WANDERING WALKER'S POINT

Walker's Point is a neighborhood of Milwaukee that lies roughly south of the Menomonee Valley and west of the Kinnickinnic River.  It's character historically is predominantly industrial but it does have a retail district that has been recovering for some time.   Many of the city's better Mexican restaurants are located in Walker's Point.  I have found myself drawn to the area both for its industrial dilapidation and for its sometimes funky retail personality, and following is a potpourri of images that I have collected in those wanderings.

The neighborhood association has designated a number of the neighborhood's buildings with the following medallion.

And here is one of those buildings, which houses an antique store, complete with FDR's photo in the second floor window.

Pretty typical of the neighborhood.  And here is a sculpture in the window of another antique store.

I liked the surreal quality of this composition--decidedly not anatomically realistic.  I couldn't prevent the window glare in the upper part of the image, but in the end I was not too troubled by it.

The neighborhood also includes a good deal of local public art, such as the following.

When on a Sunday morning I pulled over to shoot the above mural of a Native American, the artist who created it came by and offered to give me a bit of history of the mural and the neighborhood.  He showed me the studio that he shared with several other artists and gave me permission to take a few photos of the artwork in the studio.  Here is one of his works, of Chester A. Arthur.  (I had to ask who it was.)

Really quite nice, I think.

And here is a sculpture(?) sitting on a shelf against a wall that caught my eye.

I thought the composition for this worked well.  The pipes behind the sculpture also helped.

Following are some architectural details that caught my attention, from the clean . . .

 . . . to the not so clean.

Someone was having fun with paint colors on the following building wall.

This was actually on the outside of a Sherwin-Williams paint store.

I liked the shadow in the above shot.

The detail I liked best was a circular medallion above a light fixture in the entryway of a corner bar when I just happened to look up.

The soft quality of the light and absence of shadows helped to make this shot, I think.  Pretty good for handheld in a relatively dark area.

On the less attractive side, I found myself in a pedestrian railroad underpass and noticed some sort of lines of grease running down the walls of the walkway, which had been whitewashed once upon a time.

And here is a wider scene.  Looks like some sort of statistical graph, but really it's just grease.

Perhaps beauty is in the eye of the photographer.

I also caught the following "grab-shots" while driving around the neighborhood.

Pretty nice work shoes that must have fallen off a vehicle.  I left them in the street and hoped the owner retraced his route and found them.

Finally, I had noticed a relatively tall wedge-shaped building that was perhaps only 15 feet wide at one end and was trying to figure out how I might best capture that feature when I noticed a young man walking toward the building.  He sat on a curb across an alley from the building, and I decided to try to include him in the shot.  I was perhaps 100 feet away and did not want either to seek his permission for the shot or to have him see me taking the shot.  I decided to place him in the lower left of the image and grab what I could get.  This is the result.

Unfortunately, the man was sitting in the shade (thinking about it, I suppose that was intentional) and I worked in post processing to minimize that problem.  I also converted it to a black & white.  A closer inspection indicates that he is smoking something--probably not tobacco--and appears to be talking to himself.  I liked that I placed him in the lower left of the image, converting the rest of the scene into a kind of negative space.

John