After a nighttime poster session, crowds of chemists issued forth from the San Diego Convention Center and across the tracks to the Gaslamp Quarter.
Author: adohertyh
Passenger
A bright gold shirt is a great way to stand out against the black paint of this mid-1950s Buick.
Bubble City
The enormous interior halls of the San Diego Convention Center are far beyond the size necessary for most of the American Chemical Society presentations, so these pop-up tents divide the space in an excitingly futuristic way.
Hartford Towers Above the Trees
Golden light, golden buildings, green colors in the park. Flying a drone can unveil a new perspective from an altitude that wouldn’t be accessible otherwise, but it can also just give a boat’s-eye view with a lot less paddling.
Old Burial Ground in Hartford
In the center of downtown Hartford is the settlement’s first burial ground; the centuries-old gravestones beside modern steel-and-glass buildings is the perfect start to October spookiness.
Bushnell Park Returns
After a summer spent under construction to fully overhaul the pond, work is finally complete and our city park looks more beautiful than ever. In the distance, the State Capitol is lit by the last of the warm early-autumn sunshine.
Brothers’ Cars
Two brothers, two coupes, together at sunset.
Dry Amidst Lush at Julien’s Farm Store Garden
Amidst the overgrown, riotous, lush, nourishing garden of Julien’s Farm Store (perhaps the best breakfast in northern Connecticut), this trellis-like arrangement of sticks supporting an array of growing vines stands out for its profound lack of photosynthetic light absorbers.
Sneaky Stegosaurus
Calder’s “Stegosaurus” peaks out from the trees between the Wadsworth Atheneum and Hartford City Hall.
Bushnell Tower with a Great Sky
A Romantic sunset sky with lots of highly textured clouds makes a perfect companion for the rough but linear concrete forms of I.M. Pei’s Bushnell Tower.
BNSF Paint Job?
A childhood spent with a bedroom window facing the train tracks built a skill for identifying train engine paint jobs, but the intervening years of mergers and the geographical distance between Illinois and California have diminished the intense recognition that would have had me swear that black, orange, and yellow meant a BNSF engine.
Union Carbide: Repurposed Headquarters
Like the characters in a horror movie, slowly realizing that they have wandered into a place they Should Not Have, I visited a large Connecticut facility with an excitingly retrofuturistic aesthetic and realized the true backstory of the place.
I was initially surprised that a new residential community would have such obviously older architecture, and pieced together that this must have previously been a corporate headquarters. The ample parking and dramatic hilltop location suggested something ambitious.
Reading about the history of the site on arrival, however, I came to realize that this was the former headquarters of Union Carbide—responsible for the most harmful chemical spill in human history, the Bhopal Disaster, responsible for exposing more than 500,000 people to methyl isocyanate, ultimately leading to the deaths of thousands. As a chemistry Ph.D., the effect of standing in the headquarters of the company when this event took place (the building opened in 1982 and the disaster occurred in 1984) was deeply unsettling—a reminder of the responsibility that chemists hold for the impacts of our work.
Many Rails
So many almost-parallel lines in this image (both rail and power) gives it a disorienting quality.
Light Academia
If “Dark Academia” has become a fairly well-worn genre with familiar tropes, I can’t say I’d mind finding a more optimistic and friendly version—less secret knowledge driving cults towards madness, more dragging indoor furniture into the sunshine to produce a comfy afternoon study spot.
But the Curtain Did Not Rise Again
Spreckels Theater closed in 2020, was sold in 2021, and leaves behind its marquee as a grim and overly optimistic reminder of a different time.
