Author: Joe

Bowl Job

This small building is visible from the bridge above, especially if riding a school bus. My freshman year in gym class, we actually took field trips to the bowling alley to bowl (That’s for a whole other blog). I used to look down from the bus and see a piece that read Blow JOB. The wall has been buffed a couple times, once every twenty years it seems, but in this photo from 2016 you can kind of still see the Kwiz piece underneath the scratcher graffiti. The wall was half-assed-ly painted over again recently. One of the buildings never got painted over, and there is still an old Anx piece on it. I recall in the late 90s underneath it was a tiny Kwiz piece and a Jasta tag.

Life in 3 Megapixels

In 2003 or 2004 I saved up for my first digital camera. I bought it as a secondary camera to my film camera, since it took time to get photos back from the developer. It was a Sony point-&-shoot and was 3 megapixels. Here are some early digital photos of freights shot in 2004. Don’t get me wrong, I love film, but I like these because it gives you an idea of what things actually looked like (in 3 megapixels) without film grain.

Piano Factory

One of the most nostalgic spots in town for me, is the historic Starr-Gennett factory site. There is only one building remaining today, which has been preserved and turned into an indoor/outdoor venue by the City of Richmond. The building that I loved the most was the 6 story concrete warehouse completed in 1920 and demolished in 2001. It was covered in graffiti on the inside. I took a decent amount of photos there in the late 90s’/early 2000s, but regrettably none of them have survived. Every now and then photos of it will pop up online, but it’s pretty rare. The photo below was taken by Chuck Wonsik sometime in the early 90s. Mr. Wonsik passed away in 2019, and the photo was given to Donald Harrison, owner of Block Head Records in Richmond. Thank you, Donald. On this photo you can see a very early Kwiz piece with a character in a beanie. I vividly remember seeing this piece still there in the late 90s covered by ivy.

Photograph by Chuck Wonsik, 1990s. Courtesy of Block Head Records.
Postcard of the Starr-Gennett site via the Morrisson-Reeves Library website. The building is the concrete one on the far right.

https://mrlinfo.org/history/lostrichmond/starrpiano.htm

https://www.waynet.org/nonprofit/gennett.htm

https://www.starrgennett.org/

Yard Building

There is a lot of rail history in Richmond, and at one time we had a large PRR yard. It lasted through all the mergers and was abandoned in the early 1980s, according to the book “Pennsylvania Railroad Lines West, V. 1”. Most of the rails were removed years ago and the area is over grown, but there are still some old buildings remaining. One of them is tucked away and slowly falling apart. I’ve been taking photos of it for a long time.

  • Senoz, 2000
  • Sufr, 2000. Photo, 2005
  • Sufr, Early 2010s
  • Sufr, 2001
Present day, 2020.
Screenshot from a video posted on YouTube. It shows the building on the right in 1979.

Dissed Kwiz

Here are a couple scans of what remained of a Kwiz piece from the 1990s underneath an overpass. The photos are from the early 2000s. I adjusted the contrast on the middle one to help it pop out a little.

Civilian Graffiti

Give someone a marker, and they will write their name on something…or draw a penis with it. Marking on stuff is a human characteristic. Even the average person has something they want to say or wants to make their mark. Here are some of those average person markings. Included to counter-balance the pseudo-satantic graffiti is the classic “Trust Jesus” marker tag, the “Televandalist”. That one is still running today.