Probably 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 […]
Read MoreSo, I’ll throw this question open to the class: is it pronounces Wilkes-Barry, or Wilkes-Bear? Ask anyone within a 75-mile radius of the place, and you get a 50-50 split. I was told by a girl I went to high school with, who was from the city in question, that it was Wilkes-Barry. But I’ve […]
Read MoreOur friends Denise and Lynn have been trying to get us to Wilkes-Barre for at least a year to see the Sterling Hotel, an abandoned building on the Susquehanna that was one of the more opulent places of its day. We got a chance to visit at the beginning of June, and out we went […]
Read MoreSigns and buildings are always a casualty of urban renewal, and whereas some need/have to go for safety concerns or plain darn ugliness, there’s always one or two gems that caught in the friendly fire. Allentown has been preparing for a brand new hockey stadium downtown which hopes to bring some revitalization to the downtown […]
Read MoreLast Friday I went to my regularly-scheduled part-time job, video editing the television broadcast for a local church, and discovered as I walked in the door that this was not going to be an ordinary day. Funeral services were going to be held in the main sanctuary, and for somebody well-known, I was told. It […]
Read MoreLast year, in my never-ending quest to find new ways of getting to the same old places, I happened through Jonestown, Pennsylvania on PA 72. I saw something interesting out of the corner of my eye on the side of the building and so I pulled over and investigated. When I did, I got some […]
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