THE WEBSITE & ME. I have been passionate about commercial architecture and roadside-related things all my life. I grew up in California but New York City has been my home since 1980. I started this website in 2000 simply as a way to organize my photos for myself. Since then, it has become a bit of an obsession and grown to over 1,500 pages with close to 30,000 photos. I usually spend several hours every day adding to or updating this website. And, yes, I do have an unrelated full-time job.
These webpages are photo-rich so many of them take awhile to load. If any of the pictures appear as a red "X", try hitting your refresh/reload button to correct the error. I go skimpy on descriptions when there are other websites that already cover the subjects well. Instead, I provide links so that you can easily find more info and photos. The official name of my website is "Roadside Architecture" with the functioning domain name of "RoadsideArchitecture.com". I'd love to revamp the functionality and style of my website someday but for now I am too busy adding things to it.
I am proud of the fact that my site remains advertising-free. If you'd like to help keep it this way and make a contribution towards my travel expenses, that'd be great! There's a "Make a Donation" button below and at the main page of each section.
VIRTUAL ROADTRIPS. I take many roadtrips with my dogs each year to different parts of the country to gather more photos. You might enjoy tagging along with us at my flickr photostream which contains a small sampling of things that appear at this website. I upload about a dozen photos per night to Flickr while on the road. There's also my blog with nightly postings during roadtrips of things that don't appear at this website. The "New" button above will take you to a list of upcoming trips.
THE PHOTOS. Sometimes I am stuck taking photos in poor light or weather conditions. However, I'd rather get what I can and reshoot again someday. You never know how long these roadside treasures will be around. These photos also reflect the improvement in my cameras over the years.
If you are interested in knowing when the photos were taken, I began coding the images in 2005 (e.g., anything starting "agilitynut.com/06/10/..." was taken in October 2006). Many of my photos are larger than your screen and your computer will automatically reduce the size. To fix this, look for a floating magnifying glass icon or hover your mouse in the lower right hand corner and click on that icon to get the photo's full size.
COPYRIGHT. My photos are copyrighted so you need to contact me before using them for anything (blogs, websites, publications, etc.).
MAINTENANCE. Winters are usually devoted to reorganizing various sections, fixing dead links, and doing research for this website and future travels. During the rest of the year, I'm busy adding new photos and updating descriptions. This sometimes means some pretty long and slow-loading pages by Fall.
YOUR HELP WANTED! Since this is a one-woman effort, I really appreciate hearing about dead links, typos, inaccuracies, updates, and new info. I also love hearing about new places, websites, etc. that I can add to my personal To-See list and/or lists of links throughout my website. If you send photos (please do!) and I use them at my website, I will definitely give you credit.
