Canaltown. 500 Block. Main St. Honesdale, PA.
“Everything Flows” - Heraclitus
These photos (above) can be found in our Main Street photo library HERE. An interactive map (snippet shown) can be found on our maps page HERE or by clicking on the map image below. The flow state of downtown Honesdale, PA can be experienced by strolling around on a daily basis and connecting with the local landscape.
“An invisible landscape conditions the visible one.”* Such is the story with water.
Unless its flooding or raining or your kitchen looks out over an old canal basin and the small brook that now babbles through it, water isn’t always top-of-mind. It just flows; sometimes in plain sight, sometimes hidden from view but it's always there. Like veins escorting vitality, a neighborhood’s water network is unobtrusive in its day-to-day presence.
Water quite literally occupies the nooks of an urban environment's local landscape. Cracks in the pavement, imperceptibly low-lying sections of a parking lot, gutter rapids, and shoe-soaking, sidewalk puddles are all part of its story.
Even where daylight shines on what we’d consider a creek, it's often in relatively hidden areas under bridges or devoted to side lots, back yards, and stands of trees that hardly draw a second glance while driving by. With the exception of Honesdale's biggest courses (Dyberry Creek... Lackawaxen River... the waterfalls behind the old Purple Cow), the in-between connections are lost from thought if not lost from view entirely.
No better example of being out-of-sight comes to mind when venturing to the upside down. Channels for storm water occupy some of this ecosystem but a more intriguing position rests with the segments of constantly flowing water that have been driven below ground. Driven not by a stream's vampiric distaste for the sun but by a community's desire to modify and sculpt the human habitat through history.
Concerned less with our efforts to organize nature and more with finding the path of least resistance, water doesn't seem to care about engineering. It holds no grudges. It isn't competitive. It just flows.
*Quote from Italo Calvino's, Invisible Cities.
We've explored and done some mapping to highlight aquatic connections to the local landscape. The Downtown H'dale water map can be found on our Maps page.
What are the boundaries of the place we call Honesdale? Community boundaries can be defined by a zip code, polling place, shopping preferences, family homestead, or something else entirely. Sometimes boundaries are clearly expressed and other times entirely amorphous. Definitions can change over time or depending on who you ask or under what context.
This is partly the nature of making maps. No maps fully illustrate reality. All maps are a representation of reality, capturing a concept or phenomenon or feeling. There's a certain mystery in that and it balances out the perceived authority any given map portrays.
Connections to our community grow vertically as well as horizontally. That's why Honesdale's boundary can be described in a fairly straightforward way (in municipal government terms) yet, equally described in an intangible way (in terms of community identity). The H'dale boundary map we recently made illustrates this dichotomy.
Portion of the Honesdale Boundary Analysis map.
We're fans of reality's hidden layers, nooked within the habitat of our human-built environment. Our Maps page is full of examples. Our event and festival projects are equally steered into these open spaces. Driven by a shared inspiration cycle designed to create something out of nothing yet, anything out of everything else, each festival or event is an attempt to activate a shaded corner of our shared universe in the 18431. That brings us to the Canaltown Moving Movie Festival.
Our new festival might be easy to describe in terms of what it is (a movie festival) but it'll be tough to draw a boundary around. This fest will take place at multiple venues throughout town. Attendees will be able to see every movie by watching sets in whatever order they like and choosing their own festival adventure. Like Spookyfest, there will be international selections alongside local creations, albeit exploded into chunks and coordinated for multi-part discovery downtown.
Moving Movie Festival logo draft
The Moving Movie Festival map may look different every year and the schedule may eventually cover multiple days but the plan is to make it feel like the whole town is alive and collectively "up to something" each and every time. This year is round one of connecting the dots in new and exciting ways.
