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Painted Brick Wall. San Francisco, California. August 18, 2009. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell - all rights reserved.
A painted brick wall with a grated alcove near Chinatown, San Francisco, California.
(larger)
This is the person-less version of this scene that I was shooting when the man walked into it and I created the photo I posted earlier. I suspect that this interesting pattern is the result of someone painting out the rampant graffiti found all over Chinatown, but the color choice seems a bit odd for something so prosaic. The wall is just a few yards down a side street off of Grant.
(More of my San Francisco photographs
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A homeowner in Shadyside used a collection of vintage bricks to fill in about an 8 ft. area between the sidewalk and curb where there had been a tree. A century or more ago in this area there were dozens, if not hundreds, of brick manufacturing companies.
l'Hermitage de St-Sorlin, Charézier, département du Jura
Again and again as I read about the churches of the Chalain area, I came across mention of the ancient parish of St Sorlin. This had been vast, stretching from Clairvaux to beyond the lake, and had centred upon a vanished community on the slopes of Mount Saint-Sorlin, today in the commune of Charézier. Pierre Lacroix, in his scholarly Les Eglises Jurassienes Gothiques et Romanes, describes the excavated remains of the original church, and mentions a 19th century chapel that was built in the ruins.
I wasn't sure exactly where the church had been, or if the chapel still survived; but while out cycling between Pont le Poitte and Doucier, I saw a sign to l'Ermitage Saint Sorlin pointing through Charézier village along the road to Lieffenan. I followed it. I wasn't sure what to expect; was this the chapel Lacroix had written about? I might have been headed for a modern retreat centre for all I knew. Another sign directed me beyond Lieffenan. Climbing steeply up from the valley of the Ain, I came to a forest track, and a third sign pointing up it.
I had no idea how far it might be. I was already late for lunch ten kilometres away, and so I merely stopped and gazed wistfully up the track, got back on, and cycled home.
The following day, I decided to go and find the hermitage. It was a brilliant late summer afternoon. I left my bike at the bottom of the track. I locked it, the first time I think I have ever done so in the Jura. I regretted doing this, but I had no idea how far I would be walking, and didn't particularly want to come back down out of the forest and find my bike gone.
The path cut across the top of a field, and then turned sharply up into the forest. Immediately, it began to climb,through close ranks of ancient oaks. The path was coated in acorns; occasional lizards scarpered out of the undergrowth, and once I heard something large leap off the pathway ahead of me into the bushes.
I kept a brisk pace. Soon, the path was cutting into the steep side of the hill; below to my right were the tops of trees, and above mossy rock outcrops gleamed through the thickets. The low afternoon sun sent bold shadow lines through the forest, the air filling with the chatter of birds coming home to roost.
At a dog-leg turn in the path, a sign reassured me that it was only another 300m. The path levelled out, and I could see the way I had come below me. I turned a corner, passed a small Marian shrine - and there it was ahead of me in the clearing, a narrow west front with a double bell turret above, only one bell in place.
The clearing was cool after the climb through the forest. A couple of rabbits kicked heel and scattered as I approached, but apart from them I might have been the only one on the mountain.
I had found Lacroix's Saint-Sorlin. The little chapel sits in the middle of a large rectangular wall, the outline of the original church. It has a roof of stone slabs in the local manner. The expanse to the west forms a kind of lawned garden, an entrance to the chapel, while to the east the shuttered chancel window opens onto what appears to be an abandoned archeological dig. There are no traces at all now of the dwellings Lacroix says existed on the slope to the south of the church.
I wandered back around to the entrance. The door was wedged open, and a sign says Priere de Laisser la Porte OUVERT! The threshold has a strange carving of a cow wrapping its tail around a pair of feet, but otherwise presents no serious barrier between the organic outer world and the sanctuary within. Above, a head looks down, and the inscription reads Martyr de Saint-Saturnin.
The sun was sinking into the forest, and its light made a golden mouth of the doorway. I stepped through it.
Inside, the space was square, cool and damp. Brick tiles spread around three large foliage medallions on the floor. Apart from these, a stone altar and two memorials were the only features. One of the stones recalls that the hermitage was built by a man called Joseph Simonin. He had been a farmer in the adjoining hamlet of Lieffenan, but felt called to establish the chapel here, which he did with his wife in 1834. They lived as a silent community, receiving pilgrims, until his wife died and he became a Holy Spirit Friar in the Auvergne. He died there in 1856, but in 1987 this little chapel was restored and his remains were brought here for reburial.
In 1980, Lacroix had bemoaned the state of the hermitage and feared for its future, but today it is a rejuvenated centre of energy. Fresh tulips decorate the stone which Simonin had set up to recall the great days of Saint-Sorlin's past. The stone, now broken, was recovered from the ruins in the 1980s at the time of the restoration. I signed the visitors book, noting quite how many visitors the chapel had, many of them from abroad.
I sat outside, feeling the evening coming on as the sun fell beneath the ridge. A blackbird stood on the wall nearby, piping sadly in the fading light.
I thought of England. Soon, it would be time to go home, away from the fat heat and softness of eastern France to a Suffolk where the lean days would cool and shorten, where the exuberant buzz and hubbub of our urban life would be the counterpoint to a whirl of responsibilities. But if I ever needed space in my head, I knew I would think myself back here.
One of the red bricks which were used for the less-visible walls of the building. Unlike some demolitions I've seen, none of the bricks were salvaged. Thinking it was due to the fact that the holes (perforations) in them which was filled with mortar made them unfit for repurposing.
Brick Lane Music Hall, Silvertown. As a grade 2* listed building, no material alterations have been allowed to the church, but the spirit of Music Hall has been gloriously achieved with painted trompe l'oeil screens inserted within the arches.
London Docklands, Brick Lane Music Hall.
September 2013
The storage shed at the history brick plant at Claybank, Saskatchewan is used to store bricks salvaged from demolished buildings around the province. The random nature of the stored bricks and the colours and patterns caught my attention as I walked through the shed.
George Street, Kingston-upon-Hull, East Yorkshire
Kingston-upon-Hull, or Hull to give it its familiar name, must be one of the least visited cities in England. And yet, it is a fascinating and rather beautiful place, full of interest. It is a city built on a grand scale, the townscape often filtered by the fogs which regularly roll in off of the Humber.
The city of Hull is in Yorkshire, but in some ways not of it, having more of a feel of other East Coast industrial ports like Kings Lynn, Great Yarmouth and Ipswich. It is much bigger than any of these, having a population which now falls just short of 300,000 people, making it one of the dozen biggest cities in England, a position it has held for more than half a millennium.
The urban townscape is striking for the unusual number of domes and statues. Although the last twenty five years have seen a serious ravaging of Hull's industry and economy, there has been a great revival recently, thanks partly to money from the European Social Fund, but also the energy and determination of the city to prove that Hull is Not the Same, in both senses.
Hull is said to have more museums and art galleries per head of population than any other English city outside of Cambridge and Oxford. The latest is the Deep, a huge submarium at the mouth of the Humber. The Ferens Art Gallery is, to my mind, the very model of what a provincial city's art gallery should be. The Wilberforce House Museum of Slavery is world famous.
Hull had its self-image as England's forgotten city confirmed in the summer of 2007, when the worst floods for fifty years ruined more than 15,000 homes in the city. It took nearly three days for the magnitude of this disaster to reach the national news, which was concentrating on more fashionable Sheffield.
Any serious student of medieval urban England must visit Hull. Around every corner there are relics of the past, forgotten and unrecorded by anyone outside of the city, the ghost of a great European merchant port. At the heart of it all is Holy Trinity, built in the full confidence and prosperity of the late medieval period. Inside, its vast area makes it England's biggest parish church.
Another brick shot from Day 41.
Taken Feb 10, 2012 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
¹⁄₅₀₀ sec at f/4.5, ISO100, no flash.
Lens: EF50mm f/1.8 II
Sometimes, there is an opportunity to purchase a commemorative brick. The money goes to a good cause and the donor has an opportunity to express a short message.
Here, among the heart-felt memorials, is a more cryptic expression! A Google search revealed that this is a quote from the movie, Madagascar.