Some new photos from Fort Wayne

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This door is on a boarded-up storefront on the west side of Third Street in the small town of Burr Oak, Michigan. The sign on the door says: "Private." Third Street is the main business street in this very small town. Most of the storefronts were vacant.
 
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The front of Fort Wayne's Famous Coney Island Hot Dogs in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The grill is in the front window, so you can always see the hot dogs cooking through the front window. I photographed it in the warm light of the early evening, shortly before sunset.

Founded in 1914, Coney Island is the oldest restaurant in the city. It has been in the same downtown building on Main Street since it opened more than a century ago; and has been owned by the same family since 1916.
 
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The 2018 Three Rivers Festival carnival featured a sideshow called World's Strangest People. The banners outside the tent advertised "Freaks Of Nature" including an electric woman, a person with a spider's body, a fire breathing man, a radioactive woman, and a woman who could lift heavy weights with her tongue.

The carny looked bored and lonely that night; few people were buying tickets to his show!

The Three Rivers Festival takes place for 10 days in July at Headwaters Park in downtown Fort Wayne, Indiana.
 
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This former church is located on the corner of Main Street (State Road 101) and Center Street in the small town of Woodburn, Indiana. Built in 1909, it was the home of Woodburn Missionary Church until 1969, when a new church was built just north of the town.
 
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Yesterday morning, soon after sunrise, the clouds in the sky over my neighborhood in Fort Wayne formed beautiful, fast-changing abstract patterns. I made these five photographs of the sky as the wind blew the clouds around and the light changed as the sun rose.
 
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This abandoned one room schoolhouse is in Besancon, Indiana; just east of New Haven on Lincoln Highway (Old US-30).


I have returned to it many times over the years. While setting up the camera and tripod for this photograph, the clouds opened up on me with the hardest rain I have ever seen. I figured the camera was ruined anyway so I quickly shot several frames before running back to my truck.


I could barely see the truck as I ran to it because the rain was so heavy! The Olympus OM-4T I shot it with is weather-sealed, but I had never gotten a camera so completely drenched before. Miraculously, it was unharmed and still works today, almost 20 years later. I made this photo in 2002.
 
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G.I. Joe's Army Surplus has been in this old building on Wells Street for more than 50 years. When I made this photograph in 2002, the store's founder, Marvin Hecht, told me that the soldier mannequin holding the "Open" sign by the door was also named Marvin!
 
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The American flag leaned against the tree is a wooden pallet with the flag painted on it. Pallet flags have become a very popular form of folk art in Indiana.


This place is on O’Day Road, north of Washington Center Road, in rural northwest Allen County, Indiana. I photographed it shortly before sunset on a summer evening.
 
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This abandoned restaurant is on the west side of Hawthorne Road, between Lincoln Highway and Walnut Street, in the small town of Inwood, Indiana.


The old whitewashed brick building has an RC Cola (Royal Crown Cola) sign with the restaurant's name, V & R Country Restaurant, under it. Another sign near the road says the place is called the RC Lunch Room. The RC Cola signs are unique; I have never seen another restaurant with them. Small locally-owned restaurants often have signs provided to them by soda manufacturers, with Pepsi and Coca-Cola being the most common.


Inwood isn't much of a town, just a couple of small streets and a railroad track just south of US-30 in rural Marshall County.
 
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Hometown Pantry was a small locally owned grocery store on the corner of Main Street and Railroad Street in the small town of Antwerp, Ohio.


A sign by the door said the store is going out of business on December 31 (2019). The clerk told that the owner has a full-time job elsewhere and is having trouble running the store and working her other job; so she is closing the store. She needs the other job for medical insurance. The store seemed quite busy while I was in there!


This is the first of six photographs that I made of the store.
 
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The deli counter at Hometown Pantry, a small locally owned grocery store in the small town of Antwerp, Ohio. It went out of business at the end of 2019.
 
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Another photo of Hometown Pantry, the little grocery store in Antwerp, Ohio that closed at the end of 2019.


The store has two rooms. The doorway separating the two rooms has an inscription on the top of the door frame: "With God, All Things Are Possible."
 
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Another photo of Hometown Pantry, the little grocery store in Antwerp, Ohio that closed at the end of 2019.

This little area at the front of the store is the produce department. There wasn't much left aside from a lot of potatoes, some onions, and a few bananas. The store was scheduled to close permanently a couple of weeks after I made this photograph, so stocks were not being replenished.

A "Shop Small" poster, encouraging people to support small locally-owned businesses, hangs in the window.

This is the fifth of seven photographs that I made of the store.
 
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This is the last of the series of photographs that I made of Hometown Pantry, the little grocery store in Antwerp, Ohio. The building is one of the most beautiful that I have seen, but was in badly neglected condition. It is called the Pocock Building.
 
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In September of 2020, I spent a few days in the western part of the state of New York. This photograph of the sun setting over I-90, east of Buffalo in rural Erie County, was the last one that I made there as I was heading back home to Indiana.
 
Retro-Grouch said:
Again you've done it, Chris. The photos of Hometown Pantry are poignant and heartbreaking. Lacrimae rerum sunt...
Click to expand...
Thanks. The really sad thing is that the store seemed to be doing ok. The owner had to work another job because she had health problems and couldn't afford medical insurance unless she worked for a company that provided it. That's a problem I understand; I have been self-employed for many years and also cannot afford insurance.
 
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