NYC via Satan's Laundromat

Satan's Laundromat was revealed to me by my buddy Steve Vesperman, who found it while Googling for images of pre-September 11^th Manhattan.

From the Satan's Laundromat home page:

"This is a photolog of New York,
with an emphasis on urban decay,
strange signage, and
general weirdness."

Mike is a guy who lives above a laundromat with a street number of 666. Umm, hence the tongue-in-cheek, albeit obvious, title for his site.


Satan's Laundromat is the type of site my Dad would have loved immensely. One of his favorite hobbies was just walking or driving around, and—when the scene caught his measured eye—taking pictures of the incongruous, the unusual, the wonderfully juxtaposed, the forgotten and missed details. He loved city and country equally for the photographic opportunities they presented, each in their own unique ways.

What Mike has put together with his site is an enormous collection of photos that capture the city in the way I most enjoy. Taken mostly around NYC (with some jaunts across the river to New Jersey and down the highway to the Philadelphia, PA area), it's clear that Mike has an ongoing love affair with city imagery in all of its diverse, grungy-to-glorious splendor. I'm still exploring the site's archives, and have so far resisted the temptation to veer off into the side-alley links he has posted, which I'll guess are probably to sites similar to his.

One thing that saddens me when I run across sites this rich, though:

There are many people in my email address book to whom I'd like to send the link, but who would probably never take the time to explore the site, not to mention the sites that are linked from there.

Then, there are a ton of people I'd like to send the link to who aren't even online (many who continue to hold on to the belief the the internet is a vast wasteland with little to offer them), and so, will never get to experience that wonderful collection.

More's the pity.

That guy needs to publish a book, if he hasn't already.

No...Sleep...til Brooklyn!