Lavender Lake - Gowanus
Photographed August 2nd, 2016
Lavender Lake was a beautiful bar in a lovely brick carriage house in Gowanus. It was a pleasure to visit, but as Gowanus grew in popularity and the neighborhood transformed, the property the lovely bar sat on was sold to developers. The owners told me now there’s now “a ginormous high rise” of condos.
Is such the fate of every Brooklyn neighborhood and cozy little haunt?
I mean yeah, probably.
But, at least we’ve got some lovely images to look back on.
Lavender Lake has moved to South Williamsburg, so thankfully their story didn’t had to end with the demolition of that cool building.
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This was from a fun day of food photography that had me (and my cohort in food photography crime, Daniel Webb) roaming around Brooklyn. I wish I knew why we took this particular route and this collection of places, but I honestly cannot recall. Here are the other spots we hit that day:
(I’ll come back and add links to these once I post these spots:)
Olea - Fort Greene
2. Pig Beach - Gowanus
3. Lavender Lake - Gowanus - That’s here!
4. Gowanus - I shot images all around the neighborhoods as part of the neighborhood guide project, and the best ones became the cover image for the neighborhood.
5. Brooklyn Barge - Greenpoint
Reflection
As I looked back through the images in these very early sets, it was a bit of a challenge to find which photos were actually worth sharing. It’s funny looking back on images from my early days and being so certain I could shoot something much, much better these days. It almost makes me feel like I shouldn’t share them at all, but they are an important part of my heritage as a photographer. I had to make those images in order to make the images I make now. Sure, I don’t need to show all of them, but a small selection helps to show where I was then, and a look at my current portfolio shows where I am now.