Utilitarian safety device, friend of the fire fighter, protector of the citizenry, ubiquitous objet d’art… FIRE HYDRANTS This all started when my husband Michael, a Multiple Myeloma survivor, was recuperating from his first stem cell transplant in 2005.

The Fire Hydrant Across the Street, Michael and Lefty the Dog © 2006 Marilyn Lapides

To lean more about Multiple Myeloma:
multiplemyeloma.org • myeloma.org • myeloma.uams.edu • imbcr.org

He’d sit in one of our Adirondack chairs and look at the hydrant across the street and say “Been driving by that fire plug for 25 years. Never really looked at it. Sure could use a coat of paint.” Then one sunny day, when he was feeling stronger, he gathered up an old lawn chair and wire brush and sat down for an afternoon to work on that bedraggled, neglected hydrant. The next day he’d painted it and it wasn’t long before he was looking at fire hydrants every place we went.

This proved to be great therapy. Soon he’d gotten out his cameras and was back into photography. But, in spite of all the portrait work, event photography and old time costume photographs he’d made over the last 35 years, he seemed to only be interested in fire hydrants.

In September 2006 we went to Cape May, the beach town we’d visited regularly over the years. Michael was walking by a favorite Victorian cottage called The Pink House, a building we knew well. We’d lived in it during the summer of 1973 and have kept a close eye on it ever since.

For all these years we’d never noticed the hydrant that has stood so faithfully in front of this iconic Cape May beach house. It seemed to have some of the unique design characteristics of the building itself. That’s what launched Michael on this project to capture images from the point of view of a hydrant. He was beginning to see the interesting relationships between hydrants and the structures they protected. And, he was finding those relationships everywhere we went.

Hydrants are a particularly appropriate photographic project for Cape May. Forty acres of the town burned to the ground in the famous fire of November 9, 1878. Victorian building designs with its intricate carpentry emerged from the ashes of that great fire and shaped the town’s architectural character. Get more information on the Great Cape May Fire of ’78.

Seeking the point of view of the hydrant can be hard work. That’s Michael on the ground wrapped around a hydrant restored by our friends at Valtek and on display at the 2006 New Jersey Volunteer Firefighter’s Convention in Wildwood. There’s been more than one occasion when passing motorists have called 9-1-1. “There’s a man in the gutter on 4th Avenue.” That’s no man in the gutter, that’s my husband.”

Michael’s second transplant slowed him down for quite a while but, as soon as he felt stronger, he went back to his cameras and continued to look for opportunities to demonstrate the unique relationships between hydrants and their environment. He found them not only in Cape May, but just about everywhere we went. Many have found these images interesting, curious, amusing and often beautiful. I hope you do too.

– Marilyn Lapides