Among the Ruins

I'm writing a piece about little-known scenic places in Tucson, and one of these is the Fort Lowell Historic Neighborhood, just west of the better known Fort Lowell Park at Craycroft and Fort Lowell. It's a little stretch of street where time seems to have stopped, or at least overlapped itself - a place where satellite dishes sit atop adobe houses in a style of a hundred or more years ago, a place where the crumbling walls of the Mexican settlements around the original fort stand alongside utility meters and recycling dumpsters. I walked along this stretch of street last week, photographing many things I hadn't noticed when driving through to preview the shoot.  It's been said that the camera forces you to slow down and see, and see I did -- the dry little wreath atop a stake in the ground on the side of the road, the line of trees, palo verde and mesquite, lining a walkway alongside the street, each with a marker commemorating a death or passage; the fresco of the Madonna inside La Capellita, the little chapel on the grounds of the larger chapel of San Pedro midway down the street.  I talked to a couple of residents selling firewood, and they told me their families had lived here since the 1930s, and they'd grown up on this very street when it was a desert. Yes, and they rode their bikes out into the desert to shoot their guns. You can't modernize your house too much, they said. Got to keep the look of the neighborhood.

I love the look of this crumbling building.  I've added a bit of grain to the original image (captured in RAW, then converted to a JPG for the web), which has the effect both of sharpening and of adding a little texture.