One of the most interesting HABS photography projects in a while took me to the bottom edge of America this month to photograph the San Ysidro Customs House in San Diego at the Tijuana border, shown here in this view from the public pedestrian entry tunnel into the USA.
Built as the original border station in 1932 for cars and pedestrians the Spanish Revival Building with a decorative cupola now sits beside the new high-tech border crossing where over twenty lanes of cars, vans and buses sit in longs lines on the 5 Freeway coming across the US/Mexico border.
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The building has been a bit marginalized as the border crossing has expanded and enveloped the setting but the happy news is it will be adaptively reused instead of being demolished or moved to another location. The project worked out as a nice HABS documentation with help from the staff at the site even though we had planned to photograph overall context views from a building that had been demolished a week before we arrived at the site... surprise.
Cole Smothers, my assistant on this project, caught the photo below of me jammed into the corner of America, along side the high fences that surround the Customs House. This project was a challenge because most of the building was surrounded by fences, barricades and walls, making composition of the exterior facades a cram-me-into-a-corner-with-a-camera affair. Surprises make life interesting and support my faith in the "F"-word... Flexibility!
Schaf in the Corner of America. Photo by Cole Smothers
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