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Much of Tucson, Arizona's oldest section, the barrio, which dated back to when the city was part of Mexico, was leveled in the late 1960's under the short sighted Urban Renewal program. The fed's waved big bucks in front of municipalities and they bit.

Tucson's oldest continuously operating business, the Jacob's Assay Office, was also, the last to cease operations in the barrio, or "La Calle,' as it was called by the Mexican Americans.

The 89 year old building is silently waiting for the wrecking ball.

The race to claw gold or silver out of the earth was a common theme in many a Western. Assay offices were featured in several of Duke's 1930 B-Westerns.

{Note- Chris-Pin Martin who was uncredited, fractured English, comic relief in "Stagecoach" was born in Tucson's barrio in 1893, 19 years before Arizona became a state.

The Mary Pickford produced/Rouben Mamoulian directed "The Gay Desperado" (1936) was shot (on 348 South Meyer at the Teatro...

I first became obsessed with photography and motion pictures while growing up in post WW2 Manila in the Philippine Islands in the late 1940's/early 1950's. Film noirs were a particular influence. But my first love remains the theater. I acted in numerous amateur productions from 1958 to 1978. In 1979 I earned a MA in drama from the University of Arizona; earlier getting a BA in English from the University of Minnesota, where I co-founded the first film society on campus and ran it for four years. While at the U of A, I studied with the master black and white photo essayist W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978) the last year of his life. I am the last person cited in Jim Hughes' definitive biography of Gene, as I wrote about attending his final...