Some new photos from Fort Wayne

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

This the back door to the offices of Doctor Thomas Bunner, a dentist in the small town of Harlan, Indiana. It is on State Road 37, just east of Antwerp Road.

I thought it interesting that Dr. Bunner's American flag is in a display case on the side of the building, rather than hanging in the window or from a flagpole.

I photographed it last Saturday.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Here's another photograph of the old 19th Century brick farmhouse on Winchester Road in Fort Wayne. I recently found out that this house, 50 years ago, had belonged to one of my grandfather Charles Crawford's oldest friends.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

This is on the front of Gas City Victory Lanes, a bowling alley on Main Street in the small town of Gas City, Indiana. The flag is painted metal, and the bald eagle is handpainted wood. This kind of folk art is common in Indiana.

I photographed it Wednesday evening.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

This building is on Smith Street (State Road 32), the main road through the small town of Yorktown, Indiana.​

Multistory brick commercial buildings with storefronts on the first floor are a common sight on "Main Street" in Indiana's small towns. Many of them are in poor condition, but this one appears to have been renovated recently.​

Yorktown is just west of Muncie, in Delaware County. I made this photograph Wednesday afternoon.
​

 

[Anthony Harvey]

A great set of photos, Chris. I always look forward to seeing your work.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

I found this closed business, with its broken windows covered in Anti-Obama slogans, in the small town of Hicksville, Ohio. It is on the south side of High Street (State Route 49 and State Route 2), across from Hicksville Grain.​

The biggest of the slogans, "One Big Ass Mistake America," is a common one, often seen on bumper stickers. The initials spell "O.B.A.M.A." The window also has a bumper sticker on it that says, "Obama: Impeach Him."​

One of the messages on the window is hard to read because of the broken part of the window obscuring part of it, but it appears to say "Get a handgun permit."​

The "Support Arizona" line refers to the efforts of some elected officials in Arizona's state government to 'prove' that President Obama was not really born in the United States.​

I photographed it last Saturday.

 

[kbg32]

Nice work Chris.

 

[JoeV]

Great stuff, Chris. I like that the word "suport" was mispelled.

~Joe

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

This is across the street from the building with the anti-Obama slogans in Hicksville, Ohio.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Tuesday evening, I noticed that there were several displays like this at one of the Walmart Supercenter stores in Fort Wayne. The box proclaims that Walmart is investing in American jobs by selling American made products, including the paper towels shown here.​

When the first Walmart opened in Fort Wayne more than 20 years ago, the stores were full of signs touting the company's committment to selling American made goods. The signs often featured a product along with a statement of how many American jobs were created by Walmart selling the item.​

Those signs eventually went away, and in recent years Walmart has developed a reputation as a company that sold only Chinese made goods. That's never been entirely true, since most grocery items (both food and household cleaning products) sold in the United States are still made here. The non-grocery departments, however, have become places where it is hard to find American made products. That is, unfortunately, true of most retail chains, though Walmart has gotten most of the bad press about it.​

A lot of people ask me why I care about buying American made products. I have never worked in a factory, nor has anyone in my family during my lifetime. What most people don't understand is that a country that produces nothing is not really wealthy, and a poor country cannot support artists and other intellectuals.​

In addition, I worry about the future of my students. They can't all by engineers and financial analysts. There aren't enough of those jobs, and many people can't do them anyway. That doesn't mean they deserve to be left in poverty. They deserve a decent life, and that can only come when our country begins making things again.​

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

This is an abandoned church on the southeast corner of Maple Street and Smith Street (facing Maple) in the small town of Hicksville, Ohio. I thought the stop sign inside the front doors was odd.​

There were a group of local people hanging out across the street who said it had never been used as a church during their lifetimes (they were in their early 20s), but that it had once been used as a Halloween haunted house attraction.​

One of the guys I talked to didn’t have a shirt on, and his arms and chest were covered in white supremacist tattoos, including a large swastika and Nazi eagle.

I photographed it a couple weeks ago, the same day I photographed the building in Hicksville with all of the anti-Obama stuff on it.
​

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Last Thursday, I photographed this railroad car sitting alone on a siding near a factory in Allen County, east of the town of New Haven, Indiana. I was standing on Edgerton Road, looking south.

All day long, there had been heavy rain, but I stopped here during a brief lull in the downpour, only to get rained on as I was setting up the camera. In a large print, the streaks of rain are visible in the air in front of the railcar!

Railcar graffiti has always fascinated me because so much of it is done on a very large scale, covering the entire side of a large railcar, as you see on this one. Many of them are much more elaborate designs. This is something that would have taken a lot of time to execute. How the Hell does someone put in such time and effort and escape being seen doing it, and why do it in the first place?

 

[Rob-F]

I've seen the name Reznor" on space heaters before. I don't know why they would have their name on that kind of railcar, though.

Nice work, Chris.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

I've seen the name Reznor" on space heaters before. I don't know why they would have their name on that kind of railcar, though.

Nice work, Chris.

Maybe its the vandal's last name? Reznor is a manufacturer of industrial heaters, but my first thought on seeing the name was Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails!

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

I photographed this cornfield looking east from Sampson Road. Dawkins Road is to the right, and the railroad tracks that run north of Dawkins Road are on the left.

This was a few minutes before I photographed the "Reznor" railcar, which was a couple miles west of this place.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Sara's is a locally owned restaurant that opened back in 2003 in a former Captain D's Seafood location at the Village at Coventry Shopping Center in Fort Wayne, Indiana.​

The restaurant, owned by an immigrant family, is decorated in a patriotic theme that celebrates American history. I haven't had a chance to photograph the inside yet, but their menu (opens as a PDF from their website) shows off the owners' feelings about their adopted country pretty well!​

 

[mfunnell]

A pair of expired parking meters adorn Archie Arnold's tombstone at the Scipio Cemetery in rural Allen County's Scipio Township.

Mr. Arnold, who was born in 1920, and died in 1982, certainly had a sense of humor! He was dying from liver disease when he damaged two parking meters in a traffic accident. After paying to replace them, he asked to keep the damaged ones, which he repainted and kept for his grave.

​

He wrote them into his will, requiring his family to mount the expired parking meters on his headstone!​

I think I would have liked Archie Arnold!

Great photos, and stories, as always Chris.

...Mike
​

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

I think I would have liked Archie Arnold!

Great photos, and stories, as always Chris.

...Mike
[/left]

I think he'd have been a cool guy. I was 7 years old when he died. Long time ago, but he's left a little something that's made people who never knew him remember that he had lived.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

The area around West Main Street used to be a major industrial area in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Today, most of the old factories are gone. The neighborhood that once housed the workers is now impoverished.​

The Ward Corporation, which occupies several ancient 19th Century brick industrial buildings on the north side of West Main is one of the few industrial businesses left in the area. This building, on the east side of Growth Avenue, houses the company's offices.

I photographed it yesterday afternoon.
​

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

Every year, my son and I go to the annual Fourth of July fireworks show in Fort Wayne, Indiana. In 2015, the fireworks were fired from atop one of the downtown skyscrapers, making them visible all over the central city. The Courthouse Green was full of people, as it is one of the closest places that spectators are allowed.​

I enjoy the fireworks show, but I am much more interested in photographing the people than I am in photographing the fireworks. As we were walking around the Courthouse Green, we noticed a tiny hot-air balloon soaring up from the crowd.​

I found the group of teens who had sent it up; they were getting ready to launch two more of them. I photographed both launches; and this series of photographs is from the first of them, a yellow balloon.​

The balloons were very simple. A plastic bag with a package of paper suspended in the opening at the bottom. You ignite the paper, and the fire heats the air inside, making the balloon fly. Eventually, it burns out and falls. The father of one of the kids said the he bought them at one of the ubiquitous fireworks stores that spring up all over Fort Wayne each summer.​