HomeDiagramsDatabaseMapsForum About
     

Go Back   SkyscraperPage Forum > Photography Forums > General Photography


Reply

 
Thread Tools Display Modes
     
     
  #1  
Old Posted Feb 15, 2007, 11:12 PM
LostInTheZone's Avatar
LostInTheZone LostInTheZone is offline
Do you like... Huey Lewis
 
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Phila.
Posts: 3,062
1st photothread! Glass-smooth Neshaminy Creek at high tide; NE Corridor trainspotting



Haunted Lane is a crooked little street of former summer cottages from the 1920s, some charmingly decrepit, others merely decrepit. It's about a dozen or so miles out of central Philadelphia, in the first municipality outside the city line (map). Here we're about half a mile up from where it joins the Delaware River, so even though I grew up at least an hour from the ocean, I got tides right in my back yard. My dad's grandfather had this as a summer place and eventually retired here; he let it go to seed, died, and then his widow sold it to my newlywed parents. After this neglect and several floods, the worst of which was Hurricane Floyd, it's not quite structurally stable. It's due to be knocked down and replaced with what the plans promise is a tasteful, old fashioned kit cottage with a porch, lots of windows, and cedar shakes.

Trivia: Back in the 80s, after Andalusia, Cornwells Heights, Bridgewater, and a bunch of older buroughs merged with their rapidly-developing hinterlands to create Bensalem, the township tried to change the name of the street. My side of the street fought it, and now the other side of Bristol Pike is "Totem Road".

Here's some photos I took back around Thanksgiving, during our very warm autumn and after many weeks of rainy days. They're in chronological order, with the crappiest ones taken out. Sorry for the blurriness, but it was my brother's crapola digital that couldn't handle the slightest hand movement. I thought some of them were good in spite of that, so I included them.

Enjoy, and please feel cree to offer criticism and advice! I'm looking forward to contributing more photos once I'm more comfortable with the camera I got for Christmas.

1. My neighbors' house. Underneath half a dozen additions, this was originally a boat shed. I kind of wish my parents had bought it when it was for sale a few years ago:


2. Front step of my house. I made this out of fireman's brick I found in the backyard:


3. Coming to the back of the yard, this is the first view your eye is drawn to:


4. slack tide:


5. this is only a foot or so above normal high tide. I have a personal stake in climate change, since this property is more or less AT sea level, and might not be inhabitable by the time I inherit it:


6. bulkhead, bench with log from a previous flood:


7. Northeast Corridor bridge over Neshaminy Creek, used by Amtrak, Septa, NJ Transit Clockers and the increasyingly rare occasional freight train. Bristol Pike bridge piers visible behind. We'll come back to this bridge.


8. other houses, other neighbor's gazebo and not-entirely-tacky concrete classical art:


9. lens flare:


10. wall:


11. tree reflection angle:


12. what's that noise? a 4-car R7:


13. ant circuitry:


14. 2-car R7- only clear train shot, sorry . lots of trains at rush hour


15. back towards house:


16. light gets darker, view downstream gets even more saturated:


17. waterfront:


18. MAXIMUM LENS FLARE:


19. corner of bulkhead. this was kind of fun to walk on:


20. Amtrak train pulled by two locomotives:


21. cars- this time the bridge is in focus, but the train i'snt:


22. Acela- trains every couple minutes this time of day:


23. how the world looks to Canadian geese:


24. how the world looks to 5-foot-10 homos:


25. they paved over my yard with mercury:


26. beautiful:


27. somewhere underneath there is my parent's bedroom and a chimney- damn blur!


28. an honest portrait- it's nicer on the inside:


29. attempt 2: more zoomed in, still blurry:


30. these are real. Tons of interesting stuff scattered around the property- when my parents moved in, there was a bottle dump, and shed full of what appeared to be trolley parts (my namesake great-grampop worked for PTC, go figure):


31. downstream:


32. upstream:


hope you all enjoyed!
__________________
"I'm exceedingly pro-growth, but I have to respectfully dissagree. Growth is not the holy grail, smart growth is. Uncontrolled, careless growth which ends up creating problems in the long run is called cancer." -Eigenwelt

Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

Last edited by LostInTheZone; Feb 16, 2007 at 7:17 AM.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #2  
Old Posted Feb 15, 2007, 11:55 PM
Robert Pence's Avatar
Robert Pence Robert Pence is offline
Honored Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Fort Wayne, Indiana
Posts: 4,309
I enjoyed!

Congrats on your first photothread. What a beautiful place to have grown up, and within sight of the Northeast Corridor! It doesn't get any better than that. I'm terribly envious.

If the property is flooded by the time you inherit it, just get a houseboat.
__________________
Getting thrown out of railroad stations since 1979!

Better than ever and always growing: [url=http://www.robertpence.com][b]My Photography Web Site[/b][/url]
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #3  
Old Posted Feb 16, 2007, 12:06 AM
Evergrey's Avatar
Evergrey Evergrey is offline
Eurosceptic
 
Join Date: Apr 2003
Location: Pittsburgh
Posts: 24,339
I've seen these same images in my childhood dreams.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #4  
Old Posted Feb 16, 2007, 2:20 AM
Goody's Avatar
Goody Goody is offline
Run with Love
 
Join Date: Sep 2003
Location: New Hampshire
Posts: 3,134
very nice, I cant believe this is your frist photo thread.. christ you have almost 3000 posts.

#25 is fucking awesome
__________________
"Dazzled by the needles of light stitching the water, I turned to watch him watch them. I noticed his eyelashes were reflected in his eyes, like awning in windowpanes. As I tried to make sense of that reflection, I found I could not look away. His irises were brown, clouding into orange with brighter flecks around his pupils. Then it became as important not to look as to look, I feared I would be lost in rush of bronze motes."
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #5  
Old Posted Feb 16, 2007, 2:25 AM
rockyi's Avatar
rockyi rockyi is offline
Bah!
 
Join Date: Sep 2003
Location: Rock Island, Illinois
Posts: 16,399
Thanks for the neighborhood tour.
Why is it called Haunted Lane?
__________________
My feet hurt!
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #6  
Old Posted Feb 16, 2007, 6:53 PM
giovanni sasso's Avatar
giovanni sasso giovanni sasso is offline
furified freestyle
 
Join Date: Mar 2002
Location: philadelphia, pa
Posts: 12,294
buxco heeyyyyyy. nice little place there, litz. the high tides might be a little unnerving to me though.
__________________
phillyskyline.commauleofamerica.com
a matter of life and death, just like a etch-a-sketch
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #7  
Old Posted Feb 17, 2007, 12:13 AM
LostInTheZone's Avatar
LostInTheZone LostInTheZone is offline
Do you like... Huey Lewis
 
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Phila.
Posts: 3,062
thanks for the comments guys.

about the high water: this was after several weeks of heavy rain- I'm sure you remember the springlike fall we had. The water in the yard is only a few inches deep, and in a typical "flood" it doesn't get any worse than what you see in the pictures. We're planning to add about six inches of topsoil when we rebuild the older, wooden part of the bulkhead, which will take care of the swampiest parts of the yard. A small rise in sea level would be disastrous, since the yard is in a floodplain, but the house itself is built into the bank and the back part of it is already about 10 feet above the yard. Many houses along the Neshaminy were raised after Hurricane Floyd, and the new house will be raised on pilings about a foot higher than it currently sits, a la a Jersey shore house.

Still, "The Crick", as I grew up calling it, is a major tributary of the Delaware that drains most of Bucks County all the way up till you hit the Lehigh Valley. All the runoff from every Toll Brothers development and shopping center in Central Bucks passes by my house. A lot of this development was allowed contingent on the Dark Hollow flood control dam that remains unbuilt. Sprawl has pretty direct environmental consequences- in addition to increasing runoff that would normally be absorbed into the ground, it makes the water a lot siltier, which clogs up the marinas and the channel. Ironically, the approximately 16 inches of rain that devastated the entire east coast with Floyd also served to give us a temporary reprieve from frequent smaller floods by dredging out the channel. Normally the bottom is soft mud, with sand in the channel, but after Floyd it was down to clay and rock. During the hurricane though, the water was as high as the bottom of the back porch of the house, and just about everything in these pictures was under at least 7 feet of water.

Rob & Evergrey: yeah, in these pictures you really get the feeling of a cute paradise with half-wild gardens, old trees, overgrown ivy and the water. I go back to my house now, and I love it for its big windows with big moldings and copper latches, and the art deco kitchen. But growing up, I just saw it as old and shabby. It's got two bedrooms, and there were five people and a dog in my family. The basement is practicaly a swamp. The street is kind of isolated, and most of our neighbors were old people, so I didn't have a lot of kids to play with. Croydon itself is considered pretty low-class (rightfully, for the most part) and I went to high school further out in the burbs, in Fairless Hills, and a lot of my high school friends considered my house really far out of the way. I never got a driver's license, and it was a bitch sometimes getting rides.

On the other hand, if you look at the map, it's set up like a traditional town, built around a train station, with two main shopping streets and a grid system. If the oil crisis comes Croydon will be basically OK.

oh yeah and rocky: I've really never been able to get any good answer for why the street is called that. There are different stories, but the explanation I give people is that it just looks like a spooky crooked street at night.
__________________
"I'm exceedingly pro-growth, but I have to respectfully dissagree. Growth is not the holy grail, smart growth is. Uncontrolled, careless growth which ends up creating problems in the long run is called cancer." -Eigenwelt

Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #8  
Old Posted Feb 17, 2007, 12:32 AM
Kngkyle Kngkyle is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Chicago
Posts: 3,092
Some are really nice but then there are a bunch of blurry ones too. My camera has the same prob at times.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #9  
Old Posted Feb 18, 2007, 8:08 PM
Eigenwelt's Avatar
Eigenwelt Eigenwelt is offline
OG from the L.B.C.
 
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: Brooklyn
Posts: 3,055
*Flashes Litz the LBC gangsigns.*

Lower Bucks County representin'.

Really nice for a first thread though I was frustrated by the blurriness. Low light problems I presume? Also while your property may be doomed to development related flooding, I don't think global warming is a problem. Philly itself is approx. 100 feet above sea level at Penn's Landing. All of Bucks is higher.
__________________
Jonesing for a real cheesesteak.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #10  
Old Posted Feb 18, 2007, 9:55 PM
LostInTheZone's Avatar
LostInTheZone LostInTheZone is offline
Do you like... Huey Lewis
 
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Phila.
Posts: 3,062
you might be surprised- here's a map highlighting the portions of the metro that are less than 14 meters (about 40 feet) above sea level:



http://flood.firetree.net/?ll=39.9703,-75.1650&z=5&m=14

check the link. It's one of the best hacks I've seen of google maps- the lack of a topograhic feature is one of its major limitations, IMO. It's interesting to see how the city was founded on the best, highest ground available, and also that the lowest-lying areas of the city are generally used today as low-value industrial land. As you probably know, all the major northeastern cities sit astride the Fall Line, where the rolling piedmont meets the flat coastal plain:



so yes, while large portions of the city, very importantly most of Center City, sit on good high ground, you've got large portions of the river wards and South Philly, not to mention the Schuylkill banks and 30th street rail yards, that stand the chance of getting pretty swampy. They already flood after a lot of rain.

topographic contour map of Philly. Very large image, but I'm sure you geeks can appreciate it. It's amazing how much of the layout of the city, especially its older pre-tract-development neighborhoods, is geologically determined:
__________________
"I'm exceedingly pro-growth, but I have to respectfully dissagree. Growth is not the holy grail, smart growth is. Uncontrolled, careless growth which ends up creating problems in the long run is called cancer." -Eigenwelt

Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

Last edited by LostInTheZone; Feb 18, 2007 at 10:11 PM.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #11  
Old Posted Feb 20, 2007, 10:29 AM
Eigenwelt's Avatar
Eigenwelt Eigenwelt is offline
OG from the L.B.C.
 
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: Brooklyn
Posts: 3,055
Interesting. While I have seen that old topographical model and I was aware of the region's geology (in aerial shots of Bucks you can actually see the fall line; Rt. 1 more or less follows it) the Google Maps hack is new to me.

I stand corrected, and fairly dismayed. I was not aware so much of this region was in jeopardy from rising sea levels.
__________________
Jonesing for a real cheesesteak.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #12  
Old Posted Mar 15, 2007, 5:43 AM
LostInTheZone's Avatar
LostInTheZone LostInTheZone is offline
Do you like... Huey Lewis
 
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Phila.
Posts: 3,062
Quote:
Originally Posted by Eigenwelt View Post
(in aerial shots of Bucks you can actually see the fall line; Rt. 1 more or less follows it)
I'll correct you cause I'm bored :-p

The Fall Line is the dropoff to the coastal plain. The Neshaminy hits it between Hulmeville and Newportville, producing a series of small waterfalls and rapids. The "hill" in Holly Hill in Ltown is the dropoff too.

The feature you're referring to is a fault (not fall) line. It shows up in that geology map I posted as the line where the precambiran rock in brown meets the triassic rock in green. In our neck of the woods it's picked up by the R3 line and Rt 1, but it's actually a relatively straight, low-grade valley running almost all the way to the Susquehanna River:



The Reading line follows it to Jenkintown, then after Conshohocken the Pennsylvania RR used it for the Trenton Cutoff (parallel to 202 and the Turnpike to Malvern), the Main Line between Exton, and then another low-grade freight route to Qarryville just short of the Susquehanna, where it sort of peters out into a more confused series of hills.

I have no idea what this valley is called, anyone know? Is this the "Great Valley" referred to in "Great Valley Flyer" and "Great Valley Corporate Center"?
__________________
"I'm exceedingly pro-growth, but I have to respectfully dissagree. Growth is not the holy grail, smart growth is. Uncontrolled, careless growth which ends up creating problems in the long run is called cancer." -Eigenwelt

Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #13  
Old Posted Mar 15, 2007, 7:32 AM
peacefu603's Avatar
peacefu603 peacefu603 is offline
BANNED
 
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Beijing
Posts: 455
Beautiful
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #14  
Old Posted Mar 15, 2007, 7:49 AM
Urban Sky's Avatar
Urban Sky Urban Sky is offline
skeetskeetskeet
 
Join Date: May 2003
Location: Miami Previously: San Diego
Posts: 2,203
<clapping> congrats on your first!
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #15  
Old Posted Mar 29, 2007, 6:51 PM
SJPhillyBoy's Avatar
SJPhillyBoy SJPhillyBoy is offline
Hello
 
Join Date: Dec 2002
Location: SJ to Philly
Posts: 2,631
Very nice. That bulkhead wall is not doing too good of a job. Better call the Army Corp of Engineers to fix that.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #16  
Old Posted Mar 29, 2007, 10:53 PM
Derek Derek is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: Portland, OR
Posts: 9,540
i enjoyed
__________________
Portlandia
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #17  
Old Posted Apr 5, 2007, 10:37 PM
LostInTheZone's Avatar
LostInTheZone LostInTheZone is offline
Do you like... Huey Lewis
 
Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Phila.
Posts: 3,062
Quote:
Originally Posted by SJPhillyBoy View Post
Very nice. That bulkhead wall is not doing too good of a job. Better call the Army Corp of Engineers to fix that.
the point of a bulkhead is to keep the land from spilling into the water, not vice versa.

thanks again for the compliments everyone!
__________________
"I'm exceedingly pro-growth, but I have to respectfully dissagree. Growth is not the holy grail, smart growth is. Uncontrolled, careless growth which ends up creating problems in the long run is called cancer." -Eigenwelt

Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
Reply With Quote
     
     
  #18  
Old Posted May 26, 2015, 3:36 AM
BoyfromHauntedLane BoyfromHauntedLane is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: May 2015
Posts: 1
I enjoyed these photos.

I grew up along this stretch of the road. I remember Uncle John Litz.
I especially liked the photos of the water and the train bridge. They brought back a lot of memories. It was a great place before the industrial park was built across the street and when Lake Louise was still there down the road. The gun club, Sonny's Sand Pit, etc., etc. It really changed over the years.

Thanks for the post!
Reply With Quote
     
     
End
 
 
Reply

Go Back   SkyscraperPage Forum > Photography Forums > General Photography
Forum Jump


Thread Tools
Display Modes

Forum Jump


All times are GMT. The time now is 2:19 PM.

     
SkyscraperPage.com - Archive - Privacy Statement - Top

Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.7
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.