad history is so fascinating.
Thank you. The shapes and textures of industrial infrastructure are such a part of our modern Industrial Age, it is rewarding to try to make art out of them. This has been a common photographic theme - no brilliant creativity on my part!
Looks brilliant to me! It seems like "art for the people" which I loved about the New Deal art programs. We can see our everyday life as art only when someone shows us that perspective.
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