Tony’s Pizza Palace, Fifth and Walnut
Stephen Bybee
Columbia, MO
February, 1998
In the spring semester of 1998, I was taking an Advanced Photography class at MU with Professor Oliver Schuchard. Our class assignment was to produce a book, and the details of this assignment were left open-ended. Various students approached the assignment in various ways, but I had a pretty solid idea what my book would be about: night photography in and of the city I called home. In 1997 I had started taking a few black and white photographs of Columbia at night, but in February 1998 I began in earnest. The photograph you see here is one of that early batch of images, taken during the second week of February 1998. According to the notes written on my negative sheet, this was taken on February 10th…so in three days this image will be 27 years old. The photograph was made with a Nikon N2000 camera, a manual focus lens, and a roll of Ilford FP-4, a fine-grain film with an ISO of 125. The business on the corner is Tony’s Pizza Palace, and for those with a penchant for the thin crust, this is the place to order a pizza. The building is one of the only remaining structures in Columbia’s historic Black business district known as Sharp End, a district which once occupied several blocks of downtown Columbia and included Black owned grocery stores, restaurants, barber shops, night clubs, and saloons. There are several details in this photo that I would like to point out, the first of which is the herringbone patterned brickwork on the front of the building. This pattern is visible above the awning and the complexity of the design sets this building apart from other brick buildings downtown. The next detail is the distant but brightly lit sign of First National Bank (later Landmark Bank) glowing to the west. I have discovered this one-time landmark of central Columbia glowing in several of my nocturnal photographs made around this time…and I find it beautifully pertinent because First National Bank was such a strong ally of the photographic arts in Columbia, hosting the Visions Photography Exhibit each year during the fall. Of the various institutions discussed in this post, the Sharp End District no longer occupies the space it once did, removed by “urban renewal” in the early 1960s but now recalled and memorialized by the wonderful African American Heritage Trail in Columbia, First National Bank and its annual Visions photography Exhibit are both just memories now, and black and white film is far more expensive than it used to be, and very hard to come by. But this beautiful brick building, a remnant of the Sharp End, is still standing on the corner of Fifth and Walnut, and the ovens of Tony’s Pizza Palace still roar to life each day, bringing freshly-baked pizzas to hungry patrons.