Labor Day Crane

9/4/17 Non-laboring crane at the Roosevelt light rail station construction site.

Hearing that the temperature was going to be back up in the 80s again this afternoon, I went out early on this Labor Day morning. The streets were amazingly quiet, and the only activity was people loading coolers into their cars for a holiday outing.

My destination was an urban couch I had spotted yesterday afternoon in the high heat when I didn’t feel like standing in the sun. Unfortunately, someone had already taken the couch (but oddly left the cushions on the sidewalk!). On my drive back home through the Roosevelt neighborhood, though, I got an idea.

I had been wanting to go back to the Roosevelt light rail station construction site for a while now – it’s been close to two years since I last sketched the bright red crane there. Four years ago when construction began, my original plan was to sketch activity on the site itself regularly to show progress. Shortly after it began, however, a tall fence went up around the site, and all I could see were the tops of the various machinery moving around. Parking on the periphery has been gone for a long time, so it got harder and harder to sketch in the area. It’s been frustrating.

Three years ago I sketched a yellow crane (which was replaced by the taller red one) from the nearby Roosevelt Square. Early on Labor Day, none of the square’s shops were open, so I had the parking lot nearly to myself. A bonus was that no laboring was going on at the site, so I knew the crane wouldn’t suddenly swivel around, which has happened during some of my sketches.

You’ll note that the sky is blue. A couple of hours after I made this sketch, smoke from Washington’s many wildfires drifted back in our direction, casting a yellow haze across the sky. 

(To see the rest of the sketches in the series, enter “Roosevelt light rail station” in the blog’s search bar at right or use this link.)