Back in 1991, The Record ran a photo of the steeple of the First Presbyterian Church of Hackensack getting a makeover (attached). It's needed another one for a while, so it got one - albeit a partial one - yesterday.
Although there are two residences between the church and my building, at seven floors up, the steeple is my next-door neighbor and I have enjoyed photographing it unobstructed for the last 28 years. Even though I was having work done in my apartment yesterday, my attention was elsewhere, camera in hand.
It all began around 7:30am - high above Hackensack Hospital, apparently - with two men in a bucket who were discussing the proper hand signal for a right turn when driving a British car in the UK (1). Then the huge cherry-picker arm to which the bucket was attached was guided over to the steeple (2). You can see the old paint chips flying when the scraping began (3). I don't have a problem with heights, but I think I'd have a big problem doing what this guy is doing (4).
By this point, I had dragged an outdoor chair onto the roof and just sat there in the shadows taking pictures. Since I was dressed in black, they wouldn't notice me, right?
Wrong! (5)
I didn't see this until I downloaded the images, but the guy has a big grin on his face and appears to be posing for me, while his partner looks like he's taking a picture of me. I wish I had noticed all this while it was happening so I could have acknowledged them, but they were also in the shadows (I had to really brighten this one up to make his face visible).
I'm not sure what the guy in (6) is spraying - they weren't painting yet - but at least he was out of the shadows, which made the stream visible.
Time for a dance break (7) -
"Wave ya sprayah and ya rollah in the AY-ah like you just don't CAY-ah". I'm sure whatever they're really doing is a lot more boring than the appearance and that's why I love this shot.
I hope these guys are paid well (#8) (I had to put a # in front of the 8 because an 8 in parentheses results in this
emoji on this site).
For a while, the bucket moved around to my side (9). You can see alternating sections of old and new paint. When I first looked at (10) in the camera, I thought a whale was about to be harpooned.
(11) gives you the overview as the guys begin work on the upper interior area of the column section's horizontal slats. The picker's base was not huge..............in fact, it fit on the sidewalk - no traffic interruptions at all.
(12) and (13) shows that the guys have de-bucketed onto comparative terra firma.
Remember the work that I mentioned being done simultaneously in my apartment? The workers used the roof to do all their woodcutting, so I thought that a shot of the neighboring 7th-floor projects might be interesting.
Sometime after 1:30pm, the bucket brought the guys back down to earth (15). It may be hard to see, but majority of the guy on the left's face is whiter than the lower part where his mask had been, so he got half a makeover.
Apparently, so did the steeple. Because the side facing me was in shadow in the afternoon, I couldn't take a detailed shot of how much was done, so I took one early this morning when it was brightly-lit (16). From my perspective, the upper under-the vane section was done. Continuing downward, the multi-portholds section was untouched, as was both the upper exterior of the multi-columned section and the bottom on-the-roof section.
See you on the next go-round.
NOTE: I've noticed on occasion that colors seem to be less-saturated if the images are NOT enlarged, so - as a general rule - be sure to click on any image that's clickable - which, in this post, is all of them.
