Some new photos from Fort Wayne

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Another from the archives. I shot this in the late 1990s.
 
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Founded in 1914, Fort Wayne's Famous Coney Island Hot Dogs is the oldest restaurant in the city. It has been in the same downtown building on Main Street since it opened 98 years ago. Very little has changed at Coney Island in that time. My grandpa used to talk about eating there with his father in the 1930s, and he said that the tables and chairs are the same ones they had back then! I photographed it yesterday evening.
 
Love the "Don't text and drive" sign - wry, dry humour. I guess (as someone from somewhere that didn't have them) a spiritual successor to the Burma Shave signs?

Adrian
 
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The old woman who lives in this house on Taylor Street in Fort Wayne told me that her son, a disabled veteran, hung the big American flag on their front porch. I photographed it yesterday afternoon.
 
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I did these two landscapes outside Fort Wayne last night, just a few minutes apart from the same spot on Pleasant Center Road in rural Allen County, Indiana. I was facing west for the first, east for the second.
 
Chriscrawfordphoto said:
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An early one from my collection; I shot this is 2003. I have photographed these trees for many years.

I drove past the place where the trees stood on the morning of September 2, 2009, and saw that they were gone! The land was torn up all around them, and machines were digging out the field to create a deep hole. The National Serv-All Landfill is located north of the field that the trees stood in, and the dump is now expanding onto that land as well.
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There are many places that I pass and decide to photograph once the light is better, or a tree has grown taller, or during another time of the year. Sometimes it happens that something puts an end to those plans before you have exposed a single frame. You had a good thing there, sad to hear the trees are gone.
 
Lss said:
There are many places that I pass and decide to photograph once the light is better, or a tree has grown taller, or during another time of the year. Sometimes it happens that something puts an end to those plans before you have exposed a single frame. You had a good thing there, sad to hear the trees are gone.
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I've lost a lot of photos by having to wait for better light, or not having time to stop, etc. I'm glad I was able to photograph these trees for so long.
 
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I just scanned this negative from 2008.

I found this ancient GE television an abandoned farmhouse at the corner of Airport Expressway and Coverdale Road, near Fort Wayne International Airport, in southwest Allen County, Indiana.

When I photographed the house the first time, in 2002, it was locked up, so I only photographed the outside. Years later, I went back and the doors were all open. The inside was full of interesting things. It was demolished in 2011.
 
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This is the summer kitchen behind the house at the abandoned sheep farm on Pleasant Center Road, east of Bluffton Road, on the southern edge of Allen County, Indiana. Summer kitchens are small buildings that were once used for cooking in the summer, so that the house would not get too hot inside from the wood-burning stoves and ovens used in the 19th century.

The old bed springs are nearly identical to those on my antique brass bed, which is over 100 years old.
 
The kitchen photo is really great. I have a keen interest in photography documenting bygoing eras. On vacations I like to visit western ghost towns. My wife finds that to be very strange!

I would love to be able to photograph insides of such houses and am surprised they are not vandalized!

By the way great tones!
 
Rayt said:
The kitchen photo is really great. I have a keen interest in photography documenting bygoing eras. On vacations I like to visit western ghost towns. My wife finds that to be very strange!

I would love to be able to photograph insides of such houses and am surprised they are not vandalized!

By the way great tones!
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Thanks Ray. The abandoned houses I find in rural areas of Indiana vary in condition. Some are badly vandalized, some are just badly deteriorated from decades of neglect, and some are in relatively nice condition. Many have pieces of furniture, curtains, and even small personal possessions (like the dolls I found in the house I documented as the "Doll House"). I wonder why they abandoned the houses instead of selling them to someone who would live in them. I wonder why they leave stuff behind when they do move out.

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Glad you are keeping it up Chris, admirable tenacity you show in all what you do. Your son is lucky to have you.
 
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The rural areas outside Fort Wayne were shrouded in heavy fog on the mornings of September 4th and 5th, 2012. I went out with my camera on both mornings, after taking my son to school. This cornfield is at the corner of Lower Huntington Road in southwest Allen County, Indiana. I shot this one on the 4th.
 
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