Outside Lighting In

The "F"-word & The HABS at the Edge of America

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

Talented Masons, Opium Pipes, and a Big Hole in San Francisco

I like San Francisco in December, I hope it becomes a habit. A year ago I spent a drizzly December day doing a HABS-like documentation of a handsome brick building on Natoma Street in Downtown San Francisco. 

This was a small building documentation brought on by the construction of the new $4 Billion Dollar Transbay Transit Center that is replacing the old Timothy Pfleuger designed Transbay Terminal. Since the expansion plan for the project extended over multiple blocks it required demolition of some old and new buildings including 77 Natoma shown above, and I was commissioned to record the features, interior and context of the building before it was demolished.

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A year later the project has just made headlines worldwide as artifacts of the Gold Rush era began to surface at (or rather under) the construction site. The buildings on Natoma shown above including the newer, metal-clad, rounded one on the right and the old bus ramp on the left are all a big hole in the ground now, San Francisco's version of Boston's BIG DIG. Archeologists from William Self Associates are busy combing through the site and preserving the history of an 1880s residential neighborhood now long gone (probably replaced by commercial buildings similar to the one I documented at 77 Natoma).

LINK TO ARTICLE: http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/development/2011/12/dig-sfs-transport-terminal-unearths-artifacts

This is how it all looks today in December 2011 from the roof of a building just down the block while I was in the city doing another couple HABS projects. The brick buildings are gone, the bus ramps are gone, the Pfleuger Terminal is gone and construction proceeds day and night - but opium pipes, chamber pots and porcelain doll heads from the 1880s keep telling stories. 

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