Soda Signs. I just about crashed my car when I saw this last night. I’ve been photographing out-of-the-way places for seven years now this month, but this is the first time I’ve seen such amazingly preserved signage. At first I thought this stuff might have been new/restored, but as a friend pointed out, this wasn’t really the neighborhood for that sort of thing. I’m not a big fan of Coca-Cola signage, as I’ve mentioned before, but this sign is in great shape. I’ve seen places that have curved bottlecap signs like this before, though they’ve always been under layers of paint. I’m glad to finally see them. The only type of Coke sign I know I’m missing now is the once-ubiquitous “fishtail”, seen in a Stephen Shore photo of Philadelphia, and on “Sal & Angie’s” in the movie French Connection.

Electric Green. After photographing the store above, I turned right onto MLK Way (a day before the holiday, incidentally), and followed the street for awhile, looking at the progress of the light rail line (looks mostly done here). Near the Henderson Street station, I noticed a strip of green curling up into the hills. I could see an asphalt bike path weaving its way through the green, so I decided to pull over and go for a walk. As it turns out, this is a strip of land underneath a Seattle City Light transmission line, called Chief Sealth Trail. I followed about 2.5 miles of the line, first southeast, where I stopped at the Creston-Nelson Substation (complete with an electrical plug safety sculpture). I then followed it back northwest, past MLK Way, up to near Holly Park, and back to my car (for what turns out to be about a 5-mile round trip). It was really a great sight in the setting sun, especially with Rainier set beautifully against the pylons.

On a long walk through Seattle with my friend Max Action, Max pointed out to me distinctive markers of tunnels, from purple glass sidewalk-windows to giant grates. To him, I couldn’t help but point out vestiges of long-dead businesses painted, carved, and built into buildings.

On my walk home, while listening to Evan Doorbell narrate a phone trip, I noticed curved lines in the sidewalk concrete, and changes in the material of the curb. As I looked, I could see that the business on this block had changed over time, and driveway/alley cutouts had been added and removed. This is a tiny, tiny thing, but as we walk over ground (literally or figuratively) hundreds and hundreds of times, we start to recognize patterns, whether it’s conscious or not.

Max has an excellent ability to recognize subterranean patterns from above; similarly, Evan Doorbell can hear the smallest click, thunk, or ka-chunk in the old analog phone system and know just what it is. For me, once I saw how these old urban commercial nodes mapped so directly to the Minneapolis streetcar system, I couldn’t stop seeing urban design patterns that persisted 50 years after the end of the streetcars.

Seattle Subways. The Seattle Monorail Project was far from the first abandoned transit plan for the city. Seattle had interurban and electric streetcars over a century ago, but by 1926, there was a desire for real rapid transit, like in Chicago or New York. By 1928, there was a comprehensive proposal that included station drawings, route maps, projected traffic graphs and numbers, and lots of stuff you’d see in modern transit planning.

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Anydot? Everydot. A very nice spread of my photos can be found in the mnartists.org supplement to the Rake magazine this month. Unfortunately, the issue cover and index both identify my project as Anydot, instead of Everydot. Hopefully those googling for me might find this post if they search for “anydot“.

The Como-Harriet Line. It’s now just a tiny museum line in southwest Minneapolis, but it once served downtown Minneapolis, the university, and the capitol. Much of its path was down city streets, where the signs of streetcars are long-gone. Through Como Park in St Paul and Linden Hills in Minneapolis, however, the line had its own right-of-way, off city streets. If you look carefully, you can still find signs of this.

The Como-Harriet museum line ends at Linden Hills Blvd, near Lake Harriet. From there, the only evidence of a streetcar line is a gently curving path of oddly placed alleyways and greenspace. I followed this pathway to France Ave and the streetcar suburb of Morningside, which merged with Edina in 1966.

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