When the property at 232 Monroe Street came up on the Saline City Council meeting agenda last night, we couldn’t help but feel that the presentation of historical photographs could have started with images captured some years earlier.
D² Enterprises (now d2 Saline) became a new local business on August 12, 1983, and the Saline Die Casting Division of Hoover Universal was one of our earliest corporate clients. We shot the aerial photograph above in October of 1985 as a marketing project reference image.
Now thirty-two years ago, we didn’t do this sort of work using drones. I captured this image on 35mm slide film, camera hand-held, from a fixed-wing aircraft. After meeting later with clients to make selections from those slides, he went up again to capture final images using medium-format gear.
That trip was in a helicopter, with the door next to my seat removed.
More than a client location, this photograph shows where our original Saline office was located. Rest assured, we were merely a paying tenant — no environmental ghosts in our past, Halloween or otherwise.
Beyond our own history, you’re likely to be interested in some of the other historical landmarks visible in this photograph.
For example, the Saline Creamery once stood on this property. It was still there in 1985: Its roof is clearly visible within the factory later built around it. [1]
What else do you notice?
d2 Saline doesn’t make photographs from aircraft any longer, so we’re looking forward to aerial reports on a new-and-improved view of this area by the next generation of low-altitude documentarians.
References
- “Saline Creamery” (September 1912) University of Michigan Library.
