Frank Bette Gallery
"Alameda On Camera" - 2008
See also Alameda on Camera, 2007

The gallery accepted forty eight exhibitors plus a squad of youth photographers and had them draw areas of Alameda from a hat. Their photos of the life of the town had to be taken in the area they drew on Friday, February 22. They had from 9 PM on Friday until 9 PM on Sunday to shoot. The Frank Bette gallery will exhibit the finished work From April 4 through April 26.

The weekend we had to go out, it rained, but Sunday the storm lightened somewhat. I drew Area 42. That region includes the College of Alameda, the Posey Tube, a McMansion housing development barracaded behind stone walls named Bayport, and derelict, fenced-off Coast Guard housing, patrolled by police cars. These are the pictures I submitted to Alameda on Camera, 2008.

Inside the walls of Bayport the manicured streets lined with identical houses appeared abandoned in the chilly, damp weather. But in spite of the 8-foot high bricked-in perimeter, a menace reared its head...

The Posey Tube

The Posey Tube was built to replace the first solitary bridge that connected the island of Alameda to Oakland, built because the bridge blocked naval traffic in the Estuary, the line of water that makes us an island. The tube runs down under the water in a single 50 mile per hour dash. Until the second artery, the Webster tube, was built much later, the Posey tube was the island's chief vehicular lifeline from the East Bay.

Much of Area 42 is forlorn, a great piece of it still shackled in history by military ownership. The City has mis-managed the handover, offered freely during the Clinton administration, but no longer. Now the current administration demands millions for the land, ransom it must have to pay for a greedy, illegal invasion of Iraq. The government demands millions of dollars for a part of our island that we originally surrendered to them for one dollar. The old housing and great swaths of land that could be used by Alameda to foster industry, recreation, and the care of veterans sits idle, fenced in by attempts to hide the ghosts who have bickered and squabbled over it, scheming to make a few people rich. All this waste. Who has created this waste? Who remembers? Do the walls keep ghosts in or keep them out?

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