Jackknife Bridge, Cleveland (2004)

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My hometown, beloved Cleveland, Ohio. This is the view from the Hope Memorial Bridge, the location of the Art Deco relief on my Home page.
Cities based along a body of water lend themselves to night photography. The skyscrapers glow upward from the streetlights below, and reflect their multicolored light onto the water.
The night was just windy enough to gloss over the water, and make for a classic ‘postcard’ shot.
One of my mother’s favorite sculptors is Constantin Brancusi, a good friend of Impressionist painter Modigliani.
My first exposure to Brancusi was in Paris in 1995, where the George Pompidou center had an entire floor dedicated to an exhibit of his work.
When in the Met in New York, I came across this sculpture and his most famous, “Bird,” shown towards the bottom of this page.
The Cobb & Bradley Building, at East 57th and Euclid in Cleveland, was built in 1901 as a hotel, a restaurant, and a hardware store.
Abandoned since the seventies, not even pidgeons reside here anymore – unless you count the skeletons in the window sills of those who failed to escape.
The building is in quite a state of disarray – the sixth story roof is now on the fourth floor. Mick Jagger supposedly shot a music video there in the 90’s, which would explain the piano on the third floor.
I was terribly disappointed when I found out the project had been scrapped – I was imagining living there after I got out of school.