Park’s International Market

Stephen Bybee
Columbia, MO
June, 2011

Many of the images in the Nocturnal Visions exhibit at Columbia College were made twenty years ago or more, when I was taking photography classes at Columbia College and at MU. In between 2003 and 2009, I was living in a different city and pursuing a different path, but I eventually returned to Columbia and resumed photographing downtown Columbia. During the summer of 2009 I started methodically photographing our downtown with a documentary rather than an artistic motivation. Our downtown was changing, demolition and development began to alter the footprint and the skyline of Columbia, and I resolved to make a photographic record of the structures we were losing before they were gone. One such loss was the building that originally housed one of Columbia’s earliest Asian grocery stores. Known to me as Chong’s Oriental Market, the signage on the building at the time of this photograph indicates it was then known as Park’s International Grocery and Gifts. I began taking photographs of this structure when I learned that a development was in the works for this block of downtown Columbia. I had always been attracted to this building, but I had taken it for granted, assuming that it would always be an architectural feature of our urban environment. This photo of the beautifully curved, brick and glass block building formerly occupying the corner of South Seventh and Locust was taken on a warm June night in 2011.