Cindy

The Great Hurricane of 1938 devastated the coastal areas of southeastern New England. Back then they didn't give them names. They didn't have weather sattelites to track them or hurricane hunter planes to fly through them measuring wind speed, atmospheric pressure, and temperature gradients. The storm made landfall with little warning and a ferocity perhaps not seen before or since. It was the middle of the Great Depression, money was tight to nonexistant, and little immediate reconstruction took place. World War II followed and everything remained on hold.

As a little kid in the mid 1940's I remember the woods were still full of downed trees and there was a miles long row of empty foundations along Horseneck Beach in nearby Westport. Acres and acres of once wooded lowlands near the bay were now simply dead white leafless skeletons, having been killed by the saltwater flooding the formerly freshwater marshland.

A few blocks from my grandmother's house in New Bedford was Buttonwood Park and the municipal zoo. A lot of the buildings were destroyed and many of the animals were lost. I was told that these rock walls had once been the basement of the monkey house. Cindy wanted me to photograph her so we wandered around the park looking for interesting backgrounds. We both loved the texture of the granite rock walls in the cloudy bright conditions that day. Ms. Brody preferred some tighter shots, but I alway felt like here she appeared to be communing with the spirits of all the animals that had lost their lives here 27 years earlier.