(no subject)

When I see updates updates about people being arrested at Wisconsin's solidarity singalong, I keep thinking of the Wobblies. They used to respond to issues like this by sending so many members to the place that was arresting people that it filled the jails and the police often gave up. I wonder if that's a feasible response here, because I'd be a part of it.

Syracuse recap

I'd planned on Tuesday to get up at 4 o' clock in the morning so I could ensure I was on my way by five. I was having a really hard time getting to sleep though. I've tended toward staying up 'till one or two, and I was trying to lie down around ten. Since I'd been planning in a lot of extra time already, I allowed myself to change my alarm for 5 during one of my spans of lying abed relaxing and letting my brain wander. I even convinced myself that relaxing and semi-consciously letting my mind go all sorts of strange places might be almost as good as sleep. I'm not sure how true that was, but when five came around I was feeling fairly conscious after six or so hours of sleep amidst spans of wakeful dozing.

Most of my stuff was packed up already. I had a turkey sandwich, and allowed myself a can of Danae's Pepsi Max. That was quite possibly my only caffeine intake all year, so it helped wake me up and get me feeling energetic as I got the GPS set up in the car and put my camera gear and itinerary next to me on the passenger seat. Soon enough, I was on the road, speeding eastward on the Queen Elizabeth Way toward Niagara Falls.

Sunrise over the Niagara Peninsula was pretty; soft and misty over hills and bridges. Customs went smoothly, if slowly, and I stopped for gas and water just into New York state. The rest stop had a penny squishing machine, but I realized that with my late start plus delays at the border, I didn't really have time to track down change to make pennies for my dad (he's a collector). Maybe I'll pass through again some time.

As the drive along the New York Thruway went on, I was getting a little nervous about time in fact. My margin seemed awfully small. By the time I got to Syracuse University, it was about ten minutes to ten o' clock, the time of my appointment. Fortunately I found parking quickly at a lot that didn't seem to be signed at all, and I went in search of the Eggers building.

The Syracuse campus is on a hill. A large, rather steep hill. Which I had to climb on my way up to the building. But I made it to the top, found the right building, and located the professor's office. I introduced myself and we talked for a while. It turned out I needn't have been worried about time; either there was a miscommunication or (more likely) I'd remembered the number wrong, but our meeting was at eleven. I offered to come back in an hour, but he said now was just fine too.

The conversation was great. Syracuse's program seems really promising. It's part of a school of public policy, and has a focus on community engagement. I'd like to think that, if I become a geographer, I might have some impact on matters of public policy via analysis of urban issues. Syracuse seems like a good place for that kind of goal. The program (as is the field of human geography in general) is very interdisciplinary. There is a core set of classes to take, but everything else is worked out with your advisor. Geography students take classes in departments from philosophy to architecture to anthropology to political science. The class size is limited by available funding, but all students are fully funded. Evaluation of applicants is based more on how good a fit the applicant's goals and plans are for the program than other factors. This all sounds quite like what I'm looking for, and I'm going to follow up by looking in more depth at the work being done by geography program and the Maxwell School of Public Policy to see how I'd fit in.

The first professor suggested I talk to two other professors who were there on campus that day and pointed me at their offices. The first was in the same building, so I knocked on her door. If anything, the talk I had with her was even more interesting. We seem to share a number of interests. I talked about my travels through towns that had dried up as transportation changed, and she told me that she did a thesis on that very thing, looking at redistribution of populations vis-a-vis transportation technologies! We compared her knowledge of and work in Lincoln, Nebraska with my knowledge of Kenosha, and talked more generally about post-industrial cities and the ways they've changed. We talked about the movement of people coming back to city centers lately, and the conflicting positive forces of city revitalization and negative forces of displacement through gentrification and the need to find a way to balance these things. It was a really enjoyable conversation that left me thinking that I really might fit in.

Both professors I talked with thought that my getting a GIS certificate would be a really good idea as part of preparation for this kind of grad program, and that it might set me apart as a candidate, so I feel good about making that choice. One of the things they use GIS regularly for is as part of a community engagement initiative where they work with local community activism groups. They determine what kind of assistance the group needs in terms of spatial investigation and analysis and provide that kind of assistance in order to promote positive community change. As someone who feels its important to apply my skills in creating positive change rather than just play with data for data's sake from a detached perspective, I like that a lot. I think I'll email back and ask about recent community projects.

So I moved on to the third professor, but it turned out she didn't have time to talk. We exchanged contact info, and I walked back to my car. I looked briefly around the campus, but I didn't want to linger too long because I wasn't sure if my car was somewhere it was supposed to be. I'd chanced it due to what I thought was a time crunch, and I really didn't want a ticket if I could avoid it. When I got back down the hill, I found a piece of paper under my window advising parking pass holders that the lot would be closed in the future and where to go instead, but no ticket. Yay! I suspect that, since it was a major student visit weekend, enforcement was probably kind of lax.

So I'll write about the rest of my trip in another entry, but I'll let that stand by itself. I'm even going to tag this (I never use tags on LJ, though maybe I ought to start), because it might be helpful for me to be able to easily come back and find what I wrote about Syracuse later on. Everything went really well, and I'm still excited thinking about it!

Syracuse trip

I left the Syracuse University Campus about noon and made my way to the next items on my itinerary; three theatre buildings. I saw the Brighton (now the home of some kind of community support organization?), the Empire (not very recognizable; the whole first and second floor facade seems to have been replaced), and the Landmark. The Landmark was quite pretty, and the two-story grand entrance, with it's wheel-window at the top and surrounded by detailed terra cotta, reminded me of the Detroit's Michigan Theatre, now a parking garage. I drove from a very run-down looking part of town, with shuttered buildings and economically-disadvantaged-looking pedestrians through to what I'd guess was downtown Syracuse, with expensive stores in beautiful, preserved buildings.

I feel like I could be ok living in Syracuse. I didn't see a lot of it, but though it's only one-and-a-half times the size of Kenosha, it felt like a much bigger city. The college campus may be part of that.

On the way out of town, I photographed a couple sights from my other traveler's bible: Roadside America dot com. I have pictures of a large clock that counts perpetually downward from 24 to 0, which stands in honor of the creation of basketball's 24 second shot clock by a coach in Syracuse. I photographed what may be the only working traffic light in the US where Green is on top and red is on the bottom. (Can you imagine how confusing that must be for color-blind folks?) Near the light was a sculptural group of a family of what I take to be Irish immigrans, by the fact that this is a very Irish part of town. (On St. Patrick's Day, the intersection under the green-on-top light is painted green!) I tried to arrange a composition that made it look like they were pointing in shock at the strange light, but it was difficult to compose. *grins*

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Next, I drove to Seneca. On the way there, I unexpectedly drove past the Finger Lakes Drive-in, which I, of course, stopped to photograph. Their sign has an old carbon-arc (I think) movie projector perched on top of their now-playing marquee! there was also a vintage Chevrolet parked outside the entrance.

In Seneca, I shot a couple more theatres. First was the Geneva, which has now become something called the "Kidventuredome". It does seem to still be a movie house. The marquee indicated that, as well as it being "the indoor fun kid play space", it shows cult movies. Clockwork Orange is coming on the 30th. "I'm not sure," I commented to Danae as I was going through photos, "that that's an appropriate Kidventure." I photographed a couple other beautiful old brick facades nearby, the moved on to my next destination, Smith's Opera House.

Built in 1894, Smith's may be the oldest theatre I've photographed. The next oldest I can think of is Calumet, Michigan's Calumet Theatre, built in 1900. Smith's is clearly a building of its era, predating the flamboyant deco of later movie palaces, and even the ornate cornucopia of terra cotta that covers theatres of the '10s or '20s. The facade is intricately constructed red brick, full of details like faux-columns with Greek capitals, balistrades across the center peak of the facade, and gorgeous wrought-iron screen over the central window. I would have loved to have seen the inside. Large terra cotta bas-relief portraits of Shakespeare and "E. Booth" take places of honor. How interesting to see Booth; I'm assuming it was Edwin Booth, whose brother assassinated president Lincoln. The whole Booth family was in acting, and Edwin managed to retain his fame even after Lincoln's death. Edwin died in 1893, so perhaps this bust was intended as a memorial to a famous actor.

After that, I photographed a large paint-on-brick mural of a sailboat floating on the surface of a body of water above a series of concentric circles encompassing some buildings, flowers, and a colonial era US flag (I'm not sure what it was all about either!), and a YMCA building signed in a very unusual font in sculpted terra-cotta. Then I was on the road again.

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My next stop was Palmyra, where Mormonism got its beginning. I found the visitor's center at the site were Moroni buired the golden tablets that Joseph Smith retrieved, but I didn't go in. I photographed a large granite carving of the Book of Mormon that stood nearby, but I misremembered the site description from Roadside America and thought that was all there was to it. As it turns out, if I'd have gone inside, I could have seen the actual hill where the tablets were, and a 1935 statue of Moroni on a 25 foot column of white granite. I'm a little disappointed that I didn't get the full experience. I guess I felt a little intrusive too, walking into a religious site purely as a non-faithful spectator. This may be ironic, given the usual operating procedures of Mormon missionaries. I do wish I'd seen that statue and the hill.

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I headed toward Rochester, but happened to drive by a small park focused on a portion of the Erie Canal. I stopped to wander and found what signage described as one of the oldest iron bridges in the country. It had been moved from its nearby place over the canal at one point in time and set up with between a couple of ramps allowing access to walk under and over it. In the same park were stone supports which once held the large wooden trough that carried the canal over a gap, and lock and dam number 29 on a still-functioning portion of a newer canal. I'm not quite sure which canal it is; perhaps the New York State Barge Canal? I'll figure it out when I have more time to investigate. It was a neat park, and I spent a while photographing the various water features, including an old dam that made a nice two-tiered waterfall and what might have been a hydroelectric generator building, where water flowed under and in on one side and rushed noisily out a much lower tailrace below it on the other.

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From there, I drove to Rochester, where I photographed a few more theatres. I saw one that seems to simply called "Cinema" (a small single-screen house open since 1915), the Monroe (its auditorium is demolished, but the facade stands), and the Little. The Little was one of the most visually striking theatres I've seen. It's polished black terra cotta facade reminds me a lot of the Rivoli in Cedarburg, Wisconsin. Only superficially though. The Rivoli is all black vitrolite, whereas the Little is black terra cotta. At least, that's what it's Cinema Treasures page says. I don't know that I've ever seen black terra cotta before. Certainly not so much of it. But the whole effect is really sharp, and very '30s Moderne. I'm really glad I stopped to see it.

I'd planned to stop and see the table that The Fox Sisters used in their seances. The infamous trio played a major role in the creation of the spiritualism movement in the 1800s, and when one of them finally admitted that they'd been perpetrating a hoax for decades it did little to dissuade other practitioners. But the table was on display in the public library, and it would have been very difficult to find parking and it wasn't clear the library was open. Instead, I drove on to a monument erected nearby in honor of the same sisters. Erected in 1927, the granite obelisk now stands near the door of something that might be a half-way house or long-term low-rent hotel. A group of four people were hanging out on the benches on either side of the monument. I said hi and shook hands with one man as I worked. A woman asked if I knew what the monument was for, and I told her that it was for the Fox sisters, who'd done seances and things back in the 1800s. She nodded, saying "Yes, spritualism." The first man seemed astonished at this, commenting that he'd been around for years and had never known what it was! It reminded me of a theatre I photographed in Syracuse. I'd been shooting a pretty terra cotta eagle detail near the roofline, and a passer-by looked up and commented "Cool, I'd never noticed that before!"

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From there, I drove to a cemetery that holds the body of a man who, by some theories, might have been Jack the Ripper. He was a doctor who moved to Rochester from England after the murders happened. But I couldn't get to it; the cemetery was closed. I seem to have bad luck with famous graves; in Metropolis, Illinois, I got in to the cemetery but was simply unable to find the grave of the Birdman of Alcatraz.

Anyway, my next stop was High Falls. This is an 80-foot waterfall on the Genessee River that once served as a power-source for the major early industry of Rochester. There's a foot bridge out over the gorge that provides a very nice view of the falls and the area below, as well as a railroad bridge that spans the river just upstream. I got a nice shot of a group of locomotives crossing the bridge as I meandered across, photographing falling water, industrial remains, and rainbows in the mist. Before making it to the bridge, I'd wandered out onto a fenced-off viewing platform (the fence was down at one corner which I took as an invitation) with hopes of seeing a good view of the falls. It turned out not to afford such a view, so I was glad to find the bridge later on. What was neat about the platform was a fenced off pit that dropped down several stories, past a channel admitting a rush of water, and down to a far below floor. A sign indicated that this was a tailrace for a water-powered mill, back during the days of water-powered industry. I ended up spending quite a while walking around and photographing the site.

I should mention, too, the amazing Times Square building that has enormous, powerful Art Deco wings reaching high up toward the sky. When I first saw it, I was awe-struck. I pulled over to the side of the road immediately to take a few shots. I wish I'd had more time to see it, and the architecture of Rochester in general. It was a really beautiful place!

And that was about the end of my trip. I had a few more things on my list, but it was getting dark. I called lisagems to catch up a bit since I was in the states, then drove westward toward Canada and Hamilton once again. The border crossing was easy. Oddly enough, I was passed by the same customs agent who saw me on the way east. Do they work both sides of the border? Traffic was horrible on the QEW due to road construction and added an hour or so to my trip, but I finally made it home around eleven and flopped into a warm bed with my wonderful kitty.