I love a few things about the photo. The graffiti, of course. That sign! The two shrimp bookending the vegetables like parentheses. Really: That sign! Is that two iterations of that sign or three? The corner of that building is pretty interesting. It looks like they’ve bricked up the doorway separately from the rest of the entryway? Including the second and (per another photo I took) third floor? There are patterns among patterns there, multiple stories we’ll never know. What’s that arch doing at sidewalk level on the right? And the crowns!

Chicago’s Meatpacking District was a glorious playground for photographers and just lovers of vernacular architecture. All these decaying buildings had so much going on. Most of them are gone now. Google bought up a lot of it and turned it into a playground. Other huge corporations and investment companies and private equity firms got in on it. Now it’s lots of stupidly expensive condos.

Another photographer’s take on this went viral at the time. We were apparently in the same place around the same time, but this is not that photo.

As I was winding up this day’s photography, I heard music, a song I knew. It was live music, and some band was playing one of the earliest blues songs, “St. James Infirmary.” I love that song and I will always stop in my tracks when I hear it, even in a deserted meatpacking district on a late Saturday afternoon. I turned a corner and Chicago oompah band Mucca Pazza was on the sidewalk playing of the best songs ever written. I bet that does not happen in what is now called Fulton Market District anymore.

May 17, 2008. Canon PowerShot SD850 IS, 12mm focal length (35mm equivalent: 72mm), f/4, 1/160, ISO 80.