Bad Places

When I was in my mid thirties and in graduate school for architecture, I found myself increasingly attracted to places that would never be chosen as photographic subjects for scenic picture postcards. In Seattle, my friend and colleague Ken Thacker and I called them Bad Places. Railroad yards scattered with locomotive parts and cars rusting from neglect. Power stations, especially old, grimy ones with lots of broken windows. Agricultural buildings that were never beautiful, even before decades of hard use. Visiting him later in Chicago where he continued his master's degree work while I was living back here in Pennsylvania becoming a dad, we spent most of one night skulking around a seedy area where iron foundries worked the graveyard shift, spewing smoke and sparks into the sky. For reasons that I won't offer to analyze just now, these places held a delicious dark delight for us. Still do. Different, my ego wants me to believe, from the fashionable preoccupation with urban decay that has become hackneyed and passe in the art world, but maybe not. Who cares.

This particular Bad Place is more rural. It's just a five mile bicycle ride from my house, over in Mt. Joy, next to a railroad siding where grain is loaded onto hopper cars. One need not go all the way to Seattle or Chicago to find Badness. It's everywhere you look. All you need is a bad enough attitude to be able to see it.