Bostworld

A month into 2008, I’ve finally settled on my so-called “new years resolution” — to take better pictures. Time to set aside the automatic modes of my point-and-shoot. Instead of composing quirky sentences to delight the Bostworld visitor, I find myself trying to memorize the various formulas of f-stop, focal length, ISO and depth of […]

Why would anyone want to take a vacation right in the middle of the holiday season? A confluence of factors — coinciding free time availability, expiring vacation days, overwork and its attendant unstoppable urge to flee — caused my wife and I to travel cross country to visit the Florida Keys three weeks before Christmas […]

I tend to steer clear of downtown Phoenix these days. It seems every time I venture down there, I discover another of my old favorites consigned to the scrap heap or worse, a target for “renovation.” The cheerfully run-down squalorous downtown Phoenix of my childhood is all but gone, a victim of the kind of […]

Tempe was still a pretty sleepy town when I moved there in 1985. It hadn’t changed much in the ten years since I first started visiting its head shops and record stores in my mid-teens. A block east of my house, downtown Mill Avenue was still “home to little more than biker bars, tattoo parlors, […]

I first discovered Michael Monti’s “100 South Mill Avenue” blog after he dropped some praise on my scans of an old menu from his family’s La Casa Vieja restaurant. “As a restaurateur and history buff,” He wrote, “I can assure you that these will be appreciated as a goldmine of nostalgia and useful information about […]

Recently, I’ve been meaning to get some photos of the old Valley National Bank building on the corner of 44th St and Camelback Road here in Phoenix. This year has already seen the demolition of the Washburn Piano Company building on 20th St. and Camelback and the Tempe Geodesic Dome Branch building, on Rural and […]

When my spouse and I found out Scottish legends the BMX Bandits were scheduled to play at the 2007 NYC Popfest, we quickly booked some decent lodging and grabbed a red eye to JKF. For their first visit to our shores in a decade, the band played a poorly-attended weeknight show in Brooklyn and […]