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About the Book

Old city sleeping now, tired from its industry. Abandoned empty shells loom like dark skeletons, hollowed empty husks. Monuments. Reminders of coke and coal, of iron and steel. A crumbling labyrinth of brick and concrete, with a purpose long forgotten, left now to die slowly. Rust, decay, rot. To be reclaimed, enveloped, recycled, destroyed by the city they helped build, a time they served long ago. Only still shadows lie across their flaking signage where once there was the thunder of steam and the billow of smoke.

This work chronicles an observation of the Olde City and Northern Liberties areas of Philadelphia. The detritus of a modern bustling metropolis thriving in and around and expanding from its discarded and neglected history. It is not a reiteration, nor is it an abstraction; rather, it is an interpretation of its architecture, its atmosphere and its emotion. It is an observation, and experiment in how I perceive a place, how a collection of objects and images taken from that place become charged with significance. How this concentration of captured ideas and chance elements, the choice of these found materials and imagery can evoke and relate the mood, feeling, or memory of that environment.

©  2002 Lawrence O´Toole