slide show

I've been slaving over a hot keyboard today. I actually put in something on the order of six hours organizing and selecting photos, putting them on my flickr page, finding that half of them were already there, blasting away duplicates, deciding on an order, captioning, and mostly, waiting for flickr to wake up. That was the fun part.

Anyway, the magnum opus is finished. I have made a new photoset of the pictures I took in 2006 and 2007 of the derelict amusement venue, Holyoke's Mountain Park, and the nearby derelict (and somewhat newer) water park. Mountain Park closed in 1987 after 80 years, and the wooden coaster was torn down in 1990.

In the course of looking up older photos to put names on some of my pictures, I learned that Jay Ducharme (whose pictures and sound files I linked to) finished a book on the park's history. He was one of the last carousel operators. The book, fittingly, is being sold at the carousel, which is now in Heritage Park, by the Children's Museum. It came out about four months after we moved out of town.

I also found out that bulldozers have finished obliterating the place, and a new owner hopes to make a concert venue of it.



Having found the access road, we have driven up and parked just off the bridge over I-91. The animated clown sign that invited drivers to visit Holyoke's Mountain Park for years is long gone, but the sign for the water park farther up Mt. Tom (which closed more recently) is still visible and peeling away. Let's go on in!



One of the overpasses that allowed pedestrians to cross paths with the little Zephyr train that ran around the park and also marks the location of the mini golf course, whose carpeted greens are among the more recognizable features of the park.



For a real treat, check out Jay's page. He was a carousel operator before the park closed, and he saved the recorded sound tracks from the Pirate's Den and Zoltan, the robot fortune teller.

www.karenandjay.com/mtpark/mpsounds/mpsounds.html

Sadly, Thurl Ravenscroft doesn't seem to be among the pirate voices. Anyway, this seems to be the roof of the Dolly Pitch, where you pitched dolls at baseballs to win wooden bottles. Or something.

www.karenandjay.com/mtpark/mphotos/2006pan.jpg



A three-dimensional view of a hill of poles. This is freeview 3D, because cross-eyed 3D gives me a headache and won't hold still. I took some other 3D pairs as well and might do something with them some day. More information about freeviewing can be found on the internet.

Seriously, go have a look if you can. I hiked in the hot sun to get these because I thought it was interesting, and I put a couple dozen of them up two and three years ago, respectively, and they've been looked at between zero and three times, ever. Be the first on your side of the Mississippi!.

morbid makeover

In one of my last photo expeditions to local graveyards around West Springfield, I took pictures of photos of loved ones that were incorporated into the stones themselves. These make me a little sad, and it was even more poignant to see how one photo in particular had deteriorated over the years.





Here's a young male, dates unknown because all the writing is in Hebrew (or perhaps Yiddish; I don't know how I could tell) except for a surname at the bottom. Many times I have looked at my pictures of this photo and thought it might be possible to use the paint bucket tool to fill in the missing areas with a dark shade and see the original photo. It wasn't so simple.

I ended up using the clone tool to pick up areas of shade and apply the tints here and there. Some of what I did was completely arbitrary, so it may be that this is not a real image of the deceased.



Nonetheless, I felt like I had a better idea of how this person had looked. Due to some of my own efforts, it's possible I have distorted the apparent gender of the loved one here, but a photo taken farther back shows what seems to be a young boy. It's kind of rough -- a more finished job might have taken twice as long, and it's getting late.

Anyway, that's what I did after work today.

Originally posted to LJ on 20080728.

ps: Thanks to Susan de Guardiola, in comments, for providing the translation of the tombstone. We now know who this young woman was. May she rest in peace. The impression of maleness was the result of deterioration of the picture and nothing else.