Category United States
In the Halls of the Ancients: The Imagined Washington, DC, of Franklin Webster Smith
At the turn of the twentieth century, he had a bold dream of making Washington a museum of world history. Egyptian temples, Assyrian palaces, and the Taj Mahal would complete a landscape out of Rome and Greece. His scheme attracted educators and socialites, senators and major newspapers. Then it all came crashing down.
When Adams Morgan Had a Five-and-Dime
Adams Morgan, a diverse neighborhood of bars and row houses in Northwest Washington, D.C., has always had a complicated history with alcohol, entertainment, and development. When a moratorium on new liquor licenses was due to sunset in 2013, the neighborhood was forced to reflect on its past and figure out its future.
Hell’s Kitchen in the 1970s
Every May, New Yorkers flock to the Ninth Avenue International Food Festival. Artist A.S. Graboyes captured what the festival was like when it first began back in the 1970s.
A Pedestrian’s Eye View of La-La-Land
In American’s most car-centric city, snapping photos of façades as only a pedestrian can.
Slouching Towards Beverly
“L.A. is good for façades.” The view from a reality star’s restaurant in Beverly Hills.
The Taco Time at the End of the Earth
To Brigham Young, Utah was “the place.” But why? A surreal journey to an island in the Great Salt Lake and across the salt flats of western Utah to a casino town in the middle of nowhere brings answers but raises new questions.
A Tale of Two Portlands
Flannel shirts and hipster chic unite them both, but there’s a continent between them. TL;DR: Maine > Oregon.
A Beach Town, After the Season Ends
New England’s last true honky-tonk seaside resort empties out after summer’s done. Photographs of a snowy November day at Old Orchard Beach, Maine.
New Mexico: Revisiting the Land of Enchantment
Traveling again through an unforgettably beautiful land of clouds, mesas, chiles, and quiet.
You Can’t Go Home Again – And Sometimes That’s a Good Thing
The changing face of a Southern city rediscovering itself.
The Many Faces of an Antique Mall
At a small-town Midwestern antique mall, faces from the past peer at you from every shelf.
Vanished Chesterfield
I spent most of the first decade of my life in a relatively new development in a then-exurban part of Richmond, Virginia, called Midlothian. Midlothian as a community dates back a couple hundred years and was, for a long time, known for coal mining. If my elementary school teachers told the truth, it was the […]
The Old Man and the Sea: My Great-Grandfather, from Latvia to Key West
The way I understand it, Key West, way back when – way back before the spring breakers and Girls Gone Wild, back before the pride parades, back before Jimmy Buffett and Margaritaville, back before the leather shops on Duval Street, back before the Conch Republic, back before Tennessee Williams, back even before Papa Hemingway and his […]
Memories of a SoHo I Never Knew
When I was maybe twelve or thirteen, weaned on Simon & Garfunkel’s hymnal “Bleecker Street” and a healthy mid-90s diet of Friends, with some nebulous notion of someday running back to the Big Apple, the city of my birth, my parents sat me down and made me watch After Hours, Martin Scorsese’ brilliant nightmare of […]
Duck Pie 