Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Continental and Life

It's funny... I used to photograph the Continental Building every chance I got. I have a several-inch-high stack of photos of it as it stood in abandonment in the late 1990s. I was driven by the conviction that it wouldn't always be there, that its days were numbered and the numbers were getting very small.

But now that it's renovated and brought back to life? I hardly have any shots at all. Maybe a dozen or so -- and only one or two that could really serve as a good before and after comparison.

There's a lesson in there somewhere, about not taking for granted what you see everyday...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I find it difficult to take for granted the memory of the previous Continental. I even have some Hi8 video tapes of it from 1995. Unless I take up painting, the images I remember of the 1968- Continental are going with me.
How could I paint the sound of the elevator closing and it getting so quiet just before the operator clicks the lever skyward?
In July '95, I rode my GSX1100 into Saint Louis with Olympus video camera bungied on. I snuck into the parking lot across the street from the old place and took some footage.
Now that the Olympus has died, I'll have to get another player connected to a fancy converter to get the footage into a computer now. Let's hope the hard drive lasts longer.
I'm glad you mentioned radio Rob because there's a good shot of the vintage KDNA antenna heater wires, swinging in the wind and slapping against the tower I climbed once back in 1969. Elvis Costello's Let Him Dangle tells the story better than I, about the demise of KDNA.