Trolley Car Graveyard, Windber, PA

It seems like I've been waiting my whole life to get there. I've seen photos posted online and in local photography groups and admired them wistfully. I queried a gentleman who posted pictures of them on Facebook a few months ago, and he gave me directions. The trolley card graveyard, it turns out, is just a few blocks from one of my husband's and my favorite restaurants (Rizzo's) in Windber, Pennsylvania.

We usually only get to Rizzo's about once a year. Our wedding anniversary is in mid-October, and our favorite way to celebrate is to go to Rizzo's (where my husband's dad proposed to his mother) for a delectable antipasto and spaghetti; we often bring home a quart or two of sauce with extra meatballs for later. They open for dinner at 3 pm, and so we visited the trolley car graveyard just before that, for an hour in the mid-afternoon sun.

I have heard from the locals that at least some of the trolleys are from Johnstown, and my husband remembers riding them with his mother when he was little. Some of them were upside-down, or listing on their sides; others, leaning on each other, cozying up to one another like old friends.

Among the truly awful, heart-rending things that happened last week was the death of Leonard Cohen. I have long admired his beautiful songs; such amazing words. One of Cohen's friends penned a gorgeous tribute in the New York Times:

"Leonard was, above all, in his music and in his poems and in his tone of life, the lyrical advocate of the finite and the flawed. As he wrote to my son, who was mercifully too young to understand, he was possessed by a lasting sensation of brokenness. He was broken, love was broken, the world was broken."

My world is broken, and I am broken. I try to find words to make sense of it all, to make things right again, and I find I cannot. Words may fail me; but the pictures . . . never. The trolley cars seemed uniquely fitting: broken but still beautiful, with grinning toothless windows, lit up like cathedrals in the afternoon sun.

The song for these images of beautiful, broken things has to be a Leonard Cohen classic. You've probably been hearing it everywhere, as I have, since his passing. This is one of my favorite versions: Bon Jovi, with Hallelujah.

P.S. There is an interior shot in the extras. And here's a link to more info about and more pictures of this place.