PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: When my journal was side tracked and broke off a week and a half ago, I was in the midst of telling about the ancient Black River Canal, now a dark mucky groove, lined crisply with massive rocks, that cleaves the earth’s crust with canal-lock stairways beneath a forest canopy lost to time. (http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2015/05/flight-of-locks-black-river-canal-near.html).
Lyons Falls, New York is at the top of the stairway, at the confluence of the Black River and the Moose River, where there is a beautiful waterfall and a long dam. It was famous once for its "triple bridge that joined three shores with a junction over the water. Lyons Falls was a paper mill town whose vitality depended on the lumberman upstream and the seasonal supply of new logs that flowed on the river, and the dangerous work on the river was a sign of the town’s spunk.
The once thriving mill has become a wreck and a hazard and a constant reminder to a community on the brink, of a life that is gone. I arrived even as a crew of three, with cranes that wielded jack-hammers, chipped at a section of brick structure, as the rivers at this confluence idled and flowed.
2 comments:
The thing is, you keep finding these derelict places, Ted! It's almost like (if we didn't know anything else) everything is going to hell in a hand basket! At least you're getting the chance to photograph them, one by one. Thank you.
Alas, for too many in this world, that's where we are headed. My photos, to me at least, are as much about that as about the places I photograph.
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