View of 10th Street

Stephen Bybee
Columbia, MO
2002/2003 or 2008/2009

I am posting this image today not just as a retrospective view of this corner of Tenth and Locust but also as a visual moment of peace after a very difficult week. I have posted photographic views of Tenth Street once or twice during this series, and chances are I have already shared and talked about this image. But for some reason night scenes in the snow bring me some sort of restorative tranquility. The building on the far left is the old bus depot that formerly inhabited that corner, later brought back to life as the first location of CC’s City Broiler, and later McKenzie’s Prime. The depot building was demolished in 2009 or 2010. The next building is the historic James Hotel, a structure which early in its existence housed the Columbia chapter of the Elks Lodge. This is followed by the Niedermeyer Building, perhaps the oldest surviving building in downtown Columbia and, unlike its former neighbors to the south, still surviving.

Before the demolition of the depot and the James, this stretch of Tenth Street presented me, as a photographer, with a kind of dreamy, idealized, storybook quality image. Taken from the parking garage on Tenth and Cherry, this particular view of downtown Columbia in some way encapsulated the essence of my musical and literary and artistic tastes at the time. Looking at this image with at least twelve years of perspective, I can still see the influences of Russian prose, modern poetry, and even a bit of Chopin on my photographic outlook at that time.

One of the problems with photographing or documenting a particular place over a long stretch of time, sometimes it becomes difficult to exactly date when an image was taken. So…this image was either taken in 1998, 2003, or 2009. But once again, I am happy that I was able to preserve this view, for posterity, of a Columbia that I experienced ten (or twenty) years ago.