City Rain

Martin J. Desht's photo-documentary exhibit Faces from an American Dream recorded the social impacts of America's transition from the industrial manufacturing economy to the service and information economy, particularly in Pennsylvania. City Rain was a minor project incidental to the work on American deindustrialization. Faces from an American Dream has been touring for more than twenty years. After early exhibits in Pennsylvania and a review in Pennsylvania History, the work traveled to Harvard University, Dartmouth College, New York University's Stern School of Business, the U.S. Department of Labor, the U.S. Senate, and many other colleges and universities, most recently Michigan State University's College of Law. It is currently scheduled for venues in New Mexico.

In 2006 Desht was photographer-in-residence at Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. The exhibit A Certain Peace:Acceptance and Defiance in Northern Ireland explores that city's transition from a postindustrial economy rife with sectarian conflict to a new peacetime economy based on tourism, finance, and higher education.

Desht's work is represented in collections at Harvard University, the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University, with significant collections archived at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

This is the third time Martin Desht has allowed us to publish his photographs to complement material in our journal. Examples of his work appear in "Work: With Selected Photographs from the Exhibit Faces from an American Dream" and "Staying Tuned" in Pennsylvania History 65, no. 3 (summer 1998): 368-81, and 66, no. 4 (fall 1999): 601-15, respectively. These can also be viewed on the journal's website.

Pennsylvania History had intended to include the photographs here as part of the Fall 2012 environmental history special issue. For space limitations we could not, so we are happy to begin 2013 with these photographs supplementing this issue. Desht's photographs are an important reminder that the publicity cities generate about their accomplishments frequently overlook much of their landscape.

For bookings and information about the exhibits, email mdsh4956@yahoo.com, or write to 11 Juego Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87508.

—Editor

Figure 1.

Philadelphia, view north from Betsy Ross Bridge.

Figure 2.

View from Interstate 95, traveling south, near Vine Street, Philadelphia.

Figure 3.

Interstate 95, near Allegheny Avenue, Philadelphia.

Figure 4.

Fortieth Street, at Market Street, Philadelphia.

Figure 5.

Cambria Street, at Ninth Street, Philadelphia.

Figure 6.

Frankford Avenue, at Bleigh Street, Philadelphia.

Figure 7.

Cambria Street, at Fourth Street, Philadelphia.

Figure 8.

Huntingdon Street, at Ninth Street, Philadelphia.

Figure 9.

Allegheny Avenue, at Second Street, Philadelphia.

Figure 10.

Ridge Avenue, at Diamond Street, Philadelphia.

Figure 11.

Ridge Avenue, at Girard Avenue, Philadelphia.

Figure 12.

Ridge Avenue, at Twelfth Street, Philadelphia.

Figure 13.

Lehigh Avenue, at Cedar Street, Philadelphia.

Figure 14.

North Ninth Street, near Cumberland Street, Philadelphia.

Figure 15.

Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, at Broadway, Camden, New Jersey.

Figure 16.

Fourth Street, at Walnut Street, Camden, New Jersey.

Figure 17.

East Lehigh Avenue, at Thompson Street, Philadelphia.

Figure 18.

North Broad Street, at Erie Avenue, Philadelphia.

Figure 19.

Allegheny Avenue, near Eighteenth Street, Philadelphia.

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