Wood and Wire

Shots from an early morning walk around the docks of Port Townsend, Washington. I would not be surprised to see assemblages like this in a gallery, but here is art providing a quite utilitarian purpose.

(Following is the inspiration for the title of this post.)

Concrete and Color

A few more examples of the spraypaint dialectic going on at Fort Worden, Washington.

Ghosts

The Choice

The prisoner's view

Band of color

Out from the dark

Fortified Art

Visited 100-year-old Fort Worden in Port Townsend, Washington, one of the coastal forts long-deserted now that we don't fear enemy navies steaming into Puget Sound from the Pacific. It seems to be the site now of a cold war between the perpetrators of graffitti and the anti-graffiti squads. All in all it makes for some color amid the moldy concrete.

"Sudden Rush"

Sepia Bedlam

I was all ready to put up a miscellaneous handful of literally sepia postcards from my father's old collection, when I got rerailed by the voluminous amount of Internet information I found pertaining to one of the postcard's subjects, the Insane Asylum in Pontiac, Michigan.

Here's my starting point:

An odd enough card for anyone to send, but odder still given the innocuous message it contains. A "bread and butter letter," it's written to my eponymous father's dad George Nelson Bentley on December 6, 1909, when he was teaching in Cripple Creek, Colorado. Not exactly a picture to make him homesick, I would think.

The letter's riveting climax: "Suppose you heard Myrtell is now Mrs. Steavens [? sic] - was married last Saturday. They have a house in Dearborn where they will live for the winter. They did not have any [over] wedding at all."

Shocker! I assume this refers to a Myrtell Grace Foster and John Howard Stevens, married two days earlier. But I have no idea what the relationship to my grandfather was.

It also mentions his father (John) and the store run with George's brother Clyde in the village of Elm, Michigan (now subsumed by Livonia, a suburb of Detroit).

Anyway, all unsuspecting, I discovered a trove of info about the asylum. The following are borrowed from them...

• This homemade site at Rootsweb.ancestry.com has a good large collection of photos
• This Asylumprojects.org page has a great description of the building’s history and design
• There's even a book about the asylum
• For a dose of counterculture, here's a Treasurenet page devoted to the asylum on a forum for urban explorers
• And here's a rather hyperbolic news article on Gendisasters.com about a fire at the asylum
• Disabilitymuseum.org also has some good photos
  

Inmates, 1950

Chain

Ferry dock, Lopez Island WA

Montlake Ship Canal, Seattle WA

Tyee Marina, Tacoma WA

Hylebos Waterway, Tacoma WA