Pretty Vacant

After the numbers and the talk of friends losing jobs, there's not much left to provide a tangible view of the past two year's economic crisis. I can picture vast bays of empty cargo ships in Asia or homeless encampments in the desert, but I've never seen them. What I do notice are the countless abandoned building projects around town, so I decided to start photographing a few of them.

The most notorious vacant lot in Seattle seems to be the 500 block of East Pine street in Capitol Hill, a lovely strand of gravel that was the site of several bars up until 2007. A subject of much hipster angst and nostalgic photography, the "beloved block of Pine Street was leveled to make way for . . . a mound of rubble" as The Seattle Weekly put it. Like many other construction plans, the money became unobtainable. There are dozens of similar tales throughout the city. The contents of all these lots is usually identical: A hole, graffiti, fence, weeds, flattened No Parking signs, and a bus stop at the corner. My limited polling of local residents is always met with a bemused uncertainty about what's to become of these various lots (and mild suspicion of whatever journalistic or developer interests they fantasize I might represent). "You can read the sign at the corner" one passer-by told me when I asked about one lot. These signs are ubiquitous throughout Seattle are nearly always for combined retail/condo properties. Few seem to have been updated since '07 or '08 and to the best of my knowledge all the lots in this series have been vacant for at least a year.