Day at the Museum

, originally uploaded by ArcherVision.

The Quadrangle area of Springfield Massachusetts includes plenty of culture and art, and is amazingly free for city residents. We rarely take advantage of this geographic anomaly, but a showing of LEGO art by Nathan Sawaya pulled us in. As cool as the LEGO art was, it was the pieces that have been in the same place since I was a kid.

I graduated from Technical High School back in 1981, not long before the school closed. My whole family went to Tech, including my Mom, back in...um, I 'll take a stab at 1957. Situated on the eastern side of the Quad, it used to be a favorite way to get downtown and to the store, McD's, the civic center and buss route home. But it was also a favorite haunt for photo assignments while in school and taking Photography with Mr. Cook.

Armed only with and iPhone and a small Sony camera lite on battery power, I just had to shoot a few images of the Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, as well as the The George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum, one of two Springfield Museums dedicated to fine and decorative arts. It represents the personal taste and Victorian aesthetic of the collector whose name it bears.

I returned with a Nikon or 2 and tried to get some shots of the aging school that brought me through the courtyard that is now filled with large bronze characters taken from Springfield's own Dr. Seuss. They are tearing the old girl down. Since 1905 Springfield's finest learned math and machining, drafting and drawing, and even a little English and History. They even had an ROTC program my sister and one of my brothers were in. And of course the legendary football program. All that will be history, and I am determined to go find some of my old black and white images from my tenure as a Tech Tiger.

The home of the Tigers will be no more and I am going to have to get over that fence to get some better shots. I am pretty sure the auditorium is still in tact, and would love to capture that. Urbex is fun, but you just don't always have bolt cutters on you, so getting close is tough.