Roxbury Collection

The Roxbury/Cambridge section is the leading wedge of the projected work. In the Roxbury series, ruin or abandonment are the source for images of robust color, above all in the street art of Dana Chandler. At the same time there is the architectural statement of First Church in Roxbury, whose current form in the neoclassical Federalist Style dates to 1804. Still in use as a Unitarian Universalist church, it had been transformed when I photographed it into something of a community center. The peaceful harmony of its austerely beautiful interior summons the aura of the spiritual, even as the looming skyscrapers of downtown Boston, bastions of capitalism, are visible through the upper windows. First Church in Roxbury is one of the few structures in Lost America still standing to this day.