European Health Spa

For years, we've been driving down Westchester County's Central Park Avenue, and I've told myself that one day, I'd stop and take photos of the European Health Spa in Scarsdale. Last month, that day finally came. Husband, daughter, and I had a surprisingly good time for an exploration that wasn't natural in its nature and one that we explored in a surface way. As you can see below, daughter now likes to imitate the gestures of statues, which is what really made this pit stop interesting. And, of course, getting her in a "No Trespassing" photo. It's obvious that at one point, the European Health Spa was "visionary" for its creative use of architecture on a strip mall street. But now plants have taken over in much of the inside, and upon a closer look, that fantastic statue is plastic. No wonder it hasn't been taken by vandals. I found a post about this abandoned site dated 2004. I'm curious to see how long it will be before this buiding actually gets demo'd.

2009's UE book of the year

If you're interested in urban exploration literature, you're already aware of Christopher Payne's photography book Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals. Released in late September (2009) by The MIT Press, Asylum seemed to attract more publicity due to its inclusion of an Oliver Sacks essay, but Amazon states that it also won the 2010 Ken Book Award presented by the National Alliance on Mental Illness of New York City Metro (NAMI-NYC Metro). For UE literature followers, it seems to be furthering the trend of UE subject-themed works, ie: photos featuring cans containing cremated human remains, gas station photo essays, and online visual encyclopedias of abandoned theaters.

Although part of UE photography is undeniably the beauty of ruins, there is a significant benefit derived from these subject-themed works. UE photography is shifting from being viewed as an artistic aesthetic and being used as a historical resource.

These UE subject-themed works are serving as journalism, but one that's aesthetically pleasing. Documenting ruins is now valued on a more mainstream level. Like any other genre of photography, the photographer engages in the activity for a variety of reasons; it might be about the modernist aesthetics to one; the photographic act for another. But documentation of what once was is arguably the most important aspect.

Oliver Sacks addresses this topic in the last, lengthy paragraph of his essay. Most of the essay provides a context only possible with works: the history of lunatic asylums, institutionalization, deinstitutionalization. But in his last paragraph, he states "One must not be too romantic about madness, or the madhouses in which the insane were confined...Payne is a visual poet as as well as an architect in training...His photographs are beautiful images in their own right, and they also pay tribute to a sort of public architecture that no longer exists. They focus both on the monumental and the mundane, the grand facades and the peeling paint."

Payne's essay provides a more specific context for the reader. He spends quite a bit of time explaining "the Kirkbride Plan", illustrating it with a four-part photograph and the floorplan of Massachusetts' Danvers Hospital. (The Kirkbride Plan is a design that was used by many mental hospitals and consists of a central administration building with numerous attached pavilions, built in a V formation.) Paynes' "Afterword" is a more personal recount of his experiences and includes beautiful photos of Danvers' demolition. Within the photos, Payne adds a few words as well; his paragraph about "The Quintessential View" is wonderful.

But what of the photos? As expected, they're provoking, thoughtful, and pleasing. A combination of exterior and interior shots, black & white and color photography, they show both the absence and presence of the patients. The buildings have a physical grandeur and importance that conflicts with their abandonment.

So, Asylum is 2009's UE book of the year, mostly because it is one of the few UE books to get mainstream recognition but also because it sheds light on what UE photography often means to the reader and viewer: an edgy, catchy, easy way to learn our history.

A couple of related links:

The New York Times' David W. Dunlap has a nice summary of the book, along with a slide show.

Amazon is so huge now that it's often accurate in regards to rare, out-of-print books. And the customer reviews are pretty great. This details Payne's previous book.

Sewell Chan's article focuses on Queens' Creedmoor Psychiatric Center.

Payne's photographic series on North Brother Island can be accessed here on his official website.

my 2010 calendar

For the last couple of years, my wall calendar of choice has been the Environmental Art calendars from greenmuseum.org . Unless environmental art is your expertise, there are many relatively unknown artworks highlighted (one per month). Greenmuseum.org is also a wonderful museum site featuring the work of many. (Of note, Greenmuseum.org does indeed exist only online.)

Environmental art is more than Andy Goldsworthy, Robert Smithson, and Christo, and a lot of the work is much more complex. Some of the pieces featured in the 2010 calendar hit on an immediate and seemingly uncomplicated level: for example, Nicole Dextras' Yucca Prom Dress (2005) and Ilkka Halso's Rollercoaster (2004) (which, for the record, I find fascinating).

My favorite work in the 2010 calendar is multi-layered, ie: hits on the "immediate" level but also has numerous other concepts, statements, and implications within the work. Gilles Bruni and Marc Babarit's The Greenhouse and the Shed (2002) is March's art of choice, but I couldn't wait until March to post about it, as I sit here in January in New York and dream about springtime and walking in a green great outdoors.

I'm including the text included in the calendar; as you'll see, there's a lot of information about the art in the calendar in addition to the provocative artworks and photography. If you like to intepret art without any commentary whatsoever, stop reading now and avoid the spoilers....

The Greenhouse and the Shed
Gilles Bruni and Marc Babarit, dead Picea abies cones, boughts and branches, Corylus avellana branches, wire, stones, horticultural protective netting, Val di Sella forest, Italy, 2002.

For nearly twenty years, French artists Gilles Bruni and Marc Babarit have collaborated on experimental outdoor installations, combining agriculture, ecology, architecture and photography. A fallen Norway spruce tree on a slop of the Val di Sella forest in Italy provided them with an unexpected temporary world to explore and transform.

"We are 'sentenced' to share with the plants, the ladybug, the rat, the cloud that passes by, the night that falls, the cold, the rain," the artists say. "Thus we think that we have to find the ways toward a renegotiation of our relationships to the world, and that this renegotiation can, in particular, be done through art: we never actually work in neutral places, we have to take into account a third party with whom we must compromise."

On this Italian forest hillside, death created a space for rebirth, allowing the artists to propose a new order: "casting a net over the summit to protect the planting, protecting the cones to fertilize the compost."

Once the planting and protective structures were almost complete, "after waiting for clouds to appear, on a heavy but clear day in the valley," they took this final photograph, giving the tree another way to live on beyond the forest.

children's book recommendations

Children are curious, inquisitive, and constantly on the lookout for new people, places, things, and ideas. Most parents love this aspect of raising children, as do I. This exploration encompasses everything in our seen and unseen world, so it makes sense that there would be a few children's books that touch upon urban exploration, even in tangential ways.

In A Curious Garden, (2009) by Peter Brown, a young boy named Liam unwittingly changes a "very dreary" city into a green utopia by exploring an abandoned elevated railway track and turning it into a garden.

He was wandering around the old railway, as he did from time to time, when he stumbled upon a dark stairwell leading up to the tracks. The railway had stopped working ages ago. And since Liam had always wanted to explore the tracks, there was only one thing for the curious boy to do. Liam ran up the stairs, pushed open the door, and stepped out onto the railway.

Inspired greatly by NYC's High Line, The Curious Garden encourages children to explore, to do, and to enjoy the great outdoors. I plan on reading this book to Charlotte until she understands its messages. The illustrations are quite wonderful, including the old dreary "before" scenes.

Up Above & Down Below (2006) by Sue Redding is a book that my nineteen month-old will have to grow into, as she doesn't yet understand that there is something "below" every visible "above" world. Many above/below scenarios are illustrated (in a fresh, modern way), in both the man-made (city streets/subway platform; theater stage/under the stage) and natural (the Arctic/water below the ice; jungle/ground) environments. I hope to see the look on Charlotte's face as she finally understands the under/above concept, and I hope that it doesn't involve monsters underneath her bed.

The most frequent type of children's urban exploration book would have to be "animals-in-architecture" genre, as I've found two of these books so far. Architecture ANIMALS (1995) by Michael J. Crosbie and Steve Rosenthal is a board book with photos and accompanying poems for animals depicted in architecture country-wide. For example, The Owl Cafe in Albuquerque, New Mexico is photographed, and its accompanying poem reads:

Who lives in the desert/In company most fowl/Who watches in neon/Who indeed, this horned owl.

An elephant, duck, swan, stork, squirrel, and walruses are among the other found animals.

Urban Animals (2009) by Isabel Hill differentiates itself by featuring sites only in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Two photos for each site are included, one showing the the animal on the building's facade and then a close-up of the depicted animal. The poetic text itself also provides context:

Over an entrance they shimmer and glow, art deco seahorses stand in a row.
Even if you're "stuck" inside with your dear child, you can share a sense of exploration. Until, of course, they're old enough to go on a physical exploration with you to some of these sites or others.

visiting The Christmas House

When I was young, one of my favorite Christmas activities was going to this Christmas building in New Jersey. Everything was Christmas, and it was about a half hour of walking through Christmas scene after Christmas scene. My grandparents took my brother and I, so it was also "dress up" day. After all, you couldn't go to the Christmas building without dressing up in your best outfit!


So it made me very happy to find the Bronx version of my Christmas building, and that is The Christmas House, located in Pelham Gardens. I've been noticing The Christmas House for years now; even when it's not Christmas season, the pink paint and styling is seen, and sensed, from about a quarter of a mile away. With a toddler in tow this year, we had to visit it at night, when we could see the house in all its nighttime lighting and glamour.

Unfortunately, not all of the glamour was visible during our visit; since it'd rained a couple of days earlier, there was still a bit of dampness, and one of the family's daughters/installation creators was outside vacuuming the side of the house's concrete pink floor when we arrived. And most of the life-sized figures were wrapped in plastic. There is such an effort made on this installation (each figure repainted every year; $1,000 weekly electricity bills during the viewing season; etc.) that it's only completely visible when there's not a chance that it's going to rain.


Since almost all of the mannequins/models/figures had clear plastic wrap around them, a few questions came to mind: Since this is such an over-the-top, gaudy display, does the plastic wrap actually help me enjoy the installation better? Is this outsider art? Are the people who live here insane? What percentage of people who visit this house think it's beautiful? Why?!

I have a relative who LOVES sculpture that looks like The Christmas House. The over-use of pastel shades conveys delusional optimism. My husband says that the color palette is perhaps Victorian. He also says that a theory recently emerged that Roman statues and sculptures were also brightly painted.


Of course, another obsession illustrated at The Christmas House is the "importance" of celebrities. While talking to the daughter, she matter-of-factly told me "who" was inside, waiting to come out: Michael, Elizabeth, Brigitte, and more. To me, the models partying behind the glass sliding door has always been the most bizarre part of this installation, having nothing to do with Christmas and everything to do with status quo. (The middle-aged daughter also expressed that it would always be "Hollywood".)

I'll be back next year. The daughter gave us the house's phone number so that we could call ahead and find out when all of the mannequins are uncovered and outside, so as not to waste a trip. But I'm just as happy to see them wrapped in plastic, living life fully without regards to time, but physically looking "caught in the past".

would-be P Diddy employees go urban exploring

I work PR for an organization based on urban exploration, and we've received numerous "press requests" over the years.

One of the more non-relevant ones we've recently received was a request from a producer of I Want to Work for Diddy (season 2). I'd seen a few episodes of this show when the request was made, and I had a difficult time imagining how supplying this reality show with a space would be good PR for my organization. Yes, many of our "press requests" are actually requests for our free service of "location scounting" (as if).

So when I saw contestants running through a dark tunnel during a commercial for the show, I knew that this was the segment that we had been called about.

The segment lasted less than five on-air minutes. Each contestant ran through dark tunnels until they found a note from Diddy. This action supposedly showed Diddy each person's commitment and ability to get through a "scary situation".

It was pretty stupid, and I'm glad we didn't participate.

I'm not including hyperlinks in this blog post. You'll have to Google "I Want to Work for Diddy" to find information on the show.

Concrete Plant Park

A great article about decommissioned train stations in the Bronx ran in yesterday's Times. Three stations were featured: the Westchester Avenue station, the Morris Park station, and the Hunts Point Avenue station. I had already seen the Morris Park and Hunts Point stations in person, so of particular interest was the Westchester Avenue station, which is also the only one that hasn't been functionally recycled in some fashion. (Morris Park is now a gun club, and Hunts Point contains neighborhood retail outlets.)

But the really interesting story was semi-buried and mentioned briefly:

A trip to the Westchester avenue station is worth the cab fare, in part because right next door is Concrete Plant Park, a combination green space and industrial archaeology project that runs along the Bronx River. Two sides of the station are visible from the street, and two sides are visible on the park side, for a 360-degree view of this train wreck of decay.

So, let me get this right -- an abandoned train station and an urban archaeological site in the same place, in the Bronx?! How could I not immediately visit?



(note: This is an easy Bronx location to visit. The park is located right at the Whitlock Avenue subway station on the 6 line; the park entrance itself is at Westchester Avenue and the Sheridan Expressway.)

Concrete Plant Park is a non-typical name for a green space, but it seems that things are headed in a more organic direction when it comes to NYC parks. Just like the High Line, effort was made to preserve a site's uniqueness. Highly-stylized yet organic-looking seating, wildflowers, and the use of stone landscaping create a sense of calm while accentuating the inherent historical industrial component of the locale. Yay, New York City Department of Parks & Recreation!

Of course, a view of a body of water on a sunny day also helps. Looking just beyond the water, a park visitor sees a group of graffiti'd building. In the center of the park are various concrete plant fixtures, recently painted over with RustOleum (or at least that's what it looks like). The Gowanus Canal also came to mind as an aesthetically-similar project.

A lot of stories already detail the acreage and costs associated with this park, which will be part of the Bronx Greenway (our household is eagerly awaiting the completion of this project, so that we can easily bike through bigger swaths of the Bronx and Westchester County). All I want to convey is my feeling of happiness at discovering Concrete Plant Park. Connecting the Hunts Point and Soundview neighborhoods, I hope that the locals see the Park as the gem that it is. Taggers already got one of the chess tables (Really, they can't go after a bigger challenge?! Tagging a table is lame.), and we saw only three people in the park during our visit. (Two walked though the park together and one spent a considerable amount of time taking in his surroundings.) But it seems like a lot of events are held in the park during warmer seasons (there is a kayak launch), and I look forward to returning. A few child-focused details would've been nice, but there's a lot to take in/see/do. Still, the Parks logo located at the top of one of the towers made me chuckle.

Vergara exhibition at the New-York Historical Society

Urban Landscaped readers know that I'm a fan of Camilo José Vergara's photographs and books. Vergara has a distinct viewpoint blending UE photography, sociology, and street photography, and he's author of two of my favorite books American Ruins and Unexpected Chicagoland. But his work hasn't been shown on museum walls for a good couple of years in NYC; I missed that party in the late 1990s and early millennium.

Harlem 1970-2009: Photographs by Camilo José Vergara was up at the New-York Historical Society through last Saturday, July 11th. I saw the show on its last day, or I would've posted earlier.

I had incorrectly assumed that Harlem, 1970-2009 would primarily consist of Vergara's "storefront" series, ie: his shots of the same storefront over a period of time (ie: 2038 5th Avenue 1992, 1996, 1999, 2005). I really like this series and saw him talk about it once over a private lunch gathering at The New York Public Library (and I received a place mat of the above series as a souvenir!). But a lot of this work is available on Vergara's Invincible Cities website, and I wasn't chomping at the bit to see it on the wall.

Instead, Harlem, 1970-2009 demonstrated Vergara's mix of photography with a wide variety of styles and subject matter. (Looking at the dates of the work, it also seems that Vergara might've shot quite a bit specifically for the show.) Storefronts, as the section was called, was a small part of the exhibition and consisted of only six groupings (one of which is reproduced on my place mat). Other sections were titled Transformations, Heart of Harlem, Religion, Landmarks and Benchmarks, Graphics, and Obama. If anything, Vergara tried to cover too much territory, covering forty years of Harlem in the one hundred photos on display.

Street photography started the exhibition in a rather calm, understated way. Thankfully, it was assumed that "Harlem" was a known entity; no paragraphs based on the historical migration of people to its area. Storefronts warmed the viewer up to representation through inanimate objects and landscape. Transformations, my favorite section, followed. Transformations consisted of diptychs and triptychs, mainly slightly aerial, of specific intersections , ie: Frederick Douglass Boulevard between West 134th and West 135th Street (1993 and 2008) and Frederick Douglass and West 143rd Street (1988, 2001, and 2007). Parking lots and independent fish markets give way to office buildings with ground level Duane Reade and Chase Bank locations. It's a zoomed-out version of Storefronts and Vergara's answer to Mark Klett's Rephotographic Survey Project from the late 1970s. (I'm not even close to tiring of rephotography.)

The only weak link in this section was the confusing diptych of Untitled (Harlem Welcomes President Clinton), 2001 and Untitled (Marathon), 2008. While Vergara often doesn't rephotograph in a precise manner (he doesn't take out the GPS like Klett does), these two locales seemed disparate and needed additional information for the viewer. Does this duo convey a divestment of Harlem because the 2008 photo has a boarded-up building in the foreground? I don't know. But I bet that Vergara, who holds an M.A. in Sociology from Columbia, had ideas about this.

Graphics featured murals (not graffiti, which has been featured in many shows recently) and was interesting. But fascinating was Vergara's narrative, in words, accompanying the images. In just a few sentences, Vergara dissected Harlem's mural trends from the last 40 years: 1970s murals were "angrily condemning racism and slavery"; "depictions of deceased drug dealers and their victims were popular" in the 1980s and 1990s. "Today the facades of buildings in Harlem advertise such products as gin, beer, Old Navy clothing, BMW sport cars, sneakers, black TV shows or schools, and rappers." Vergara's conversation with a building superintendent is summarized on a label accompanying a photo of a MLK mural located behind garbage cans (Coincidentally,the two men talked on MLK Day). A recent ad for 50 Cent's Formula 50 water is accompanied by labels claiming that 50 Cent and P Diddy are Harlem's current figureheads.

The Religion section of the exhibition featured photos taken from 2007 through 2009; there were photographs of churches and people (in their Sunday finest). Vergara has done the church beat before (see How the Other Half Worships). "Although there are over 300 congregations in Harlem today, many of the smaller ones have closed or moved, and Harlem is no longer an incubator of struggling churches."

The photographs in Landmarks and Benchmarks were not my favorite of Vergara's work, but there were a lot of interesting Harlem factoids. Do you know what "Koch" windows are? Isn't the Mount Morris Fire Watchtower an interesting structure? Why has the building that housed the Renaissance Ballroom and Casino stayed shuttered since 1979? The photographic highlight was the cross formation of "security" photos, but stylistically, they were very different than the Vergara photos we know, and it was a bit of a turn-off.

The Obama and Sculpture sections were interesting, but the exhibition would not have lacked in their absence. The Heart of Harlem photographs were displayed in the center of the space and were nice street photography shots of electic Harlem residents.

Harlem, 1970-2009: Photographs by Camilo José Vergara displayed a broader style of Vergara's photography; in and of itself, this made the show thought-provoking. Aesthetically, it seemed a bit like a Vergara retrospective (without American Ruins, that is) with the cohesive subject matter of Harlem creating the bonds between different types of photographic works.

While I was in the exhibition space, a group of approximately a dozen sightseers entered the space; most were in their 20's, but a few were older. After about ten minutes of looking at photographs on one side of the room, the tour guide/leader of the group asked the then-seated-and-ignoring-the-show group "What do you want to do?" Several voices responded quickly: "Shopping!" The tour guide was disappointed. "Really?" he asked. After several minutes of conversation about future plans, one 20-something male said, "(Let's) Go to 125th Street." The group left shortly thereafter. Most likely, the group shopped and got to see billboards of 50 Cent and P Diddy. But they probably didn't see Vergara's Harlem, and that's kind of sad.

Image is Vergara's 65 East 125th Street (2007).

Plymouth, Montserrat

I first heard of Montserrat while reading CREEM magazine. Montserrat was the home of AIR Studios, where the English bougeoisie "rock" musicians went to record albums in the 1980s. (The Police, Paul McCartney, and Elton John all recorded there.) Plymouth is the capital of Montserrat and was the only port entry. I missed the news in 1997 when a volcano covered 80% of the city with over 4 feet of lava.

Plymouth is a future archaeological site, although it seems that it would be so cost-prohibitive that the city will most likely never be dug out. It could be a great above-ground urban exploration site, but it is fenced off, due to possible danger of further volcanic action.

Ed brought Plymouth, Montserrat to my attention, so thanks to him for most of the links.

For basic info, start at the Wikipedia entry.

A few photos of the destruction can be seen here.

This page is encouraging tourists to now-safe Montserrat. It provides a nice contrast to the previous photos.

This is a first-person testimonial to vacationing in Montserrat (two different photos of the destruction available). (I like the claim that if one drinks the water of Montserrat, he or she will return to the island.)

Here's a nice Flickr shot of the landscape, taken from the Caribbean sea.

Here's the entire collection of the tagged "Plymouth Montserrat" Flickr photos. This is a great look-through.

Image is of postcard created and photographed by Qule Pejorian and available to share and remix via the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

nostalgia photography

Is taking photos of abandoned places in America too often an act of nostalgia, and if so, what does that mean about the work? Is "urban exploration photography" an excercise in nostalgia?

Vanishing America: the End of Main Street: Diners, Drive-Ins, Donut Shops, and Other Everyday Monuments by photographer Michael Eastman prompts the question. Vanishing America has received rave reviews, and Eastman is often compared to the important and influential photographer Robert Frank.

There seems to be a good-sized group of photographers documenting the America of yesteryear. Sometimes this fits into my definition of urban exploration photography, and sometimes it doesn't. Michael Eastman straddles the dividing line, and in my opinion, it makes his work less spectacular.

Don't get me wrong: Eastman's photographs are quite nice, and his subject matters are worth documenting. But he's doing too much in Vanishing America, in my opinion, and his supposed subject suffers for it.

Eastman divides subject matter into 10 chapters: Theaters, Churches, Hangouts, Doors, Signs, Stores, Services, Automobiles, Hotels, and Restaurants. There are photographers who could fill a book on one of these subjects, and have done so. (Camilo Jose Vergara's How the Other Half Worships for churches; Zoe Leonard's Analogue for storefronts) and many others who have done extensive work documenting the other subjects and could fill a book given the opportunity (Roy Colmers' Doors, NYC, although dated and New York-based, is much more provoking and less architectural).

Having said that, Vanishing America is supposed to be about Main Street, USA. Most of us miss Main Street, I think, from New York City to New Orleans, St. Louis to Tempe, AZ. But are all of these photos really from what was the Main Street in these cities? I have my doubts, and it's a small photo titled "Dinosaur Parts" outside Sedona, Arizona (p87) that reinforces my reasoning. I ride the route from Phoenix to Sedona almost annually, and this doesn't look like the Main Street of Sedona (which is still very much an active Main Street). It looks like new sculptures created to entertain. And "outside Sedona, Arizona" doesn't scream "Main Street". One photo I really like is the "Interior of a Bar, Clarksdale, Missippi", which serves as an unofficial centerfold of the book, printed on two pages (p122-3) and depicting cheap white blinds with marker writing on each slat ("Bananarama 2002"; "Bacon Luvs Da Blues"; "Rhonda W. Cheryl P. 8/20/05"). But it doesn't speak Main Street, and it isn't really from yesteryear, as indicated by visible dates.

Photos like "Fish, Pest Control, & Roofing, Saint Louis Missouri" (p91), "Geller's Shoes, Providence, Rhode Island" (p127), and "Along Highway 1, Guadalupe, California" (p94-5) do indeed support a theory that Main Street ain't what it used to be. But Eastman's desire to include interesting photos overrides his desire to provide a cohesive statement that isn't just nostalgia. Was "Red Building with Coke Sign, Southern Maine" (p190) really on a Main Street? (If so, wow, look at all of those TREES and SPACE.) And the one photo of NYC "Thirsty? (Slated for Demolition), Coney Island, New York" shows off the great Burlesque at the Beach paintings of Fire Eater and Madame Twisto, but this isn't really Main Street on Coney Island; it's a beach and boardwalk development.

Eastman's photos are nice, but the book could've been better by tighter selection and adhering to the thesis. This is nostalgia in full force.

Douglas Brinkley wrote the excellent foreword. so excellent that sections of it stand on their own, despite the constant crowing of Eastman's work.

I'm genetically predisposed to visit the same locales Eastman shares with us in his dreamlike Vanishing America. Where some might find gloom in these anti-Rockwellian photographs, I find a liberation from the glaring rat race of American life.

Or maybe it's best to think of Vanishing America as a book of Sunday photographs, since Sunday is the loneliest day of the week. Like in the Kris Kristofferson song "Sunday Morning Coming Down," I imagine Eastman surveying an empty Main Street while the new-fangled box-store churches on the outskirts of town are full of repenters. The murals he documents are not the kind Thomas Hart Benton erected to promote the vigorousness of Populist America.

I don't agree with everything Brinkley writes ("You're better off building a fire by the side of the road than trying to reclaim one of these hard-luck properties"; "Michael Eastman still needs to photograph your footprints"), but his essay is thought-provoking and ties the photos together in a way the photographs don't do themselves.

I will use Brinkley's voice to make a final critique of Eastman. Brinkley writes "There are no Tennessee waltzes or Texas two-steps vibrating out of these juke joints, no 'Happy Trails' to close out the day at the music hall." I disagree. There's a photo of the interior of the Broken Spoke, a honky tonk music venue in Austin Texas (p44) across from a photo of an unnamed "Dance Hall" (also in Austin, Texas). The Broken Spoke is indeed still very active and heralded venue, and the photo of the "Dance Hall" looks like a nicely upkept place as well. Austin, Texas loves Americana and to say these photos are part of a Vanishing America is simplistic. People are still living this every day (in this case, probably every weekend). The aesthetic might be different than "the norm" (of non-Austin locales), but that doesn't make it Vanished. In fact, these photos indicate that this culture is CURRENT. These photos, and several others, show that along with the REAL photos supporting Eastman's hypothesis, there are photos supporting Eastman's own aesthetic experience of buildings and status quo. Overall, not only is Vanishing America a nostalgic experience, it's a nostalgic experience of Eastman's own thoughts and assumptions, many of which are stereotypical and simplistic.