#fredonia ny

[captainpirateface]

Fredonia, New York

[sayjoart]

Went to my first non-school rally.

🚫👑No Kings Rally,

Fredonia, Chautauqua county, Ny. 6/14/25

I got lost so I couldn’t “March” there with the people I had an rsvp with (I would have been the youngest in the group) but I found the end point so I went there. I think next time I’ll go directly to the park. There were people of all ages but it as still tiny but Chautauqua county is a rural, conservative community so it wasn’t surprising. Also the Fred State (a state university) is on break so it wasn’t surprising mostly locals .

There was only one heckler but nobody reacted to him so he got bored and wandered off.

🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱

Here’s some studies I made. I added some color after the fact. I may add more later.

The writing on the first one in just the date.

The writing on the 3rd down on the right says: “Honor those who died for a representative democracy. “

“I take down kings for fun.” “Compassion not oppression. “

The sketch next to that says “FDT”

Bottom right says. “We were all once strangers in this land.”

[captainpirateface]

After 10 p.m. the Village is mine.

[staticdecay-blog]

Post 5 - Abandonment Issues

I have been asked before of why I am infatuated with, and enjoy being in abandoned buildings. I can speak at length of the parallels between those spaces and my own self and my emotional space, about the comfort I find in the affinity with them. They stand in their neighborhoods, overlooked or hated by most, neglected, becoming ruins and testaments to the nature of decay......but for the few that take the risk to their health, their freedom, and rise to the fears of being labelled a weirdo or outcast...they find a beauty there, they find story after story after story told on and in the walls, in the furniture left behind, in the documents, pictures, and relics that are scattered among the floors.

To find the history of a building, and how it became abandoned is usually a not overly complicated affair. Sometimes it can be found simply by looking at it, such as when a fire claims it and leaves a large chunk collapsing and charred. Other times it is not so obvious but usually boils down to economic failures in general. The actual details can be so completely varied...some are failed business ventures, some suffer from gentrification, some have slumlords, some have histories of drugs......they are like us in so many ways...a thousand faces a thousand stories...there will be similar circumstances among many of us but rarely the exact same.

I have been asked not nearly as much, how I came to have abandonment issues. For years I thought on this...I would trace scar after scar that is etched in my flesh and ruminate on it. The first answer was "because I am BPD." This is, however, a very common and dangerous answer/dynamic because it shuts down really finding out WHY?

Then I began to think back over my life. I thought of the numerous people in my teens and adult years who said they would "be there" and then cut out as soon as things got remotely tough, or even remotely not tough. Girlfriends...friends....mentors......it was a pattern that I saw and experienced in my life but even those instances...those were not the causes, those were symptoms.

Just as the obvious answers of why those buildings are empty and falling apart can be found but lack the details...so too can it be pretty easy to see the pattern of my own abandonment issues. However, the details may require some digging beyond the daily newspaper archives or beyond the archives etched in my skin.......

The year is something I cannot recall beyond a rough guess, but based on certain things such as the vehicle we drove and the fact we often went to the playground, I would guess it was between 1990 and 1992. I know for certain it was before the years of hell I would face in Fredonia middle and high school. It happened in early summer and I would have been between 9 and 11 years old.

The playground at Fredonia Central School was a sprawling fortress back in those days. It would later be torn down as a safety hazard but in its time it was called the creative playground. It was entirely made of wood with everything interconnecting. A lot of hidden passages, bridges, towers that would give way to tire tunnels, various monkey bars, slides, poles, and no shortage of things to climb, jump on or off from, run across, and potentially break your neck on.

Remember all those old NES games? It was extremely easy to take yourself to those scenarios on this playground. It was NOT a playground it was a haunted castle, or a fortress held by the evil ninjas or soldiers. There is a reason it was called the creative  playground...because it was ripe to create various fantasies to act out in our solitude when we were not star athletes or cool kids.

It was also an extremely good spot to play hide and seek or capture the flag if you had friends or random playmates that happened to be at the playground at the same time.

My father had gotten home from work and after dinner he somehow found the energy after 8 or more hours of grinding steel in a sweltering mill to take me to the playground. The sun was just beginning to set as we were pulling up to the playground. This meant we would get about 45 minutes or so.

The frogs could be heard from the small forest patch that contained a little pond, and the sounds of the night started to fall as I opened up to the playground. It did not take long to ask my dad to play hide and seek with me. There were no other people at the playground that evening, and my father was a good father, despite the fatigue he surely felt he would stand up and he would do something I find myself incapable of as an adult...he could get very in to this childs life and escape the real world with him.

I hid first.

I thought I was clever and I found myself a spot in some hidden crevice. As I would also do as an adult, I would overlook some very obvious setbacks in the plan and soon after I would be crushed to find I was not nearly as clever as I thought.

I do not know how my father found me but he was good at finding things. He grew up in the country and was decent at tracking and noticing things. He probably saw my footprints or made himself invisible and would stealthily wait for me to move a bit and he would see it and then slowly move in to tag me.

Sometimes I would get frustrated with it and the fact that he never let me win. As good a man as my father was, and as good a father as he was, he still had some short comings, as we all do or will. One thing he did not always see was when enough was enough. There was a time we were playing HORSE in our backyard, and every time I would shoot the ball, he would say in an announcers voice "Barkey shoots...and he puts up a brick" and I would get sooooo mad. In that incident I ended up in tears and crying to my mother....

The sun was falling further towards the horizon and the temperature was cooling with it, and I had to find my dad as I was "it" now. I had reached the mandatory count which was probably 50, but I can't recall for certain.

I started up high near the big wizard tower structure. I felt I could see the most ground from there. After climbing up the tower and coming out I crossed the bridge and kept my eyes out both below me, and to the left where the rest of the playground was after crossing a balance beam. There was no sign of my father.

After the bridge I started looking in the hidden areas below the bridge before going to the area that connected to the hard, one board balance beam that I could not get across without stepping off a couple of times. This area had more hidden areas within it and I started clearing them. Numerous people had been there, as was evidenced by the simple and young graffiti displaying things like "Jenny <3's Tim" or a statement of dislike against one teacher or another.

None of the people that had been there though were not there now, nor was my father.

Temperature drop. Losing light. I clear the playground with no sight of my father. Panic rising.

My mind went to the place it went every time my parents would leave: "what if they dont come back?" If they ran late I would become very panicked inside of myself and think they were dead or that something happened to them. They always came back though.

My mind was racing because I could not find my father. It was racing faster than the speed of horizon swallowing the sun, faster and louder than the frogs who were screaming at me.

I combed through the wooden corridors, towers, bridges and nooks looking for him again.

I came to sit at the foot of the widest slide in the playground. I watched the sun disappear over Lake Erie in the distance, creating intense shadow figures of nearby trees and houses. I was crying hysterically at this point with full rivers being developed from what were first gently moving streams down my cheeks.

I was left alone. It happened.

Through misted, glassy, blurred eyes I made my way back to the van. I opened the passenger door and climbed in to the seat. I was hoping that my dad was in the van but that was dispelled as soon as that door opened.

My head slumped down, staring at my feet...this is a position I would come to know well a few years later for numerous reasons. I would occasionally find the hope and will to look out the window to see if my dad had magically reappeared. He didn't.

The sun was all but gone but my tears certainly were not. My breathe was dwindling from the sobs and crying. No hope was felt so I aimlessly looked back at the window.

A shadowy figure moved and I realized it was not a backlit tree. This figure moved closer and closer until it could be recognized as my father..........

Parents have the best of intentions a lot of times. Mine certainly did. My father never considered the consequences of not "letting me win." He, nor I could have ever predicted that twenty years later I would sit within the walls of, or on the roof of some decrepit abandoned building self portrait, watching that same sun disappear, taking the light with it....and contemplating HOW I came to relate more with that spot than any person I have ever met.

[chautauqualocal]

portrait Gallery in the Darwin Barker museum

First guy is Darwin Barker, he married Helen Pettit, whose family owned an eye salve company that shipped throughout the eastern U S and Canada, only the eye ointment wasn’t always eye ointment, the Pettit’s were part of the Underground Railroad.

Some of the Barker family

The Adam’s family. Top are Morris and Hannah Adams.

John and Clarissa Edgar. Not sure why they’re in the museum, they’re not related to Fredonia, but the portraits and frames are cool

[chautauqualocal]

Bicentennial quilt at the Darwin Barker Museum featuring local landmarks and made by multiple artists.

1. Full quilt

2. Church

3. Farm

4. Vinyard

5. Bunch of grapes

6. Cemetery entrance

7. Pomfret Pioneer Cemetary

8. Vineyard but lace

[chautauqualocal]

Tompkins H. Matteson (1813-1884)

Examination of a Witch.

Oil on canvas

Depicting the examination (public humiliation) of Mary Fisher. They’re looking for the “Devils mark”. A wart, skin tags, ect that they interpret as the spot were a devil suckled. Like a demonic hickey. They didn’t like Mary because she was a Quaker. She was tortured and released back to England.

Tompkins H. Matteson was a Peterburo, NY native born in 1813 and trained by Alva’s Brandish, another NY local known for portraiture that painted a lot of early Fredonia New Yorkers. Matteson was super interested in pilgrims cosplayed as an one in his regular life. He was best known for historical and allegorical paintings.

The painting above is one of two, the other copy is in Salem Mass.

You can see this painting in the Darwin R. Barker Museum

[captainpirateface]

My talented son. ❤️