These are from last weekend's harvest of pics, taken around town. We just stopped here and there. As usual, first I post the "starkers" type of pics, and then I do the others. I also have a lot of older pics of various sights and scenes I will be posting. This blog with be very pic heavy!
All the stuff above can be found along 34th Street, where construction seems to go on without end. This has to be the slowest construction project in town. Traffic disruption has taken a toll on small businesses. If there is anything the city council hates, it's a mom and pop style, small, locally owned business.
These are the last of the recent pics:
The fact that I have finished this series with a pile of pigeon crap should not be in any way construed as a commentary upon anything. It just worked out like that. Besides, it's real. It's there.
Texas Tech University has a very large campus, but it is also very attractive and consistent in style. But some of these photos reveal the signs of age and a need for repair. The older buildings need some work. In that last photo you see rotted window frames and sills. Not good. I see a lot of that rotten woodwork in the older structures, as well as crumbling masonry and grime.
This is just continuing the series taken last weekend. Many more to go... this is just an area in and around the Science Quadrangle. TTU has a HUGE campus.
The last two pics bring waves of nostalgia for me, because the area used to be part of Agricultural Engineering and I worked there once, as a part-timer, under Dr. Ulich. Whatever happened to Dr. Ulich? Nice guy. He would be retired, surely. I enjoyed the work. Now, I think these buildings just seem to be used for storage.
Grampus exists, but different things are called that. For instance, Orca whales have been called Grampus. Not likely to find an Orca hanging out at TTU though. Various naval vessels have been named Grampus but that won't get us anywhere. So how do we complete the picture? See below:
This is the Texas Tech Biology building. If we take one of the accepted "Grampus" defintions, that of bottfly larva, this is the place where we are most likely to find the Campus Grampus. And you thought I was being funny. By the way, a very strange thing and sad thing happened at the Biology Building when it was under construction, in the days when I still lived in a dorm on campus. I walked right by the scene that night but didn't find out until later what had happened. It was after dark. I was returning to my dorm from the library and I passed a knot of students outside the fence that surrounded the construction zone. They were talking in low voices and waving flashlights. They were gathered around something on the ground. That something was a dead body, a student from a nearby dorm who had leaped to his death from the top floor of the not quite completed Biology Building. Witnesses reported that the student was speaking to them in the hallway of his dorm, seemingly normal, before he turned and ran. He was followed. He was seen to enter the construction site through a breach in the fence. He ran up concrete steps in a stairway that had, as yet, no enclosing walls-- the entire building was still a skeleton, with no external walls. When he reached the top he didn't hesitate. He hurled himself into the air and fell to his death outside the fence, onto a grassy area outside his dorm. Those dorms were demolished several years ago. I think it was the Carpenter-Wells complex if memory serves. Strange incident! Hard to forget something like that. I think at that time I was in Thompson Hall...
Now it is time to post our harvest of conventional color photos, taken on the TTU campus at the very start of the Fall Semester, 2014. The dorms were opening and students were moving in, according to schedule... these pics will go up over a period of several days.
There is the campus, but where is the Grampus? Every campus should have Grampus, in some form, I think. More on this later...
My wife and I made a photo expedition to the TTU campus this past weekend and I'll post all the pics here eventually, but first I want to put up an impressionistic harvest of black and white images. Not all of these were from TTU. If I can't get them all in one post I'll do the rest in another. The kids were moving into the dorm rooms when we were there. Kind of an exciting time here in Lubbock, as another semester begins, and the schools prepare for a new school year. TTU sports promise to be bigger than usual this year, and of course, high school football rivalries go on and on... it's those Friday night lights.
Well, I'm amazed! They all went up! Next time I'll do the plain color pics...
I'm trying to complete the batch taken several weekends ago. My wife and I want to get more. We like to take photos in the parts of town most residents don't see, since they spend all of their time in the more prosperous parts of town. But those prosperous areas seem to us to be overcrowded and sterile.
This is where Lubbock has stashed its homeless, out of sight and out of mind. There is a tent city behind the fence. Looks like they've got a crematorium handy, doesn't it? I suspect that will be the FINAL SOLUTION...
Sometimes in Lubbock you see something that appears natural but on close inspection it turns out to be a pile of broken, bulldozed, concrete scrap, overgrown with weeds and scraggly, drought-ravaged trees. And you think, well, that's sort of natural. It doesn't look TOO bad.
This city is home to a very nice couple who own a 1954 Kaiser Darrin. My wife and I photographed that car at a charity street festival in the Buddy Holly district (it is really called the DEPOT DISTRICT) downtown. In fact, there were many sharp hot rods and collectible vintage cars there. I've been intending to post the pics but never got around to it. Well, I'll begin now, and I'll start with some pics of that neat old Kaiser Darrin:
Lubbock has auto enthusiasts, like any other city, and they LOVE their vintage cars! My wife and I like old cars too.
Not all of Lubbock's downtown is a wreck. Here is some preserved old signage, and a funky wall. And I must admit that the local economy is doing very well. It's just that Lubbock is growing to the South and Southwest, and other parts of town are simply left behind.
No, Joyland is not what you think. It is an amusement area in McKenzie Park. My wife and I took some pics and I'm posting them here, in my efforts to "document" Lubbock, Texas. I'm foolish enough to continue this effort even though I realize that I live in a police state, that we are all potentially subjects of searches and seizures of property with no warrant, or even confinement for indefinite periods with no hope of speedy trial or legal representation. Even though I am contending that the Constitution of the United States has been reduced to the status of mere toilet paper, I am not ranting. I am merely stating facts. At any rate, here are the pics! JOYLAND! Have fun while you can!
