Sherwood’s submission:

Click here to vote NOW and support a local artist. More importantly, [...]]]> Local artist and illustrator Owen Sherwood is competing in “Threadless Loves Your City,” with the top 10 hometown designs getting their own Threadless t-shirts. One lucky designer will even receive prizes that include $2,000 in cash.

Sherwood’s submission:

Click here to vote NOW and support a local artist. More importantly, though, because I want this goddamn shirt.

Still, I consider it a sister city to my hometown of Troy in spirit and circumstance. Like Troy at the turn of the century, New Castle was a bustling [...]]]>

Image by angus mcdiarmid via Flickr

It takes about eight hours on I-90 West to get to New Castle, Pennsylvania. I’ve never been.

Still, I consider it a sister city to my hometown of Troy in spirit and circumstance. Like Troy at the turn of the century, New Castle was a bustling city littered with mills, factories, and opportunities for the blue collar class. As the Industrial Revolution came to a grinding halt and the Great Depression dramatically altered the economic landscape of the entire country, New Castle saw its resources dry up and its population move elsewhere. It, too, is a city that fighting to find and  establish a new identity. It is a part of America that has been forgotten by political rhetoric in the 21st Century. Cities like Troy and New Castle are not Middle America or “the Real America,” yet despite their invisibility to folks running for any office at the state level or higher, their socio-economic vulnerabilty make them an accurate barometer of the nation.

Though really none of that matters, because the most interesting aspects of these cities are the stories of the individuals who live, breathe, and die on its streets with no greater concern than what’s going to get them through the next week.

Small Town Noir  is a blog project launched by Diarmid Mogg in July of 2009. After the New Castle police discarded mug shots taken from the turn of the century up to the tail end of the 1950s, Mogg retrieved them from the trash and began researching each and every individual through various stories, tidbits and blurbs from the archives of the town’s newspaper, The New Castle News.

The result  is a series of remarkable and astounding journies of residents convicted of everything from public drunkenness to armed robbery. What makes it so remarkable, though, are the extra details gleaned from unrelated stories on the same persons, which in many cases tell us where life took them after the unfortunate circumstances and misdeeds that culminated in the discarded photographs.

To focus merely on its unique concept would be a disservice to its execution. Mogg is also a fantastic writer who lends heart and depth to the stories of these individuals through his prose.  Seeing them  at their most fragile, hitting their own personal bottoms, brings a familiarity that carries even when information is scant and makes it seem as if they walked out of camera shot and continued straight through until they hit the edge of the planet Earth and walked off.

Small Town Noir is one of those rare, refreshing realizations of the true potential of the internet and blogs as a medium. If there could ever be such a thing as “required reading” amongst a sea of RSS feeds, this should be included.