An open door is not always an invitation to where you want to be.
“There are so many doors to open. I am impatient to begin." --Charlie Gordan” ― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon (1959)
I shot this photo in a quiet area of North Carolina on the outskirts of the Pisgah National Forest. This photo is inside an old and deserted motel that sits on the edge of a creek. The motel is slowing caving in and mother nature is winning the battle.
A lonely street on a Saturday morning in Mexico City. Employees of businesses stand and wait for the company they work for to open their doors for the day. Very few employees are key holders.
I shot this photo in a Mexico City Catholic Church on a Sunday afternoon.
Roman Catholicism was first introduced in Mexico during the period of the Spanish conquest that started in 1519. The Catholic Church had a powerful say in the governence of Mexico up until the end of the Mexican Revolution.
It was not until the end of the Mexican Revolution that the Catholic Church's role in Mexico was restricted constitutionally.
Over 101 million people in Mexico are said to be Catholic today. Mexico has the second largest Catholic population in the world, just under Brazil which is number one.
Inside the Nashville RCA Studio B you will find this old piano that has many stories written within its strings. One of those stories being Elvis Presley sitting behind the keys playing his favorite gospel songs surrounded by friends singing before actually recording a song or two.
The studio was built in 1957 by Dan Maddox and used by many greats throughout the years up until 1977, the year that Elvis died. However, the closing had nothing to do with the King. The studio was already scheduled to close, ironically nearly a full year before Presley’s death.
Today, the studio still stands and looks almost identical to the way it looked when the greats like Chet Atkins, the Everly Brothers and of course Elvis used it in the 60’s. In fact, most if not all of the equipment still remains within its small acoustically perfect walls.
The song by Craig Morgan came to mind after the writer of the song woke the sleeping man:
“I was afraid that he was dead
I gave him a gentle shake
When he opened up his eyes
I said, "Old man are you ok?"
“He said, "I just climbed out of a cottonwood tree"
I was runin' from some honey bees
Drip dryin' in the summer breeze
After jumpin' into Calico creek
I was walkin' down an old dirt road
Past a field of hay that had just been mowed
Man I wish you'd just left me alone
Cause I was almost home”
-Craig Morgan, Almost Home
Photograph captured in the Tepito market on a side street in Mexico City. Tepito is an area known for crime and and area largely governed by gangs. It is an area filled with kidnappings, shootings and robberies. However, this man was sleeping peacefully.
Mexico City has a massive museum called the “Tolerance Museum” or Museo Memoria y Tolerancia that displays the reality of genocide around the world. Multiple floors are dedicated to the Holocaust, Darfur and more.
Inside the museum is an Olive Tree that sits before the memorial for the children who were murdered in different genocides from around the world. Artist Jan Hendrix created this display using the Olive Tree as a visual motive behind her work called Lamento.
The sculpture is made up of 20,000 pieces of irregularly shaped glass (photographed).
When you exit the museum you have a new idea of what tolerance should be as opposed to racial or ethic divide.
“It's a universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Historian and Russian Novelist (1918-2008)
The Old City Dam in Shelbyville, TN along the Duck River has seen its share of floods over the years. The question now is, will the old power house remain or will it be torn down?
The Tennessee Preservation Trust continues to call the old red brick building on the edge of the waterway an endangered historic site, yet little has been done to preserve it.
The building was constructed in 1915 to generate electricity for the community of about 2,800 residents. Today, closer to 21,000 residents from a variety of backgrounds call Shelbyville home.
The power generating facility was sold to the Tennessee Electric Power Company in 1929 and later to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in 1939. The TVA stopped using the site in 1948 and sold it to the City of Shelbyville in 1950. It has now been unused for 68 years.
As for the Duck River, it is the longest river in Tennessee. The 284 mile stretch of water is also home to more than 50 freshwater mussels and 151 different species of fish. While it may be hard to believe, the Duck River is the most biologically diverse river in all of North America.
“Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.”
―Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay
The Hill Folk playing some tunes at Hippie Hill in Tennessee.
Arlo Guthrie once stated, “Folk music is music that everyday people can play, and it inspired a lot of people to make their own music. That trailed into making your own pop music, and that's why garage bands started springing up everywhere.”
Guthrie was an original hippy, a song writer and was known for singing songs against social injustice. However, his only hit was the cover of Steve Goodman’s City of New Orleans.
His best known work was an 18-minute blues / satirical song called Alice’s Restaurant Massacree.
The old and now deserted Tennessee Prison opened in Nashville during the year of 1898. It later closed down in 1992. But, do you know why it shut down?
The prison shut down due to a class action lawsuit filed in 1983. The Federal Courts issued a permanent injunction that prohibited the state from ever putting another inmate into the old Tennessee State Prison.
The Grubbs V. Bradley case led to the determination that the conditions of living behind the walls was unfit for human habitation. Some prisoners had as little as 19-square feet in their prison cells.
Scotty Grubb and four additional inmates filed a suit on behalf of themselves and others being held in the prison in 1983. The suit alleged rampant violence, improper medical care, poor sanitation and overcrowding. Violence, according to court documents, included rape, robbery, stabbings, inmate vs. guard violence, guard vs. inmate violence and murder.
In the medical hospital on site, prisoners who were trustees were said to be involved in the direct delivery of health care. The inmates, who were completely exempt of certifications, licensure or training in the health care industry, assisted in examinations, surgeries, cleaning medical equipment, reviewing inmate medical records and more.
As a result of the court findings, the old Tennessee Prison eventually shut down.
Tennessee Department of Correction opened a the new Riverbend Maximum Security Institution at Nashville in 1989.
Source:
Grubbs v. Bradley, 552 F. Supp. 1052 (M.D. Tenn. 1982)
As you walked through his gate an air raid siren sounded. Some of the signs on the fence along the road read, “No Trespassing, No Loud Music, No Loitering.” Other signs were simply pictures or stickers of an assault rifle. With that being said, I wanted to meet the man behind the collection of oddities.
As I made my way to the front porch crawling over old refrigerators, tires, washing machines and more, I could hear a television was on inside the house. However, my knocks on the door were unanswered.
I then made my way back to the road, this time noticing some of the scrap metal had been turned into art. Sculptors of old motors were to the left and a sculpture of an airplane to the right. Plastic skulls adorned the fence post along with the heads of mannequins.
“I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.” - Frank Zappa, American musician, composer, guitarist, filmmaker and more (1940-1993)
Photo taken in the Mississippi Delta region.
I heard about the so called store of death, but I had to see it for myself to believe it.
It was not exactly my cup of tea, but some seem to really like it.
It is a small store located in the depths of Nashville with a hearse parked out front and a small camper to the right of it. The store is called "Hail Dark Aesthetics."
Inside I found a variety of animals, all deceased of course. They even had a giraffe head / neck inside the store.
In addition to animals, I also saw an assortment of antique medical supplies which were actually for sale.
I met a man who calls a school bus home. The gentleman, who was previously homeless, came up with this creative idea to save his money and buy an old school bus. He is in the process of making it into a real home.
I thought it was pretty cool for sure.
I did a short interview with him (audio on below link). It is worth a listen.
To hear an audio interview with the man, CLICK HERE for link.
It looked like a painting both in life and in picture. The swamps of the Mississippi Delta.
"I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in." -George Washington Carver
On Monday, I found myself in the middle of nowhere in the Delta of Mississippi surrounded by cotton fields to my left and right. Out of nowhere, a crop dusting plane flew over my car. I followed the plane to where it landed and quickly made my way to the small country airport to speak to the pilot as he was refueling.
The first commercial crop-dusting plane was not a plane at all, it was instead a hot air balloon used to spread seed over a field of swampland in New Zealand. The balloon was tethered to the ground and moved from one side of the field to the other in 1906.
The idea of utilizing a plane in agriculture was born in 1921 by the U.S. Agriculture Department and the Army Signal Corps. A man by the name of John A. Macready piloted the first crop duster in 1921. I guess you could say the rest is history.
Nashville Sounds, Greer Stadium: The Herschel Greer Stadium was built in 1978 for the Nashville Sounds. Many who grew up in and around Middle Tennessee have fond memories of games at the Nashville stadium. Hot dogs, cold beer and mustard covered pretzels are likely included in some of your memories.
The Nashville Sounds became a part of Nashville when Larry Schmittou decided he wanted to bring baseball back to Davidson County. In the 1970’s, Schmittou inked a deal with the City of Nashville for the plot of land below Fort Negley. The fort was a forgotten part of the American Civil War and had not been developed into a tourist stop until 2004, years after the construction of the baseball stadium.
Schmittou was born into baseball and even named after “Larry” Gilbert, manager of the Nashville Vols Minor League Baseball Team (1938-1948).
The Nashville native began his coaching career as a junior at Cohn High School, coaching for a youth baseball team of children who were 12 and under. After graduating from Peabody College (later merged with Vanderbilt), he became a teacher for the Nashville Public Schools and eventually moved on to become the head coach of the Vanderbilt Commodores baseball team from 1968 to 1978.
Schmittou was also an entrepreneur. In the late 1970’s, he owned several minor league baseball teams, but the Music City was always in his heart as the Nashville Sounds was his very first minor league team.
As for the name of the Greer Stadium, it also has to do with Tennessee baseball history. The stadium was named after Herschel Lynn Greer, a Nashville businessman and the very first president of the Nashville Vols baseball team. Greer died in 1976, so the naming of the stadium came after his death.
In 2014 the stadium closed down as the Sounds moved to their newly built First Tennessee Park. The new park is built on the Sulphur Dell site, which was the original location of the Nashville Vols baseball team.
By the way, the original name of the Sulphur Dell ballpark was the Sulphur Springs Ball Park, named after a Sulphur spring near the site. The word “Spring” was eventually dropped and changed to “Dell” by a Nashville sportswriter, suggesting that “Dell” rhymed with more stuff in his unique sports stories.
On Lake Nicaragua, you will find small islands of huts adjacent to a small island with a mansion. It is quite interesting to venture into the polluted waters by boat. You will also find the remains of old buildings that were once high enough from the water’s edge when built, but were later flooded in storms. Fences still line the property that was once a habitat in some areas. On other islands, you will see monkeys jumping from tree to tree.
There have been many drownings in Lake Nicaragua and some believe that the lake is filled with spirits that pull swimmers to the bottom. Others talk about bull sharks that feast on swimmers. Of course, the bull sharks are real in the lake and not a fictitious legend.
Over the years, bull sharks from the ocean have made their way into the freshwater by swimming 120 miles up the Rio San Juan river from the Caribbean Sea. The sharks were first noticed in the mid 1500 chronicles of Spanish historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés.
In the past few years, Nicaragua has tightened security at their borders. The reason being, many are trying to make their way through the country in hopes of reaching the United States by way of Mexico. In doing so, there have been multiple attempts of persons making their way into the country by way of water travel from the ocean and into Lake Nicaragua. However, many of those immigrants from places like Africa and Haiti later drowned when their vessels capsized in the middle of Lake Nicaragua. In other words, they survived the warm Caribbean Sea, but died in the fresh water of Nicaragua. Some of the recent drownings that occurred in July of 2016 included eight men from Africa.
America is going from one tragedy to another, second after second. I don't think people know how to process everything.
This photo is from Orlando in the downtown area about one mile from the Pulse night club where the shooting took place around three weeks ago.
"The world is a crazy, beautiful, ugly complicated place, and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy." - David Remnick, American journalist
There is something romantic in a whimsical sense about an old 1960's gas station sitting empty on an old country road in the middle of nowhere Georgia.
This was once a full service shop with a single bay, unlike what you see today. Pay at the pump did not exist, you had to make human contact for a gas transaction. Needed to use the phone, it cost you 10-cents to utilize what hung on the side of a pole about 50 feet away from the pumps. Buying a single candy bar and a glass bottle of Coca-Cola while using a credit card... unheard of.
"Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days." - Doug Larson
Alex, who is from New York, has only worked for Walt Disney World for two years. However, he remembers taking his kids to Disney in the 1990’s.
"You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality." - Walt Disney (1901-1966)
