Saying goodbye to Landmark Mall…
February 23, 2017, 9:21 AM
About a month ago, Elyse, Brian, Aaron, and I took a field trip to Landmark Mall in Alexandria, visiting it for the last time. Landmark was slated to close permanently on January 31, and so we came by to get photos before it all shut down. This trip took a similar form to when Elyse and I visited Owings Mills Mall in September 2015, though in the case of Owings Mills, we didn’t know that in less than two weeks from our visit, the mall would close permanently. With Landmark, the mall was closing at the end of January in preparation for a redevelopment that would replace the mall with a mixed-use “town center” style development. The Macy’s and Sears stores would remain through the redevelopment, however, I suspect that may change. The Landmark Macy’s was included in the round of store closings that Macy’s was doing in early 2017, and I’d suggest that the long-term prospects for Sears’ survival are looking pretty grim, so the plan to include those two buildings in the new development might change, as one of those stores is vacating, and the second may not be far behind.
And then here are photos:
Escalators in the mall’s northeast corner, viewed from the lower level.
Continue reading…Categories: Alexandria, Elyse, Friends, Shopping
Elyse goes to the inauguration…
January 28, 2017, 8:24 PM
Sometimes, it’s fun to live vicariously. Such is what happened on Inauguration Day. I had to work, and so I spent my Inauguration Day mostly doing support work to help keep trains moving. However, Elyse came down to DC to see what she could see as far as inauguration-related activities went. She and mutual friend Dave went out to see what was going on, and I was able to follow along through frequent updates sent to me on Facebook Messenger. Though this was not intentional, she did a photo shoot in a similar way that I shoot an event that I’m not directly involved in. The official festivities were kind of “meh” (though she did watch the swearing-in live on television, which I didn’t get to do), but she kept up with a lot of the activism.
I admit: I have more or less hung up my activism hat, having not participated in a political demonstration in a very long time. I stopped doing black blocs in October 2010 after a pair of disastrous demonstrations soured me on the tactic, and I haven’t been to a political demonstration of any kind since August 2013. However, I still cheer on and support my friends who are still involved in it, even if I haven’t done it myself in years, and in fact, a number of my activist friends helped organize some of the protests that occurred in DC. So I was delighted to get these updates from Elyse, as well as from elsewhere on Facebook and the Twitter, to see what was up while I was at work.
After I got off of work, Elyse came over and we looked at her take from the day, and the photos were quite good. She also gave me permission to run some of them on Schumin Web, and so hopefully you can live vicariously through Elyse as well, as people came to DC to protest Donald Trump on the occasion of his inauguration.
Categories: Activism, Black bloc, Elyse, Events, National politics, Washington DC
Returning to Scott’s house…
December 30, 2016, 11:29 PM
You know how it goes when you have like-minded friends. On December 28, Elyse and I got together with mutual friend Aaron Stone, and we took a field trip to the Baltimore area, revisiting various places of interest in order to show Aaron, including the Ames at Diamond Point Plaza and Scott’s house. The way that we planned the trip, since our main objectives were mostly dependent on having daylight, the plan was to spend a little time at Diamond Point, a little bit of time at H&H Outdoors (a military surplus store in Baltimore), and then have a large block of time at the Bauers’.
The Ames at Diamond Point was, for the most part, unchanged from our previous visit. We spotted a set of movable stairs near the front of the store that wasn’t there in our previous visits, but otherwise, it was the same:
Categories: Baltimore, Elyse, Friends, Howard County, Urban exploration, Vintage business
Trying my hand at planespotting…
November 18, 2016, 11:02 AM
On Tuesday, November 16, Elyse and I went down to Gravelly Point in Arlington and photographed airplanes taking off from National Airport. In the past, I had photographed airplanes casually, usually when I’m over in Rosslyn, i.e. near the airport, while doing other things (the raw photo set for Urban Demolition II is peppered with random airplane and transit photos, if that tells you anything). However, this was my first dedicated outing for planespotting.
So I put the big lens on my camera and took it out for a spin, putting the camera in sports mode and going to town with it. My first takeoff, however, left something to be desired:
Categories: Airplanes, Arlington, Elyse, Photography
Painting pottery…
November 16, 2016, 12:21 AM
The day before Elyse and I went to Pittsburgh, we got together with our friend Dave, whom we know through transit-enthusiast circles, and we went over to Color Me Mine in Rockville. This is one of those places where they have premade pieces of pottery for customers to paint in the store, and then they glaze and fire it all afterward, and you pick it up a week or so later.
Going in, Elyse and Dave both picked train-shaped coin banks for painting. I got a big plate, because I felt more like drawing, and thus I got myself a nice, blank canvas to paint.
But first, here are Elyse and Dave at the table:
Categories: Elyse, Fire alarms, Friends, Rockville, SEPTA
I’ve seen Christmas lighting, Halloween lighting, but never election lighting…
November 8, 2016, 12:00 AM
So Elyse and I were driving down 16th Street in DC last night, and we spotted a house near the intersection of 16th and Corcoran Streets NW with red and blue lighting in the front yard. Hmm. So we turned around and took a look:
Categories: National politics, Washington DC
A “lost” photo set of sorts…
November 6, 2016, 10:10 AM
In doing the writing for an upcoming photo set for Life and Times about a trip that Elyse and I recently made to Pittsburgh [update: photo set published in January 2017], I quickly realized that much of the discussion about the trip up builds on a photo set that I shot in May 2006 with the intention of publishing in Photography, but that I ultimately never completed.
In this case, the subject of the “lost” photo set was Breezewood, Pennsylvania. For those not familiar, when one travels to Pittsburgh from the DC area, one of the places that you go through is Breezewood, a settlement best known for a quarter-mile stretch of US 30 that carries Interstate 70 traffic to the Pennsylvania Turnpike – a stretch of road that is loaded with gas stations and motels and restaurants. I first traveled through Breezewood in 2003 during the LPCM trip to Pittsburgh, and it piqued my interest – even more so when I later learned that there was an abandoned stretch of the Pennsylvania Turnpike nearby, including two tunnels. I discussed a potential trip to Breezewood for a photo shoot in 2005, and then made a trip from Stuarts Draft to Breezewood – a three-hour drive each way – on May 2, 2006. About the only bit of evidence of the trip on here was five photo features showing Breezewood, a short Journal entry with no photos, plus a few things here and there on Wikipedia and Panoramio, as was my practice at the time. The intended Photography set, with the working title “Town of Motels”, was never made. Kind of a shame that, for a trip that was that far away and entirely dedicated to photography, so little was actually published from it.
I’m pretty sure that I never published the set because I didn’t feel like the photos were up to par, even for the (lower) standards that I operated under at the time, and thus couldn’t find the inspiration to complete it. Most of the photos had a yellow cast over them, and I clearly didn’t take enough time in composing my shots. In hindsight, while I had fun doing the shoot, the idea was something of a loser. After all, it was, for the most part, just a clustering of chain businesses along a unique stretch of highway. The road configuration, created due to regulations in place at the time that precluded the use of federal funds to build direct connections to toll facilities, was what was unique, but that wasn’t the focus of my photography. I focused mostly on the chain businesses themselves, which weren’t particularly unique. The chain businesses looked a lot like “Anytown USA”, i.e. they were much the same as you would find anywhere.
Categories: Breezewood, Photography, Roads, Schumin Web meta
Horns with bugles attached…
October 27, 2016, 8:24 PM
As I mentioned earlier, the trip to Philadelphia that Elyse and I made on October 3 was primarily about fire alarms. In short, I now am the proud owner of 16 Federal Signal Model 53 fire alarm notification appliances, and 12 Couch coded fire alarm pull stations. This was the total haul:
Categories: Elyse, Fire alarms, Philadelphia
A day trip to Ocean City that definitely felt rushed…
October 23, 2016, 1:20 PM
On Monday, October 10, I finally visited Ocean City, Maryland and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. You would think, having lived in Maryland for nine years, that I would have gotten out there before this, but better late than never, I suppose.
This was a trip where the journey was probably more interesting than the destination itself. I’m also pretty confident that we did not meet my usual rule for a trip where you should spend as much time at the destination as it takes to get down there and back. I also felt rushed when we actually got to the destination, but I suppose that such is what happens sometimes. However, with this being an “overview” trip, where the goal was just to get a feel for what was there for future exploration, meeting my time rule wasn’t as important as it might otherwise be.
In any case, we left a little later than I would have liked, and the trip began fairly uneventfully. Things went smoothly until we made a planned stop at the Wawa near Annapolis. There, my low tire pressure light came on as we were getting ready to leave. Okay. Wawa has free air, so no problem. The way that I figured, it had been a while since the last time that I had checked the tire pressure, so one of them may have reached the threshold for the warning light from normal whatever. So I topped off the tires. The left rear tire was a bit lower than the others, but the light went away. Cool. Problem solved. Continue on trip.
After going over the Bay Bridge (my first time), I learned far more than I expected about center pivot irrigation systems from Elyse. If it tells you anything, I’m no longer surprised when I learn that Elyse knows a lot about something medical or industrial. But her information always checks out. In this case, I learned about the different brands of center-pivot irrigation systems, and how to distinguish between them. The main brands are Valley, Reinke (pronounced like “rinky”) and Zimmatic. Those names, for whatever reason, made me think of the Pac-Man ghosts: Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde/Sue. I said, “Valley, Reinke, Zimmatic… and Sue.” Maybe you had to be there, but we got a laugh out of it. In any case, though, you saw a lot of them, as the Delmarva Peninsula has a lot of farmland.
The evolution of a cloud…
October 5, 2016, 10:24 AM
Sometimes, you don’t notice the way things change right in front of your eyes until you analyze them a bit more. I was recently in the Philadelphia/King of Prussia area with Elyse on what was primarily a fire alarm-related mission (more on that later), and was photographing the Manayunk Bridge. First of all, for those not familiar, the Manayunk Bridge is a former rail bridge that was closed to rail traffic in 1986, and which reopened last year to pedestrian and bike traffic as a rail trail. I had previously known it as the big arched bridge that the Schuylkill Expressway goes under, i.e. this, as seen in November 2001:
Categories: Nature, Philadelphia
Amazing how some things never change…
September 21, 2016, 10:04 AM
It’s always amazing how some things never change. Back on August 25, Elyse and I were photographing trains at the MARC station in Gaithersburg. After the train departed, I captured this photo of a flurry of people walking across the tracks before the gates went up:
Categories: Montgomery County, MTA Maryland
I have been to Pennsylvania a lot lately…
August 27, 2016, 6:27 AM
In the span of two weeks, Elyse and I went to Pennsylvania three different times. We went to Hanover on the 8th, Harrisburg on the 11th, and then Harrisburg again on the 18th. Two of the trips were to scout out some potential sites for photography, as well as get something out of our system from the earlier bus trip, and then one was to bring the bus back for my friend.
The first trip was to Hanover. This was one of those “seeing America” kind of trips, about catching a shot of whatever we found interesting, as well as scouting locations for further attention with our SLR cameras when the weather was more accommodating (it was hot and humid out – yuck). Elyse met me at my house, and then we left for Hanover via Westminster. On the way up to Westminster, we both knew about a certain street off of Georgia Avenue in Carroll County near Eldersburg and Sykesville (yes, I refer to Route 97 as “Georgia Avenue” all the way up to Gettysburg), and had to get a photo of it with Elyse. Check it out:
Categories: Amtrak, Companies, Driving, Elyse, Food and drink, Friends, Hanover, Harrisburg, National politics, Pennsylvania, Railroads, School buses, West Virginia, Westminster
Nobody can rope a wheel like I can…
July 30, 2016, 10:52 AM
This past Thursday, Elyse and I went up to Harrisburg with another friend to help test drive a bus. My friend had been searching for a bus to convert into an RV, and located a school bus as a potential candidate. I was there because I had a CDL, and therefore could legally drive the bus, and knew what I was talking about when it came to looking the bus over and getting a feel for how it drove. Considering that my work as of late has had me around rail vehicles rather than buses, I was excited, because I hadn’t driven a bus since April.
The bus was a 2007 Thomas Built HDX. For those not familiar, that is a transit-style school bus, i.e. the kind with a flat front. I definitely knew how to drive those, because transit buses have flat fronts, plus I first learned how to drive a bus on a Thomas Built MVP, which is an older version of this bus. Only thing I did have to get used to with this bus was that the turn signal control was on the steering column, whereas on a transit bus, the turn signals are on the floor. School buses should have them on the floor as well, for the same reason that they’re on the floor for transit: it allows you to keep both hands on the wheel at all times. Clearly, whoever placed the stalk for the turn signals had never operated a bus before, because it did feel like something of an awkward reach to operate the turn signal.
I was worried that I might have lost some of my bus-handling skill in the three months that had passed since the last time I had operated a bus, but once I got a feel for the bus, no problem. As I discovered after being out for six weeks for that broken foot, it’s just like riding a bike. However, I did have to get used to the pedals on this bus. Unlike every other bus that I had driven, where the accelerator and the brake pedals are attached to the floor, these were hung from above, like a car. Go figure. But once I got over that, no problem.
Categories: Driving, Elyse, Friends, Harrisburg, Walmart
Had never traveled a business Interstate before…
July 24, 2016, 8:55 PM
…and now I have. Elyse and I made an impromptu road trip to York, Pennsylvania on Thursday, July 14. We got together in Ellicott City, but didn’t know quite what we wanted to do, and so we ended up doing that.
However, our first stop was a completely unplanned one, in Catonsville. There, the McDonald’s in 40 West Plaza recently closed, and was in the process of being vacated. At the time that we came by, they had started roofing over the McDonald’s-style mansard, and removed the signage, and were packing stuff up inside.
Categories: Baltimore County, Elyse, Fire alarms, Roads, York
A look back on an old photo shoot…
July 7, 2016, 11:06 AM
July 7, 2001 was something of a milestone date for me. It was my first full-on photo shoot in DC. The result of that photo shoot was a Photography set called “The Schumin Web Salutes America”. I pulled the set during the WordPress conversion in 2012 because it was somewhat low quality, but you can still find it in the Internet Archive. Looking back on the set, it was clear that I didn’t know what I was doing, both in the photography itself as well as the post-production, but it was a start.
The set really embodied the way the Photography set started out, which was more like the modern Life and Times, but more subject-based. Photography didn’t take on its current form until 2008. In that, it started out showing my coming up to the area, traveling in on the Metro, it showed the things that I observed on that trip, and also showed a few landmarks in between.
Looking back on this day, fifteen years ago today, it’s funny to see how much has changed since this set was made. I was 20 years old. The camera was a Sony Mavica FD-73 – that means that I was toting a box of 3½” floppy disks around DC to save my photos. Buildings are now here that weren’t in 2001. Some buildings are gone now. This was also my first time riding past Smithsonian on the Blue and Orange Line, and my first time transferring to the Yellow Line, at L’Enfant Plaza, and going over the bridge. So here we go…
Categories: Arlington, Fire alarms, Photography, Schumin Web meta, Washington DC, WMATA