The Photographs I Never Got

Back in 2001, there still existed an old building on Jefferson and 10th, brick masonry with all the windows dark (and most of them gone). It stood there, across from the old Safeway, surrounded by a chain link fence, for years. 

I would admire it as I walked past it on my way to the store. I always wanted to go in there and look around. I'd had an affinity for old buildings, vacant and decaying, since I had noticed the strange old Victorian stuck on the hill next to Highway 30 as you pass through the little community just before the turnoff to Cornelius Pass.

I don't remember the first time I saw it, but I do remember the first time I noticed it - it came to me in a dream. I was passing by it and suddenly, I was at the front door, knocking. I went in and walked around. I don't remember much else of the dream beyond that and a sense of the space itself, but when I woke, I remembered the place I had not seen in a couple of years, and decided to drive out to see how well it matched up with memory.

I drove past on the highway, but didn't find a way to actually get up there. I thought I eventually might, but, that one was super creepy in it's decay. It emanated an ominous foreboding that something bad had happened, or would happen, there. And I couldn't fathom the kind of person who would still be living in a space that looked like it would seriously collapse and slide off the side of the hill at any moment - tarps flapping, rotted wood flying, glass crashing.

I never did get to photograph either of those places. I was not shooting yet at that point, and by the time I had started my love affair with photographing Portland, the building on 10th and Jefferson, as well as the old Safeway, had both been demolished to make way for mixed usage space of the new Safeway with condos on top. And being carless for 8 years limited my photographic excursions to within biking or bussing distance - neither of which would get me out to that old, crumbling Victorian. By the time I got a car, I was pre-occupied with other things - the horse, the band, the business. I had forgotten, temporarily, its very existence.

But the thing with memory, is that sometimes you get flashes. And sometimes I picture those buildings, standing there, forlorn in their decay, waiting for someone bring them back to their former glory. And so they wait, still existing in my mind, decayed as they were the last time I saw them, and no more.