Lamp and Tree, East Parkway

Stephen Bybee
Columbia, MO
2008/2009

Since moving to Columbia in the 90s, I have been fortunate to live in several different neighborhoods in our city. When I moved out of the East Campus neighborhood, a friend and I rented a house on McBaine Avenue. This photograph displays a view I saw on an almost daily basis when I was walking or biking to and from my photography class at MU. I had a very poetic route to get from McBaine Avenue to campus, crossing busy Broadway, wandering down tree-lined East Parkway, taking the tiny connector street between Parkway and Garth, and then quickly cutting across the playground at Grant Elementary School. After crossing the playground there was a gateway that opened into the Columbia Cemetery, then across the cemetery to the hole in the old wooden fence that led one directly into the area next to the incinerator at Osco Drug Store. Not to worry…the employees burning boxes behind Osco didn’t seem to mind when I pulled my bike and backpack through the fence opening in order to bike across the parking lot to the crosswalk on Providence. From here I would bike up the hill on Locust, past the men who slept in the small strip of trees behind Hardee’s, past the Mosque with the store underneath that sold the very best baklava in all of Columbia, and so on until I reached the Fine Arts Building. Returning home in the evening, this scene greeted me as I approached Parkway from the east, on my way down the small hill next to the library. This image was taken during the winter of 2009.