This weekend I developed a roll of 35 mm film and found some pre-Labor Day photos I’d taken with my Lomo LC-A, including images of my first (of two) visits to the Minnesota State Fair.

One of my favorite places at the fair is the Agriculture building. The first reason is that the signage and the restrooms are all as they were 50 years ago.

The second reason is the gradient jars of ribbon-winning honeys.

I only rode one midway ride this year, and it wasn’t the Kamikaze – but its red, white, and blue flashing lights were a joyride of their own.

An unremarkable rabbit who did nothing to warrant being photographed.

The view from our sunset SkyRide. Half the fun is waiting in line and hoping you get assigned your favorite gondola color. (Faded Retro Turquoise. But I think we got stuck with Boring Grass Green.)

After fifteen years I finally went to a drive-in movie again this weekend and loved every second of it. Ninety-nine point nine percent of my enjoyment came courtesy of the adorably dated signage hanging around my old haunt.

What a good old obsolete logo, sans serif font, or product shot of cola chilling in an icy forest scene won’t do for a guy’s soul.

The world may as well have stopped designing itself entirely after 1986, and I’d have been just fine.

To escape the intense weekend heat, I retreated to the 18th floor of the Foshay Tower – the first skyscraper west of the Mississippi.

Modeled after the Washington Monument and completed just before the stock market crash of 1929, the historical building is now the first W hotel in the Twin Cities.

The W furnishings and lighting are all nouveau nightclub glam – Carrie and Samantha chic, I guess. But the buildings original detailings remain as they were eighty years ago and were the true signals of style at the hotel.

The elevator doors, the ceiling, the original mail slot…why is nothing today fashioned with such detail and dignity?

Another retro rush of the Foshay tower is its observation deck above the thirty-second floor. To this day the tower remains one of the tallest concrete skyscrapers, second only to the Empire State Building.

Wandering around the Foshay’s narrow decks from way up above in the warm August winds was supremely cinematic.

A gigantic gorilla, second in size only to King Kong, might as well have crawled on up to paw down propellor planes.

It’s good to look at your world from a new vantage point, and to look at your world the way it once was. My hometown W was pretty perfect for doing both.

My parents have lived in Florida for five years and when I visit them its become a tradition for them to drive me to the abandoned Old Colony hotel where I would cross the No Trespassing tape to take photographs while they patiently waited in the car.

It unintentionally became a tradition because three years ago my parents mentioned the building was to be leveled soon so a strip-mall could take its place – but every time I came back, the pink battered beauty was still standing. I felt I owed it to her, and to the postcard perfect vision of old Florida, and to the way America used to sparkle, to continue to photograph her as long as it was still possible.

The day before Mother’s Day, my mother e-mailed me this:

“at 7 a.m. this morning, the Colony Plaza motel that the Disney people stayed at while building Disney World will be destroyed and the pink motel will be no more.  Good thing you got your pictures of that piece of history while you were here.

i sure do love you, my heart.

-mom”

And then an hour later she sent this:

“They televised the implosion live. The building went down at 7:10 with a thousand pounds of dynamite sticks that were set off from the ground floor up. It sounded like a series of 20 loud gun shots, and then the building dropped and there was a huge cloud of dust that they said would be picked up by dopplar radar because it is so large. Interestingly, it was 41 years ago that there was a press conference at the hotel where there was a world-wide announcement about the construction of Disney World, so it really was a historic landmark. It will now become a shopping center. Hundreds of people were lined up to watch the implosion. They said it looked like a fourth of July parade turnout.”

Sometimes I feel like just about everything postcard perfect is being leveled by a thousand pounds of dynamite sticks, merely to be replaced by a closer Barnes & Noble or a larger Verizon Wireless store. All we can do, friends, is whip out our cameras and save what we can.