About a month ago, I was checking through my news feed on Instagram and found out that there was going to be an Instameet at the Bethlehem SteelStacks on August 3rd. In case you’re not hip to the jam (as the kids are saying these days), and Instameet is, well, people meeting together and Instagramming. […]
Read MoreThanks to several people who have been visiting my To-Do List page and made some great suggestions. It’s terrifically encouraging and it prompts me to get off my sorry duff and research some things my own darn self. Particularly in Philadelphia, which is the nearest major city to where I live. And which I have […]
Read MoreIt was the one word motto of IBM. Simple and brilliant. You could come up with numerous flowery words and phrases that couldn’t sum up that sentiment any better. It flowed from an America that wasn’t near as self-conscious, that did what it did because it wanted to and because something better lay ahead. Friday: […]
Read MoreAs scheduled, demolition of the Hotel Sterling in Wilkes-Barre began on Thursday. Here are my pictures from a month ago from this great old place: Destruction and Rebirth The story in the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader
Read MorePort Motel, Port Trevorton, PA One of the things that I noticed right away is that people tend to respond very positively toward my pictures of motel signs. I found this interesting, and somewhat understandable. We all have some weird visceral response to motels, whether it be through experience or because we watched “Psycho” at […]
Read MoreProbably the heat this week in the Northeast is to be the blame for the following post. In it, Mr. Sanders appears to be under the impression that he is a private detective of some sort. It was believed to have been written during the throes of a fever dream. The heat was hot. It […]
Read MoreThe difficulty of sign photography is almost always positioning. Very often, older signs like the ones I target were created with maximum visibility from the road in mind, rather than from a sidewalk, or even across the road. I ran into this a few months ago when I tried to get the Jones’ Humdinger sign […]
Read MoreWhen last we met, we were in Milford, Pennsylvania, basking in the glow of the early morning neon while on our way to my wife’s ancestral home in the Catskills. Still traveling the back roads into the town of Matamoras, we crossed the Delaware in to New York. The bridge to the town of Port […]
Read MoreMy wife grew up on a farm in Central Pennsylvania, but before her family moved there, they lived in the Catskill region of New York. She was born in a hospital in Monticello, and for the first two years of her life she lived in an old house that sat along the banks of the […]
Read MoreOriginally, when I got into this whole taking-pictures-of-signs nonsense, my interest was solely in the classic neon signs. Somewhere along the line I branched out into ghost signs, which are about as non-neon as it gets. Perhaps it was the fascination with something from the past that is very slowly fading into oblivion, but most […]
Read MoreThe Joseph S. Rice Building I’ll give my friend Denise the credit for finding this one. She spotted this one first and was so happy she found this ghost that she bounced up and down for a few minutes. So who was Joseph S. Rice? I found this in a history of Wilkes-Barre, written in […]
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