Fall River, Massachusetts

November 2005

Hometown, USA

After two weeks of train travel and hotel rest-overs, I needed eight days of rest in Massachusetts in order to face the Trans-America leg of my trip that still lay ahead.




Second Street, Fall River.

On this trip, I stayed with an old friend Paul at his apartment nearby this location. This Second-Empire style tenement building with a mansard roof was where I first had my own apartment. I rented it with friends while I finished high school in 1969-70. It was where I discovered such pleasures as taking a bath with incense burning and Thelonious Monk on the stereo. I began to cook in that apartment as well, the joy of making one's own pancakes. There was no television in our pad; we thrived on books, music, and conversation.
Second floor in the back, it looked out on St Anne's church towers visible in this photograph.
The house where the Lizzie Borden murders took place in 1892 lies just downhill on Second street.





Hipster slouch after long train rides.

Paul's back yard looking off toward the South end.
Everything seems so tranquil when compared to the hectic, over-populated Bay Area where I live.






My sleep chamber.

Rest-over was a dark, quiet room in Paul's apartment,
momentarily decorated with haunted objects from my old home.
It seemed the apartment's silence and darkness covered over some dark event in its past.






The Flatiron building sails under blue skies and scudding clouds.

Situated across Second street from where I stayed, this fine old curiosity was a landmark of my youth. It meant we were halfway from our homes near Maplewood park to downtown or to high school. I knew a folk-musican from Swansea who had a place there in the 60s. He invited me to play harmonica in his jug band. I held out for an electric blues band instead.
Even earlier than that, I used to get my Mad paperbacks in the old variety store on the street level. One of them Like, Mad featured beatnik cover art--I dug that special. Clearly the place has long had Bohemian appeal. I think there was even a head shop there once upon a time. There should be a bronze plaque there. The building itself in every regard is a weird time-traveler with an oddball profile. And it has an elevated location where Plymouth avenue meets the top of Second street.






Second street looking Northward from the Flatiron building.

Fall River's

Backyard Shrines

Fall River was a city populated by Roman Catholic immigrants. Each successive wave of immigrants undercut the last one by working for cheaper wages. This led to some amount of resentment and to separate churches for each ethnicity despite a shared faith. They were often built a stone's throw from each other.
Most of these ethnic groups do seem to hold one tradition in common. A custom by which the Irish, French-Canadians, Polish, and Portuguese faithful alike could express their individual Catholic devotion. It takes the form of personal backyard religious shrines. They are all over town. A popular method of building one is to use an old bathtub with the drain-side buried. Waggishly such displays have been referred to as "Bathtub Marys."
Since 1980, I have been photographing examples of such shrines whenever I got the chance. The neighborhood where I stayed provided me with the two remarkable ones that follow.










A home on Stafford road.

Jesus shrine under the stairs. The icon looks to have received at least one touch up with heavy white house paint on his face. Note the distinct color of his hands. The drooping paint manages to resemble the snow clinging to the votive shrubbery.
Add to this the free-style spray-painting of his tub-grotto and the rosary bead lights and you have a dazzling tableau ingeniously tucked away in an available space.








A fastidious yard around the corner from us on quiet Conant street.

Christmas lights festoon these icons of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary.
The image of Jesus, Man of Sorrows is hand-painted on Portuguese tiles.