What’s one of the most annoying things for people who care about urbanism? The fact that normal people don’t even notice it. But a photograph creates an aesthetic object which invites scrutiny. The more banal the photograph, the better. One is confronted directly with something that would ordinarily be background noise. I imagine someone looking at a photograph of a typical contemporary urban landscape in the U.S. and, finding it ugly, having an epiphany: “My God, that’s practically the whole country! What have we done?” One can dream.

By the same token, the more photographs there are of one place, the more we know about it. So this week I’ve decided to share sets of multiple photographs of the same place.

Lake St. BIG K-Mart.

Lake St. K-Mart 10 years later.

What a coincidence, the parking lot wasn’t full in any of those three pictures!

This is a rather charitable view of Hiawatha Ave. & 26th St.

Here is my own bleak vision of the same intersection, looking South. I would be standing just about in the middle of the first photo.

94.

1. Cars using roads to travel from building to building. The future is now.

Skyway.

Skyway with shuffling/motorized denizens.