Techonological Forces (aka ARTV is Here!)

While I hate to have left you in limbo for so long, I'm ashamed to admit I've run up against a horrid case of the writer's block in trying to articulate how awesome and impressive the ruins of the City Methodist Church were to behold, and have yet to undertake words equal to the images Jezebel captured there. In the meantime, I've completed a video montage of an exploration into what we'd found and termed a "hotspot" during a reconnaisance of the rust belt via Google Earth on a 42" LCD. Allowing us to follow the remnants of a railroad bed we'd run across in town, but hadn't identified the former destination. They ended up leading into the south end of a massive hulk of ruin sitting at the corner of 7th & Alabama;

Part One takes you through the approach and administrative areas, with a peek into the yard.

Part two starts in the yards and explores the upstairs maintenance/fulfillment area and employee bathrooms where talented taggers have created a color menagerie we were lucky enough to capture reflected around the room by a coating of ice dripping in through the breached ceiling.







There is a third video in the set, it's upload is completed but the link to share it with you is not active just yet. As I'm packing up to head for that church again in the morning, I'll leave you to explore the channel and there is a playlist to go through all three of them in succession.

We'll be back soon with an intriguing look at that church, a narrative to the sites in this video, and more in the coming weeks.

Until next time, stay off the radar!

Economic Forces

An April 1984 F4 tornado tears through Mannford, OK

 I grew up in a dead town. We all thought it was dying, but having been back once a decade or so since Old Man and Momma Jones took down the shingle and meandered us westward; I can see it was dead when the water slide closed down. Those left either never wanted to be in town anyway, or stumble around zombie-fied recalling the last time the Pirates made a run at the Oklahoma State 1A High-School championship, as a measure of persistent relevance.

They mean football, but no team had been to state in anything except marching band for decades. Held together with sludge leftovers of the oil boom, the original town site flooded by a Corps of Engineers dam on the Arkansas river west of Tulsa. The ground so polluted, in a pre-EPA America even, recourse was burial at minimum 15 feet underwater. I thought of it as a suburban experience, since Old Man Jones commuted to Tulsa. Later I met true suburbanites and learned the equine facilities in our back pasture, let alone the back pasture, disqualified me from the normal perception of suburban. Sparse population-density tends a balance that keeps most of the residential and commercial space occupied, each spring tornado season erases another swath of town, only the necessary buildings get recreated.

Inside Gary's Union Station

 This was never an economic hub, like the refinery town where my grandparents lived. Though it still had some vibrance and character when I was young, the brick-streets of Ponca City continue to deteriorate and remain underfunded now that I'm, ahem, less young. As time wears on the sheen fades, and facades begin to dull.

 The Continental Oil Company didn't hold a candle to the United States Steel Corporation's testament to civilization plotted out of northwest Indiana. Named in honor of their founder Elbert Henry Gary, a capitalist mogul of the first order, having coordinated the likes of JP Morgan, A. Carnegie, and C. Schwab to launch the steel company and the city where its labor force would flourish.

Union Station, Gary, Indiana, where the trains no longer so much as slow down

From Homefront to Treehouse

Blast walls separate the buildings, their integrity compromised by peepholes

Growing up I had a tree-house. Old Man Jones was a helluva craftsman, but he was just as shrewd. So my tree-house had solid guard-rails around a platform, transparent walls to satisfy the ever-nurturing Momma Jones and her watchful eye. My only respite from Lil' bubba Jones came in the ladder of rope with rough cut oak rungs. Bubba hadn't developed the dexterity to navigate that when it went up. As he got there, us older boys took the rungs out and hung a single knotted strand of rope down over a sturdy branch.

  Nothing like what the Military-Industrial Complex of the 1940s left for the kids in an outlet town outside the Chicago metro area.