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Vacant Lot To Retail Store

On a foggy September morning in 2014, I photographed a vacant lot on the east side of Bluffton Road, across the street from Mike's Donuts, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The shape of the trees along the edge of the Saint Marys River at the back of the property looked interesting in the heavy fog.

This lot had been home to a company called Truck Engineering when I was young. They built dump-beds and installed them on trucks to create dump-trucks. Several years before I made my photographs, Truck Engineering went out of business and their building was demolished, leaving the empty lot.

A few months after that foggy morning in September, I noticed that construction crews were clearing the land. The beginnings of a building began to emerge, but the triangular shape formed by the trees along the river was still visible. I decided to photograph the construction site, and I have returned periodically to photograph it again as the building took form.

The building is going to be a Family Dollar store, presumably replacing the smaller store the company has operated for many years on Bluffton Road in Waynedale, about a mile south of the new store.

I have tried to photograph it from about the same location, with the same perspective and composition each time so that the changes to the site, along with the things that have stayed the same, are visible.

Update: The store finally opened at the end of July, 2015.

 

 

 

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