#marktown

March 12, 2018

On a March day in 1977, my cousin Gary and I set out on a long walk in Whiting, Indiana. I was studying photography at Columbia College at the time and made some photos on the way with my Olympus OM-1. Starting at Wolf Lake, our trek took us by the train tracks along Lake George and then into East Chicago’s Marktown neighborhood.

Two of the photos I took that day are displayed above, paired with images taken last week. 

While I was matching the shot along the Lake George bike trail, I asked a man passing by if he recognized the dog walker on the train tracks in the black and white photo. It turned out that the man with the dog was his uncle, his father’s twin brother, who had died a while back. I’m now hoping to identify the man holding the letter in the Marktown image.

Trading a paved bike path for an underused set of train tracks seems like an improvement to me. The bike path has been there so long that I had forgotten about the train tracks, until I scanned the old negative.

MarkTown Mutants - MarkTown