Cycle Extreme Building
Stephen Bybee
Columbia, MO
August, 2015
While teaching a basic photography class for Access Arts, my students and I would go out for night photography rambles in downtown Columbia. Most of our excursions were on campus, up and down 8th and 9th Streets, and occasionally a beeline was made to a notably photographic structure or location. At the time, during the summer of 2015, Cycle Extreme was still located here in this beautiful brick structure on Columbia’s South Sixth Street. I had taken photographs of the front of this structure, but during our class outing on that August evening, I finally discovered the symmetrical brick beauty of the back side of the building. Now to those of you who will decry this image as a breach of protocol, this was taken during the evening hours, right around twilight. So, while it does not look like a night photograph, technically I think it is close enough. And my resurrection of this image from my archives is purposeful and timely, as this massive brick building on the western edge of downtown Columbia was recently damaged by a rain-related roof collapse. Built by J.E. Hathman Contractors in 1927, this structure was built for brothers Clyde and Clem Funk as the Funk Brothers Garage and Automobile Parts. Financed by Central Bank and built using materials from Boone County Lumber Company, the Funk Brothers Garage, according to a 1927 advertisement, proudly supplied Globe Batteries, Mohawk Tires, and Sinclair Oil. The official opening of the Funk Brothers Garage was on Saturday, May 7, 1927. By 1949 the building also housed the William B. Smith Hatchery, and the William R. Robinson machine shop.
Standing across the street from a bar on Ninth Street, on a chilly night in a light drizzle, with a tripod-mounted camera and presumably a camera bag, maybe a raincoat…this made me slightly uncomfortable. Anyone on the other side of the street might have thought it odd to see someone going to such trouble to photograph what seemed like a trivial, mundane scene. A scene that would happen again and again, night after night. A scene that would be taken for granted, the assumption being that this is how Ninth Street would always be: Quinton’s crowded on a Thursday night, the front windows softened and blurred by fog and warmth, the blue light of the neon sign gracefully illuminating the brickwork and the branches of the nearest tree, two politely placed benches flanking the front of the building, and the denizens of Ninth Street gently shuffling by on the rain-darkened sidewalk.
The view of this stretch of Ninth Street is changed and different today, 25 years later, and the gentle blue of Quinton’s neon sign no longer illuminates the spreading branches of this tree.