Photos

I'm still trying to work out the hows of posting my pictures from Photobucket, so I'll just plop in a link to the set.

http://s78.photobucket.com/albums/j94/MsJaye/Sightseeing/

The first photo is an artillery piece from Fort Nelson Park, next to the Portsmouth Naval Hospital. There are little placards scattered through the Park, but none of them are sited to identify any of the historical objects located there. This gun looks to be either a coastal gun or one dismounted from a ship, sometime from early in the last century. There's a sign at the base of the mount that proclaims the weight of the piece to be 49,000 pounds.

Next up is what is called a "First Order Fresnel Lens". It was once mounted in the Hog Island Light, a lighthouse that was torn down in 1948. It now sits in this glass enclosure on the Portsmouth seawall. The lens is one of the largest of its kind, ten feet high and weighing 2,500 pounds. I like how the light comes down through the facets.

On High Street, there's an apartment building that used to be the YMCA. Outside is a vintage fallout shelter sign.

A little further up High Street is the Hotel Dinwiddie, first opened in 1946. Maybe it's the "HOTEL" sign down the side of the building, but this always reminds me of the "Heart O' the City" dump from The Matrix.

I didn't stop to see what church this was, but I like the Gothic touches, and the oxidized copper trim is beautiful.

A project I have planned for the future is to wander through Portsmouth and take pictures of all the churches. It probably sounds odd, what with my feelings about religion, but you can hardly walk a city block in Portsmouth without tripping over a church of some sort. I think it would be nice to catalog all the different architectural styles.