Millinery Center Synagogue, NYC

 NYC has continued to evolve in a direction that I find disturbing... an extended shopping mall/amusement park/food court...hell disguised as a clown with bright plastic facades and flashing neon lights hawking bland franchise food in contrived predictably faux exotic settings that appeal to the lowest common denominator...families...that have contributed to the dumbing down of NYC and Broadway theatre to nothing but Disnoid live TV spectaculars with songs that has done little more than extend the comfort zone of the suburban mall to 42nd Street.   A city that has left the redefinition of its architectural integrity to the lowest bidder, Donald Turnip, a bland, crass man, devoid of character or any visible redeeming qualities who has been allowed to redefine the NYC skyline in his own featureless image.  Welcome to the new New York.

It is against this backdrop, that I find myself lost, disoriented, and searching the streets for sanctuary.  Places that have maintained an authenticity that link me to the past, and this little architectural gem of a Millinery Center Synagogue on 6th Avenue between 38th and 39th streets is one such place in which I find peace.  Built in the 1940's so garment workers could find a minion during the week, when they worked long hard hours and such things mattered, it had its origin many years before when orthodox Jewish garment workers worked here, producing things (in this case hats) and gathered in lofts to pray in the morning and afternoons until they could raise the money to build this lovely building.  Most of our clothes are made in China now, and the garment district is mostly gone now, as is the raison de etre for the synagogue, which is largely forgotten and easily overlooked.  A footnote and a reminder of a different and forgotten city lovingly cared for by Rabbi Hayim Wahrman (seen below), it has become a refuge for displaced persons such as myself and other easily recognizable wandering lost souls.

Until recently that is...

During the unusually cold winter of 2014, a pipe burst, flooding the place, leaving the floors warped and twisted, the walls stained and sagging, prayer books soaked, and the odor of mold and rot in the air.  When I was just there the place was dark and empty but for one sad soul sleeping on a bench.  Its future is tenuous in this voracious city where only the strong survive and developers see only opportunity in the misfortune of others. 

Monday through Friday you can find Cantor Tuvia Yamnik selling sheets and dry goods in front of the building and talking to anyone and everyone who will listen and who will sing for if you even hint of the need for spiritual uplifting.  A joyous man made for the streets on New York. 

                                                                      Pablo

Back in NYC and glad to be there!!!

There is something about walking along the wall on the side of Central Park East on a mid spring morning that makes me feel like I am in Europe, Paris maybe.  I walked up Park Avenue from Grand Central Station at 42nd street to 92nd street to see how things are there on a Sunday morning, and what a saw a lot of was well scrubbed nattily dressed Presbyterian families going to and leaving Presbyterian churches and looking enviably nice.  It was a relief to reach 92nd St and a short two block walk to the park with a short

There is an ancient stone wall running around the park with benches placed every so often.  People sit on them, and the first people I met up with were Carl and Barbara, a lovely old couple who have always lived in the city and claim to have never tired of it.  They were just finishing up their non-kosher lunch before going into the Jewish museum on 92nd St. since they were careful not to bring treyf into the museum which has a kosher cafe.  My sister and her husband tell me that they often look at old couples and sometimes see people who they think (or hope) they will be like when they're that age.  I liked Carl and Barbara's spirit and continued excitement about life and hope Jackie and I will do as well. 

Wasn't going for a smartphone theme or anything here, but it does seem to be a common thread everywhere anyway, unless you have something more satisfying to do, like smoke a good cigar by yourself.

This was taken just inside the park where I ventured for just a moment or two and found two more people entranced by their hand held device.  What are the odds!!!

                                                                             Pablo

An architectural post script...

I revel in the architectural exuberance exhibited in years gone by when people often built buildings that were is some way an expression of themselves, and were meant to make a statement.  Followers of this blog know that I am particularly attracted to buildings that have something to say.  They may have  been utilitarian in their time, but have aged well and have a story to tell, even if you have to make up the story yourself.  Occasionally examples of this architectural elan, buildings that are much more wonderful than they needed to be, turn up in unexpected places and continue to amaze.

The exuberance of buildings like the now abandoned Field Bros Service Station in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, has been replaced by the expedient, utilitarian boxes that how clutter our landscape at every intersection and exit ramp, selling everything from gas to books to burgers to hardware to pet food ad nausem.  These dispensable expedient structures are cheap and easy to build and just as cheap and easy to dismantle when needed to be replaced by another uber monstrosity housing a Walmart/Dollar General et al...selling cheap and easily discarded shit from China to people who they've convinced need it.  In the end we are leaving no architectural heritage of our own, unless bland and ubiquitous are the new art deco.  

Did not feel the need to provide any comparison photos.  Just look out your window, or drive down the Central Ave in your town to the Mobile gas stations Holiday Inn Expresses and the big box stores littering the access roads at the edge of town.

                                                                     Pablo

Pauls Valley, Oklahoma

About 10 years ago, while Jackie was attending a conference in Dallas, I was forced to leave town under questionable circumstances after causing a minor situation at the infamous book repository high above equally infamous the grassy knoll.   After being shocked to find out that the good people of Dallas had the nerve to want me to pay $8 for the dubious privilege of walking up 4 or 5 flights of steps to see the window from which Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly shot JFK, I suggested that they should be the one's paying reparations to the rest of us for something that happened on their watch, rather than profiting handsomely from their complicity, inattention, and ineptitude, that was further attested to by the killing of Lee Harvey right under their noses.  Metaphor intended... The whole thing still reeks, and they were not amused.

High tailing it out of town one step ahead of the mind police,  I thought I may as well see Oklahoma while I was in the neighborhood, and ended up in the most extraordinary time capsule of a place, Pauls Valley, a town seemingly bypassed by time and progress, isolated from change and still living in the 1950's, with no shopping centers or box stores to sap the vitality of a downtown.  I often reminisced about the joy of holing up there and since we were passing by on the way back to Austin,  Jackie needed to see this mythical town, and I needed a reality check as well.  It was a short stop this time around and when you are just passing through, you take what you can get.  The sun was out, there were clouds in the sky, and though I was shooting from the hip with no time to linger, got some good shots and the place was just as I remembered it, although the dark clouds of doom were on the horizon as I discovered on the access road leaving town.

One thing I was surprised to see when looking at these photos was the fact that there was no one on the streets, something that might be explained by the temps, 87 degrees when we were there...

Or possibly the reason there is no one on the street has to do with the recently built Walmart Super Center and other such life sucking entities that now stand along the access roads at the edge of town, draining all of the life out of this once vibrant and self contained community where people once came into town to buy shoes and clothes and appliances or hardware or what ever and linger on the sidewalk or coffee shop talking to their neighbors.  The people of Pauls Valley obviously didn't understand the implications of allowing demonically predatory Walmart into their home to destroy their economy and way of life, all so that they could but cheap shit from China that they don't really need but which is all they can afford working for slave wages they earn at one of the most despicable employers in the country.    The unholy alliance of China/Walmart will poison them in the end.  And that's why there are no people in these photos taken in mid afternoon on a normal business day.

                                                                          Pablo

Route 66 Peace Sign, 24 1/2 miles east of Amarillo...

I didn't get it.  Was it an illusion, a mirage, a byproduct of heat stroke?   Right there, as clear as day for all the world to see both at 70 miles per hour along interstate 40 and at a more leisurely pace on Route 66, about 24.5 miles east of Amarillo, Texas is this fantastic leap of faith/imagination in the form of a peace park apparently conceived and built by one Richard Daniel Baker, born June 19, 1951 where we stopped and spent an hour amazed at the spectacle which we were a part of as we roamed alone through this monument of peace, strength, whimsy and faith, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Returning home, I eagerly googled this phenomena in every search permutation possible to find out something about what we experienced and came up with nothing.  Got Jackie, the master of the search on the case, and she too was stymied.  Not a reference, image, or entry to be found of this obviously spectacular and prominent landmark that had to have been passed by thousands of pilgrims making the 66 trek.  Finally, confirmation that it was not a dream.  There, on a web page documenting the Wehner family vacation of 2013, was a snapshot of the kids posing in and around the central peace sign.  Validation at last, but was that it for such an imposing presence along such a fabled and well visited road.  And as for Richard Daniel Baker, creator of all this, not a word.

In the spirit of the experience, I sat in this chair overlooking his creation, closed my eyes, hoped and dreamed that I might be beamed up, but alas, no luck, I opened my eyes and there I sat with nothing more than the good fortune to share Richard's dream.

 As I have said before when trying to somehow communicate the experience of being in a certain place at a certain time in a certain state of mind, it is no more possible to do justice to this experience than it is to bring the Sistene Chapel home on a post card.  So too, this paean to peace.  So the following are the view from the peace chair and the results of my struggle to come to terms with this unexpected experience.

Although it remains hidden in plain sight, they say that sometimes, in order to find something, you need to know what to look for and to be open to the experience.   I am thankful for the clouds in the sky that afternoon and thankful to you,  Richard Daniel Baker, born June 19, 1951 for what you've created. 

                                                                        Pablo 

12/20/14

Addendum, mystery solved...

Received an e-mail this week regarding this posting from Barbara Chittenden who knows Richard Baker well and was actually involved in the creation of the peace monument.  I want to share this with everyone who has expressed interest in the Peace Farm.  Thanks Barbara!!!

Dear Mr. Shapiro,   I discovered your blog when searching the Internet for posts of Mr. Baker's peace farm. You see, he is a dear friend of mine and my husband and I participated in the unveiling of his creation.   When he first conceived the idea, he contacted his dearest friends and asked them to submit a date that was an important date in history.  As you probably noticed, many of the pedestals have only a date on them.  It is left to the traveler/visitor to figure out what significance that date represented.  At the base of the Peace sign itself, are the signatures of all of us who were asked to participate.  After we each painted our pedestal, he threw a huge BBQ with all the fixins for us and many others.  That is just his way.  Quiet and unassuming and ornery as a little brother.  I say that with great affection.   Richard D Baker is a unique individual whom I have known for 38 years.  He is a farmer, a philanthropist and retired telephone repairman.  His family have farmed in the panhandle of Texas for over a hundred years.  He is a good hearted man and a good friend to many.   Thanks for highlighting his Peace Farm.    Sincerely, Barbara Chittenden

Felix Shapiro, a eulogy...

This is supposed to be a photo blog so why not start with a photo I took in the street in front of a fruit stand in Florida where I am shopping right now under quite sad circumstances.  The photo has no particular relevance here, or does it...

It is February 14, 2014, my birthday, and I am in Boynton Beach, Florida, presiding over the lingering demise of my 93 year old father who fell and broke his good hip 3 weeks ago and then suffered a stroke that further immobilized and impaired him to the extent that he now hovers in that netherworld between life and death from which there is no return but in which he was left with the intact cognitive capacity to be both painfully aware of his situation and to communicate coherently, which has been a blessing.  He is a stoic and pragmatic man who understands his situation and only wants to die to end the indignity his incapacity has forced upon him, but can't.  He says he will stop eating and drinking, like he says his father did at the end, and then eats and drinks.  He is ready to go, but in spite of it all, can't let go of life, because if he does, that will be it and that must be a very hard thought to have when it is no longer just one of those hypothetically,  casually brave things younger people say when they imagine themselves far in the future as being old and infirmed.

I just turned 67, the age my father was when my mother died in October 1987.  My father lives in one of those ubiquitous gated communities/senior ghettos that comprise a large part of south Florida, and I have been staying at his place during this difficult time.  Over the years, when people used to ask me if I lived there, I always said "no, just visiting my father", but now this no longer seems true, just a convenient lie I tell to mask the truth that I am indeed one of them, more or less the age my father was when he re-married and moved in there.  And now, my father may not return home, the home I temporarily occupy as I watch over him.  I am now him.

I do not feel sad that he is dying exactly.  It happens, and he has lived long and well.  In spite of it all, I love him and he has come to appreciate me.  But I do feel sad that he might not come home, and one day I won't go home.  What happens to all your stuff that was your life, that is still sitting on your desk that you were meaning to attend to just hours earlier, before the fall,  that other people are now left to dispose of.  All that stuff that was so meaningful to you.  I have been looking through photo albums at his parents as young people and imagining the joy they felt at the birth of their first born little boy who is now a decrepit old man lying in a nursing home bed, dying.  Someone's little baby boy is now old and dying.   And I am inconsolably sad.  I am flooded with thoughts I do not want to be thinking.

During this difficult time, I am surrounded by old people, cloistered in their self imposed senior ghetto, engaged in an artificial social construct peculiar to American life, self segregation, toward what end  I'm not sure, although being warm and far away from your family seems to have a lot to do with it, which  appears to come at a certain cost.  More painful is seeing people my own age, defying impending old age and sheltering themselves from their irrelevance behind the walls of the gated community and living as if the 60's and 70's and 80's never ended.  Their only concession to old age is to yammer on incessantly about their exceptional children and grand children, as if anyone else is actually listening or really cares.  The others are just waiting for a pause in the monologue so they can counterblab about their own extraordinary progeny.  It sounds like I am going on about this to deflect my inconsolable sadness, so enough.

                                                                   Pablo

Addendum:
March 29, 2014,   9:30 pm or so my father died.  If it wasn't for him, this blog would not exist.  Since  1968 I had been a b&w film photographer, and more recently, with all the bluster of the relic I had become, I swore that I would keep shooting till they stopped producing film, at which time I would retire.  But my photographic productivity had been diminishing as I found less and less to see, and my enthusiasm about darkroom work had diminished as well, primarily due to printer's block.  Nothing I printed seemed good enough...too dark...too light...too this... too that...never quite right.  I began to fear the darkroom and was fading away.

For a few years, my father had been urging me to buy a digital camera, which he would get me for my birthday.  I refused, standing fast by my rapidly diminishing career in film.  But one day about 4 years ago I took him up on his offer.  I became enamored with the Olympus Pen digital camera, and decided to give it a try.  I became hooked, and all the color work in the blog is a result of his encouragement.  I have not looked back.  I have stopped shooting film, but return to the darkroom on and off to work on my backlog of negs, and have stopped beating myself up about my prints (more or less) and am producing good work.

I owe that guy a lot, everything really, feel at peace with it all and understand the wisdom of how things played out.  And regarding the photo at the top, it is quite relevant.

                                                                   Pablo

Addendum:
June 29, 2014,  Noon...
As per my father's wishes, his ashes were deposited in Far Rockaway today, at Beach 41st Street, a barren, desolate stretch of sand, punctuated only by the cracked and broken remnants of roads that used to lead to the summer bungalows that once filled the beaches for 100 blocks until they were all torn down in the 1970's and 1980's wiping out an entire important chapter in NYC history now alive only in the memories of those of us who spent the summer there escaping the hot streets and stifling NYC apartment in the 40's and 50's.  Now there is nothing left other than a boardwalk and a great place to bury a body, and I'm sure there are more than one there.  I'm sure if you dig deep enough, you might find Jimmy Hoffa.  So under that gray, heavy sky, shedding the occasional tear, we buried Felix and next to him, my cousin Steven brought the ashes of my father's brother Cyril two guys who loved each other and loved "Far Rock", two guys who were best friends in life and now back home together for the last time.

That's me and Steven in the dunes taken by my daughter Devora on her cell phone.  On the sand in front of us are an F and C where Felix and Cyril are buried.  If I look overwhelmed with grief, maybe I am, but it is not for the burial, it is because I have been slowly feeling my father's presence slip away and while this may be another step in moving along,  I don't necessarily want to.  I was comforted by the enhanced sense of closeness that seemed to inhabit me after his death and I am reluctant to let it go, but I feel like it is going and there is nothing to be done about it.

                                                                      Pablo 

McLean Texas, Route 66

Generally I don't think of myself as a Route 66 kind of guy in terms of having any overarching interest in it any more than the average dreamer, but when you criss cross the America as much as we do, it is inevitable that you are going to be spending time on the 66 and lately due to certain extenuating circumstances like Jackie's love affair with the historic LaPosada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona,  or our work on documenting Highway 83 which intersects with Route 66 in Shamrock, Texas where we were staying to divine the essence of the epicenter/cosmic convergence of the American pre-interstate highway system, we have begun to develop a curiosity that has taken us on a new road.  Today, that road lead us to McLean, as we traveled east on the 66 from Shamrock to get to Amarillo and a certain BBQ place, Jackie had her eye on.
Once a vibrant and relevant hub of commerce and activity, along Route 66 when it was still the only way west, sporting 6 or 7 gas stations, movie theaters that operated, and 56 stores, ...., it now lies all but abandoned and in a state of decay that is deplorable, but not at all uncommon in the thousands of towns across the country that have been left to implode or wither away quietly now that they've torn up the railroads they once serviced and/or built interstates that allows the world to bypass them at 70 mph.  Now there is next to nothing left in McLean other than the few tattered buildings that make it an object of curiosity, a 1 or 2 hour stop over for Route 66 aficionados, longer if you decide to take in the Barbed Wire Museum.

If this photo looks like a hundred others I have taken, that's because it is.  Just another American main street empty and abandoned, devoid of life and searching for relevance.  If little else, there always seems to be a Dollar Store, consignment shop where people sell their possessions to stay alive in the absence of any real employment, a tattoo parlor,  beauty salon, convenience store and little else.  Below is the Avalon Theater, in name and facade only, that are falling apart and provide a photo op for any serious 66er.  I was fortunate that the clouds were with me that day and the sun was in the right place.  When you are just passing through, which is so often the case with us, either you get lucky or you don't, condition wise.  There is more to McLean, but not much, sadly, but this gives you the idea.  Hope the Avalon will still be standing if you get there. 

As I said, there are 6 or 7 abandoned old gas stations from a variety of eras dating back to the 20's and 30's in McLean, most  of which had their backs to the sun or were not photogenic for one reason or other.  This 1950's vintage one was not the best of the bunch, but was well lit.  It looked like the newest of the old abandoned stations, and of at least some historical interest.

As we were leaving town to head west, we passed the Cactus Inn Motel which was quite, a pleasant surprise relative to the rest of the town, and a nice place to stay if you should want to spend more time in McLean in order to see the barbed wire museum, the main point of interest in town.  In view of the inherent brutality of the concept, we passed on it.

Pablo