Things I saw on HWY 14
The main thoroughfare near my place.
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Photo Essay No. 2: Things I saw on HWY 14
Something interesting about Illinois is the way communities are laid out.
There’s usually one or two main thoroughfares along which neighborhoods sprawl outwards.
The one nearest my house is HWY 14 and, like most of these kinds of roads, it’s pretty ugly. It’s all gas stations and mini-malls and grocery stores and fast food restaurants. With the exception of a few sections, there are no sidewalks or bike lanes, so cars are everywhere.
Not the greatest.
But also, not the worst.
It’s an American thing, these thoroughfares, this infrastructure.
As much as I’d like my city to be laid out like Amsterdam, it’s not going to happen. For that, you must go into cities. And maybe I will some day. But even then it’s a gamble, and usually things get worse.
For now, I take solace in the convenience of it all, the absurdness, the fact that my lakeside neighborhood seems entirely removed from the mess despite being only five or so miles away. I’ll take it.
My original plan was to bring my camera to the historic main street here in town.
But I thought, no.
Let’s see what we can find along the edges of the highway.
In fact, there was a lot to see, more than I could manage with the little time I had before the daylight reached levels untenably for photography.
There were back alleys, massive parking lots, interesting signage. Here was the America most of us live, despite trying to avoid it and put it out of mind. And there was nothing wrong with it. In fact, it was quite practical. Dangerous for a distracted pedestrian a.k.a. yours truly? Yes. But practical and fascinating and broad and ripe for photographs.
Too bad, then, that I wandered into a laundromat — too bad in terms of capturing a large swath of stuff — because I was totally and completely enamored with the photos I was able to get amongst two dudes doing their laundry.