Backroads America

Dan Daniel said:
A form of disaster porn. I've been on these type of roads over the last decade many a time. Towns are deserted, broken, collapsing, emptied. Some places look like a neutron bomb went off a decade before. Broken culture, broken people. 'Vernacular' is a loaded term here; didn't Venturi et al use it in 'Learning from Las Vegas'? Collapse and ruin is more like it. The vernacular today is McDonalds and mobile homes and Walmarts and McMansions
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/05/the-view-from-the-back-row
https://mcmansionhell.com/
Thanks for the link. Although it set me off on a tangent, some nice photos of interesting buildings.
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A disaster is something that cannot be averted. This is the opposite, it was done on purpose, and whether people understood the ramifications or not, they went along with it. Modern society has consented to this decay by accepting and using its causes.

My first real estate purchase was built in the 12th century. Not many people in the 21st century have the kind of dedication required to keep something like that going.

prague+stairway.jpg


Marty
 
Dan Daniel said:
A form of disaster porn. I've been on these type of roads over the last decade many a time. Towns are deserted, broken, collapsing, emptied. Some places look like a neutron bomb went off a decade before. Broken culture, broken people. 'Vernacular' is a loaded term here; didn't Venturi et al use it in 'Learning from Las Vegas'? Collapse and ruin is more like it. The vernacular today is McDonalds and mobile homes and Walmarts and McMansions

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/05/the-view-from-the-back-row

https://mcmansionhell.com/

Thanks for the link. Although it set me off on a tangent, some nice photos of interesting buildings.
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That Current Affairs article was very interesting and sad !

The buildings in the OP post are great to look at - love the Miss. and Alabama structures
 
The pictures are interesting, and these types of images are common. I do not consider them disaster "porn", tragic, or sad. These represent the way of all things, everywhere: Things made from other things will eventually deteriorate, naturally. Whether you leave them up, sweep them out by demolition, gentrify or refurbish them, it's all the same.

Like these buildings, as we age, it will be nice to have some photos for others to appreciate, even if we no longer have that youthful sheen. Hardly tragic. Rather, its natural.
 
The revolving land use culture.
I have first known revision. A.k.a. "Walker Evans. American Photographs"
 
Times change - these buildings should be seen, before they disappear. I have captured many in my current city which have been knocked down only a year or two later.

Capturing them and sharing them is not the depressing part, the depressing part is that they were allowed to get into such a state in the first place.

As society changes being able to sustain a life outside of a major city has steadily gotten harder and people move away for opportunity.

Central Illinois is full of decay, and it doesn't take much effort to find it, I am guessing most of small town USA is the same.
 
These buildings are in surprisingly good shape. I took up large format photography to document these types of buildings. Typically they are vandalised.
 
Geez, lighten up, and tone down the snark a little. They’re backroads because the Interstates sucked all the life out of the towns pictured, more or less. People moved away, went with the jobs that the Interstates siphoned off, and they left the buildings behind because it was inconvenient to carry them with. And they don’t come back every month to touch up the paint, and mow the yard. Hence, “decay.”

I’ve spent a lifetime traveling roads just like those in the Guardian article, because it is my strong preference. The people are friendlier, generally. They are not nearly as “hopeless” as the narrative from people who live in Boston like to believe. I grew up in places not too different from those pictured in the lead article. Rural poverty is nowhere near as hopeless as urban poverty; just as poor, often more so, but without the self pity and generalized despair. Some places are grim, most are just poor by standards of others.
And broken down buildings are not necessarily as much a symbol of something deserving as much angst as people who tend to be nothing but feelings like to......feel. And many of the architectural choices seen on backroads isn’t bad taste as much as the result of someone with a sense of humor, though oftimes that distinction isn’t clear. But, thankfully, for some of us, a trip down America’s backroads isn’t a succession of one Walter Gropius nightmare after another.

And, as ways to travel go, backroads are much more interesting to travel on than the Interstates. I’m ending up a 1,500 mile road trip tomorrow, the fourth different one to different areas I’ve taken since last April. I often take photos of unusual buildings, but studiously avoid taking photos of honest people in rural coffee shops and diners who might be smarmingly dismissed as rubes, because of the way they dress or do their hair, by self aggrandizing twits with lifetime sinecures at the New Yorker. The whole “underbelly” of the U.S. trope is as tedious as it is false.
Some of the stuff out here on the highways no one goes on any more is beautiful even if deserted, sometimes even more so, in its own way. You give people the freedom to do what they want with their own property and their own lives, and this is what you get, you don’t get Switzerland. But, there are always those tsk-tsking when driving by the 80 acre farms with 23 rusted deSotos in the yard, always a cohort of those whose secret wish is for the country to be governed by a gigantic Homeowners Association run by Karens. Clean this junk up, maybe add some windowboxes. Albert Speer might help. Everything ship-shape and presentable.

I don’t look as good as I did in 1950 either. Decay isn't always “avoidable.” The Acropolis was an untidy mess last time I was there.
 
Larry Cloetta said:
Geez, lighten up, and tone down the snark a little. They’re backroads because the Interstates sucked all the life out of the towns pictured, more or less. People moved away, went with the jobs that the Interstates siphoned off, and they left the buildings behind because it was inconvenient to carry them with. And they don’t come back every month to touch up the paint, and mow the yard. Hence, “decay.”

I’ve spent a lifetime traveling roads just like those in the Guardian article, because it is my strong preference. The people are friendlier, generally. They are not nearly as “hopeless” as the narrative from people who live in Boston like to believe. I grew up in places not too different from those pictured in the lead article. Rural poverty is nowhere near as hopeless as urban poverty; just as poor, often more so, but without the self pity and generalized despair. Some places are grim, most are just poor by standards of others.
And broken down buildings are not necessarily as much a symbol of something deserving as much angst as people who tend to be nothing but feelings like to......feel. And many of the architectural choices seen on backroads isn’t bad taste as much as the result of someone with a sense of humor, though oftimes that distinction isn’t clear. But, thankfully, for some of us, a trip down America’s backroads isn’t a succession of one Walter Gropius nightmare after another.

And, as ways to travel go, backroads are much more interesting to travel on than the Interstates. I’m ending up a 1,500 mile road trip tomorrow, the fourth different one to different areas I’ve taken since last April. I often take photos of unusual buildings, but studiously avoid taking photos of honest people in rural coffee shops and diners who might be smarmingly dismissed as rubes, because of the way they dress or do their hair, by self aggrandizing twits with lifetime sinecures at the New Yorker. The whole “underbelly” of the U.S. trope is as tedious as it is false.
Some of the stuff out here on the highways no one goes on any more is beautiful even if deserted, sometimes even more so, in its own way. You give people the freedom to do what they want with their own property and their own lives, and this is what you get, you don’t get Switzerland. But, there are always those tsk-tsking when driving by the 80 acre farms with 23 rusted deSotos in the yard, always a cohort of those whose secret wish is for the country to be governed by a gigantic Homeowners Association run by Karens. Clean this junk up, maybe add some windowboxes. Albert Speer might help. Everything ship-shape and presentable.

I don’t look as good as I did in 1950 either. Decay isn't always “avoidable.” The Acropolis was an untidy mess last time I was there.
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Well said Larry .
I enjoyed the article but some of the comments ....
This board is getting grumpy in its old age and isn`t as much fun to visit as it once was .
 
Striking contrast between the "clinicalness" of digital and the history of the subject. So the parallel universe for me was their default jpeg profile and their snapshot framing. A disposable film camera would be much more fitting, unless that was their intent of course. But in that case (personally) it was not an effective execution (or was it?).
 
Fifty years ago, almost every small town in America, especially in the south, had a textile mill, farming co-op, machine shop etc that allowed a subsistence level living for residents. As Ross Perot used to say, that "giant sucking sound" was all of those jobs being sucked out of America through greed, a desire for more profit through less involvement and cost. So now, small town America just isn't viable as a place to survive, especially with a family. I started taking pictures of that way of life back then because it was clear that all I knew growing up was being pushed aside.
 
I suppose you'll be able to find this wonky, homegrown anti-architecture in any country without a building code. Some of the architecture in the link reminds me of rural Ukraine. Cheers, OtL
 
I enjoyed the photos~ Thank You for the link !

Good on You to those who may
~ take on the love and task of restoration
~ marvel at history / architecture, the simple life, days of old, adding Grace & Dignity to a not so good situation
 
Thanks for linking to this. Larry makes some good points too. I spent birth to age 14 in a small rural town, then our family moved to a suburban university town. In some respects it was perfect: Boys' Life magazines until 14, then the full panoply of the '60s when I was (barely) old enough to appreciate and enjoy it. I think we need to pay attention to the emptying out of large swaths of the country. Many of these places have a lot going for them, and relocated businesses, at least of some sorts, would probably be happy with the workforce they could find there.

It is getting harder and harder to make a middle class living in small towns. Thus, they are shrinking and deteriorating. In some cases, these towns and their old buildings get bought and renovated. This seems to happen here on the East Coast often as small towns transition from places with a local economy and a population that includes poor and middle class residents to places for second homes. It is good to see Victorian houses go from tired to show places and thus be preserved. It is not so good to see families that have lived in a town for generations priced out by wealthy professionals from nearby cities. The natives then transition to being the help: lawn mowers, food service employees, real estate agents, etc. Factories and even farms deemed unpleasant by the new second homers are banished. But the locals can at least continue to put food on the table, while living in an area where they want to live. This has happened with a vengeance to my first hometown.
 
I live in a desirable location by the mountains where, as you say, the affluent are moving after retirement. Wages here are, by and large, too low for offspring of long-termers to afford housing. City fathers are bulldozing many of our old and historical buildings for condos etc. Much of the "flavor" that defined this area has been paved over. We are in the middle stages of what has happened in many other parts of the country - plastic housing for the future "service workers."

If you want to remember the houses and buildings made by "artisans," your better get busy and photograph them now.
 
Franko said:
Fifty years ago, almost every small town in America, especially in the south, had a textile mill, farming co-op, machine shop etc that allowed a subsistence level living for residents. As Ross Perot used to say, that "giant sucking sound" was all of those jobs being sucked out of America through greed, a desire for more profit through less involvement and cost. So now, small town America just isn't viable as a place to survive, especially with a family. I started taking pictures of that way of life back then because it was clear that all I knew growing up was being pushed aside.
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Reflecting on this: I recently made a post-vaccination trip to visit old friends (also well into postvaccination) in our mutual hometown on the North Carolina coast. I chose an auto route my parents used in the 1950s-70s for family visits to my mother’s parents—in the area where, coincidentally, I now reside.

I stopped several times along old highways 211 and 87 and 74 and 133 to photograph crossroads, main streets, bridges, storefronts, arcades I’d seen traveling as a child in the backseat. Three things struck me.

1/Some of these settlements were now what I call “deadlands,” (and clearly have been, for the decades beyond my backseat Chevy Impala drive-through childhood, when I lived across the continent): abandoned homes, shops, corn silos, storehouses, train sidings. Drivers sped through, some probably to jobs at the vast Smithfield pork factory near Tar Heel, or the chicken processing plants, but for me the opportunity was solely to photographically wonder at the evidence of abandonment. Settlements can die. This is not surprising to me at 68, when nearly all of those I traveled with or was carried to see are long dead. But there is a different sort of heart-piercing that comes of seeing the deathly abandonment of what were once way-stations, places with people and town-limit signs, in a perennial childhood pilgrimage.

2/In the still-functional towns—seats of county government, water-tourism destinations along the Cape Fear River shed, centers for agricultural/ livestock/hardware supplies—, the empty storefronts, vacant sidewalk arcades and shuttered buildings seem to signal white flight in its various forms. But in the one live storefront the street with five empties, or in another repurposed building near the two that are closed, is the tienda, the llantera, the panaderia, the farmacia for phone cards, birthday cards, sending money to Oaxaca. They may be towns white kids left to get a city education and job (and Walmart still hasn’t arrived to displace the rest of the old economies), but they’re also towns where Hispanic immigrants are still arriving to start a business and own a home.

3/The more that workers in a post-pandemic world work remotely, the more likely these more or less abandoned places will repopulate, rebuild, expand in ways we (the aging snarks, curmudgeons, and wits of RFF) will find unrecognizable if we drive through it at all. I hope I don’t sound cynical. 250 years ago, along the route I drove or was driven, Scottish highlanders were settling. Imagine my family in their eyes, magically flying past in a 1960 red Impala, or me two weeks since in my little blue Miata. Like aliens in spacecraft. When the highlanders arrived in NC in the 1730s, white folks numbered in the thousands. In 1960, there were over 4 million. Now there are 10 million. The mystery may be that there are any abandonments that have been been rebuilt and infilled, but this is a vast country with many backroads still, thank heaven or whatever you wish, for your photographic rambles.

Our ground time here is brief and getting briefer the closer it approaches eternity. I enjoyed the formal frontal color portraits of those backroads survivors, like the church converted to car mechanic shop converted to icon, and I appreciated the photographers’ approach for being non-rhetorical, unjudgmental, straightforward. And I hope to see more backroad photojournals from everyone here.
 
I enjoyed the photos, thanks for posting and have enjoyed the discussion. Life is full of ebbs and flows and very little here in the United States has the permanence (or transcendence) of older cultures/civilizations.

In my direct family tree, I'm the first to grow up middle class and not on a farm that required significant manual labor and/or pack animals. Different cultures measure value and success in different means. As one of my great uncles said, "We were healthy, we had our family, a home, our church and momma and daddy always were able to provide food for us. We had no idea that we were considered poor." They were exceedingly poor in material wealth and the ability to even save meager amounts during subsistence living was limited, but they were and still are (for those still living) wealthy beyond measure in their relationships with others.

I still have some family members that live in the country out there on backroads (and I've tried to get back but keep getting beat out by higher/faster bidders). Economic realities of making a living out there in much of the middle are just as tough now as they were then, it's just that there was so little prosperity for a long time to leave such a visible amount of decay to photograph/see. There are still sections of our family farm where you kind find old bits of brick/nails/wire/ceramics/etc. from the late 1800's in the soil if you look for it. Most older buildings that would have been at end of life would have been recycled/upcycled/burned for fuel instead of being left to decay.
 
I have a visual affection for derelict structures. The photos in the link show a history that provides character while potentially stirring reminiscence or raising intriguing questions. You don’t need to travel to the ‘hinterlands’ to find the ruins, cities obviously have their share, but the forms differ, as then do the visceral reactions created upon viewing.

Yes, the proverbial ‘time moves on’, but certainly, depending on the structure viewed, a sort of sadness or sympathy is also one legitimate response, given that you might be viewing the loss of someone’s lifetime dream, ravaged prematurely by the Darwinist dictatorship of plutocratic capitalism, which, within itself, hardly confers freedom in its fullest sense. Let’s not kid ourselves (but we already have, and that’s a major part of the problem).

And when you travel through the wreck of cities or small towns, a socioeconomic variable must therefore be considered, one that is not merely defined by the misplaced or self-aggrandizing narrative of urban elites.

To be sure, the true issue is not the rusted Dodge on cinder blocks or ‘bumpkin’ stereotypes, of which the cosmopolitan is often guilty.

Meanwhile, an ongoing opioid epidemic has literally laid waste to thousands of lives across the Heartland. The rural had no problem vilifying the ‘urban’ crack epidemic, now it’s their turn to run for sympathetic excuses.

Again, for me, derelict structures, in general, often elicit an emotive and aesthetic response that I find fascinating and reflective in terms as both person and photographer. And I enjoy American kitsch, as some would call it, others, perhaps not so kindly. Really, who could deny the compelling soul of Route 66, right? So yes, in some cases, there is humor, there is individuality, there is history, and there is even the tale of progress amidst such dilapidation.

Even so, to completely romanticize these relics or disregard their possible lessons, especially when viewing in total, and especially when assessing economically, is to ignore a certain brutality, that, in part, has divided this country since its founding and incited a collective anger strikingly incongruous with a nation that is supposedly a beacon of freedom, equality, and prosperity.

I lived in more than 10 different states; I’m not speaking from some myopic geographic bubble. I’ve also lived outside the country. And while those folks working in big buildings might look down (literally?) on the country folks, such criticisms, ignorance, dismissiveness, and condescension are not streaming down a one-way road.
 
It isn't necessary to travel "backroads America" to see the effects of fifty years of neglect. Anyone from what used to be the industrial heatland (Detroit, Gary, Pittsburg, etc) knows what I mean. There's just as much to photograph there as in Grinder's Switch. Take a look at the work of David Plowden, who made it his life work to photograph just what this thread speaks to.

https://www.davidplowden.com/
 
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