Pennhurst State School and Hospital of Pennsylvania was recently sold. There are fears it will be demolished and developed. We are trying to save at least just the Administration Building as a permanent memorial. Copied and pasted from the Preserve Pennhurst site [link]:



"Reared against a cloud-studded sky high above a graceful curve in the Schuykill River, a mysterious, hauntingly beautiful, seemingly forgotten place casts its shadow into the valley below. It is the fabled Pennhurst State School and Hospital. Its venerable administration building, a formidable Jacobean Revival monument, has presided over the sprawling campus for over a century. At its height, Pennhurst was a self-sustaining community, with its own farms, power plant, and fire company, all staffed in no small part by the school’s thousands of intellectually and developmentally disabled residents. Also a major local employer, Pennhurst’s population dwarfed that of surrounding towns.

The administration building has come to symbolize Pennhurst—not just as a public institution, but as the setting of countless private and deeply personal stories that tell the tale of how we as a people have treated those we have defined as “others.”

The now forlorn façades provide little to suggest that the eyes of the entire nation were once intimately focused on the campus sprawled out under the administration building’s watch. Through Bill Baldini’s 1968 NBC documentary Suffer the Little Children and subsequent Supreme Court cases, the nation saw in these red brick structures the dreadful plight of thousands of Pennhurst residents.

The architecture’s pampered detail disguised a systemic malaise and bureaucratic apathy imperiling generations of confined innocents. “Granite walls of ignorance and social blindness,” as Baldini called them, masked the neglectful decay of Pennhurst’s residents. They, like the campus on the hill today, were intentionally forgotten."



For me it's not about the fact that it's a cool place to photograph, or neat looking architecture, it's about the fact that children were sent there to be stashed away from society and forgotten. I say we have a duty to not let them be forgotten...forever. Please sign it for the children, for those who were "different" from us but couldn't help it, and packed away because of it. At least we can say we tried, even if the project does fail. It only takes a minute to sign.

Click here to sign the petition:
[link]

and if you have the time, watch the NBC News expose report done in 1968 (35 mins total):
[link]

First off, thank you SO much to everyone who faved "Lower Bridesmaid's Falls 2", it's now over 100 's, my first to reach that mark!

For those of you who didn't know, I've been using a crappy point and shoot for almost all my DA shots. Nothing against my Powershot, which is tough as nails (I've dropped it almost 10 times), but it just can't do what a DSLR can. It's really hard to properly expose waterfalls with a point and shoot, the sensor isn't really good enough to not get white blowout even if lighting conditions are good, so I shot a little dark and pulled out shadows in Photoshop.

Today, I've never been happier to see those ugly brown UPS trucks, which brought me this:

Canon EOS 30D, 8.2 Megapixel, SLR, Digital Camera with Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM Autofocus Lens

It will be a while until I master it I'm sure, but I'm still estatic just to FINALLY have one!!! So give me some time and you'll start seeing better shots from me plus I'm going to start submitting prints now that I have a camera with higher megapixels.