Jeffery

Stormfront is a hoot. They used to have a great Tolkein/Lord of the Rings subforum. I was a member and posted there a bit, was really getting into that forum , but was booted for being too liberal. They do see themselves in the terms of this survey, "white" (by which they really mean European) being a sort of ethnicity. I usually dont use the term "ethnic" in reference to the categories in this survey, more in terms of ancestry ("ethnic" used to be shorthand for urban dwellers of eastern and southern European ancestry).

That's a confusion between capital and operating budgets, though the operating subsidy for the streetcar is a legtimate issue or policy question. Oh, yes I recall the discussion here re Jeffre. He sounds like a crank and ego-freak, opposing something just to oppose. NAACP probably has more of a point, though they miss there mark. In LA the oppostion to the subway came, in part, from poor/minority transit riders since the transit budget & service was being hit to support the subway construction/operations, which had limited benefit to LA bus riders. That would probably be the most legitimate argument against the streetcar, that the operating budget could, possibly, lead to reduced money going to bus transit, leading to service degradation for bus riders. That was one reason I kept bringing it up here earlier in this thread...."where is your operating budget coming from, beyond the farebox?" The gentrification issue is probably somewhat valid, but that is happening anyway with 3CDC doing stuff in OTR. That wave is coming independent of the streetcar.

It sounds like the Wasatch Front is turning into a good place for rail transit. The SLC system is expanding AND they are building that system up to Ogden. There used to be an interurban that ran fairly late (post WWII era?) between SLC and Ogden, so the area seems to lend itself, geographically speaking, to this kind of transport, being a "linear city" of sorts, squeezed between the mountains the the lake and salt deserts.

Anyway, back on topic: The issue of poor people embracing the internet is that they can't afford access? Maybe? Or maybe its more entertaining to just do games and stuff like that. Blogging would be...different somehow?

Blogging is a waste of time & effort. I blogged for about two years or so on Dayton urban affairs as an experiment (and because I could be more critical than I am here, respecting the expectations of Urban Ohio), and it was just pissing in the wind. No one is listening. Or if they are they just lurk, read, and remain silent. Minimal feedback. So why bother?

The "college dream" is about entry into the white collar world. That was the impetus for families with an immigrant background, like my grandparents, pushing college as a vehicle to upward mobility. Yet, this is just an example for one subgroup of people going to college...people coming from 1st or 2nd generation immigrant families. Of course that dream could be a false one, too. Historically speaking it wasn't, though. Classic examples of upward mobility via college: Jack Welch and Charles Kettering (obviously, success wasn't only due to college for these guys, but it got their foot in the door). Nobody? Depends on who you are talking about. The frat crowd did this, but most of these kids came from middle class backgrounds already, whos folks had already went to college. But, also a lot of people didnt go to college, either. Back then it was a bit suprising how little interest there was in college in my high school, and also, when I did go to college, how middle and upper-middle-class (ie kids whos parents already had college) the student body was compared to me and my background. ...back in the 1960s. Nowadays fill in "working at Wal-Mart" for "stamping widgets". This thread seems to be dealing a lot in stereotypes, or college has changed a lot in the past 30 years or so.

There used to be a fun little gay bar on Ontario Street, just off Michigan Avenue. A second store bar...never saw one like that before here in Ohio.

Hmmm...good question. Not from here so can't say.

So, is this the part of town Dwight Yokum is from?

Im looking forward to Part II. Nothing like virtual slumming from the safty of a PC.

Thats a good map, upthread. I only just heard about RI Coffee Milk (like in the past few weeks).

I'll be eating a 15 Layer Lasgna at the Spaghetti Warehouse in about an hour or so.

There's been complaints about the devaluing of college degrees...that they are not so special anymore.... since the mass entry into college with the baby boom generation after WWII. Yet that graph that Sherman posted was pretty interesting, seeing that inflation in college costs. I would never have went to college (at least not "away" to a 4-year college) the way costs are now. Before going to college (starting 1977) I had a line into two apprenticeship programs, for ironworkers (the guys who erect heavy metal framing in construction) or moldmaking (part of the machinest/tool & die trades). Now, if I was offered those two apprenticeship programs I would have taken them becuase college would have been out of the question. So these high costs are probably pushing people back into the trades or technical things like med-techs and such who might have went to college when it wasn't so expensive. So it all works out in the end. Only the super-bright kids who can get scholarships can afford college, or if their folks have a lot of money, or they do what C-Dawg did, or they go into debt. For guys like me, who shy away from debt and arn't smart enough to snag a scholarship, that leaves either working your way through or going into a trade. Still, for knowlege, if you like to learn things, you can read about stuff in the library. Cheaper than college.

So, if any UO'er is going to Bockfest on Friday let me know and maybe we will meet???

I am FINALLY going to Bockfest! And I'm combining it with the Dave Dorfman modeern dance show @ the Aranoff (it's going to be about funk music, something we in Dayton..of a certain generation... hold dear) Anyway it will be a downtown time,,,,hotel is Garfield Suites, and the dance show is at 8:30 on Friday evening, leaving time to go to the Bockfest parade which steps off @ 6 PM. Then, on Saturday, it's off to Bockfest Hall to take the Prohibition Resistance Tour! Wow...I am finally going on one of these!!!. Already bought my ticket. After that it's down to Louisville for yet more dance. Louisville Ballet doing....Copellia, a classic ballet.

So this is the town they named the car after, huh?

Hah...yes! What you saw was a fragment. Most of Chicago's "Little Italy" (AKA "The Valley" & "Taylor Street") was destroyed during the 1960s to build UIC "Circle Campus". Cleveland has the best "Little Italy" I've seen outside of North Beach (and that was pretty touristy).

..this is what's happened in Dayton. ...back when i was doing all that stuff with the Sanborns and pix and things I kept on grokking on how built-up the city used to be, and how just a few things remain in some locations from entire landscapes of buildings. Even in my own time here I've watch things erode away. Good examples are the Brown/Warren/Wyoming & Main & Wyoming intersections, which used to be a little business district with some apartments, and is now mostly destroyed for hospital expansion. I think one of the last of these...Jimmys Cornerstone...will be coming down this year sometime. The main buisness corner in Old North Dayton, Valley & Troy Street, has been seeing similar erosion, loss of of two story brick commercial buildings along Valley (one was a used bookstore in 1988), now vacant lots...just gravel and grass. The big 4 story apartment house/retail thing that "turns the corner" at this intersection is now empty and boarded up...you just know that's going to come down one of these days. At Tals Corner they lost a big stone-front masonic or odd fellows hall..a very impressive building from what remember, to a fire in the early 1990s, and thats all grass lot now, a big hole in that intersection. What's was left of the old "Patterson" or "Browntown" neighborhood (isolated houses and aparments) was demolished in the past two years (inlcuding the Reynolds & Reynolds factory) to build some bunker-esque vocational school. A lot of old loft factory buildings came down since 1988, including most of the old Stoddard-Dayton complex (later Maxwell Auto) near Webster Station and a big loft on Cincinnati Street near St Elizabeths, and the old NIBCO foundary, McCalls Printing, the early Figidaire plant at Tech Town, Platt Foundry, and, and, and...etc etc etc And the beat goes on....

4th Street Live was fortunate that it was easy to redevelop due to a street running through the space...when the original Galleria was built they kept the 4th Street alginmnent as the atrium space. So 4th Street Live has this indoor-outdoor aspect that opens itself up to the city more. I don't see this with Tower Place.

I think I know this area. It's south of that big foundry and railroad overpass at the end of Parsons, no?

...some of this reads as if the anti-3C sentiment is now finding an outlet against the streetcar? @@@ ...this sounds like a fairly robust coalition; now they have some public employees unions against it. Why would that be? The Greens being opposed to this is slightly batty, though.

Gary was destroyed by white flight, to the point that even the business community abandoned the downtown, leaving empty high rises like the one you are taking the pix from. One expects retail to leave for sububria, but the banks, lawyers, and other white collar work left as well. The replacement buildings for downtown are in the edge city in the vicintiy of the I-65/US-30 interchange. If I recall right it took political intervention from the city to keep the one hospital left in town from joining the exodus.

Yeah, a cultural thing. I am not a super big fan of the Beatles, but I can see they are influential. They were part of a bigger scene, true. Music did change in the 1960s.

No, it means that public sector layoffs will contribute to unemployment, not that there will be a slowdown in the private sector generting employment (albeit at a low rate vis a vis previous recoveries). Bloomberg: Leading Indicators Increase More than Forecast The index of U.S. leading economic indicators increased in December more than forecast, a sign the recovery will gather steam in the new year. The Conference Board’s gauge of the outlook for the next three to six months rose 1.0 percent after a 1.1 percent gain in November, the New York-based group said today. The December reading, the sixth consecutive monthly increase, exceeded the 0.6 percent gain in the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. So we are continuing with this slow recovery...

There's an opportunity to tie in with regional heritage tourism. And places like Ripley and the part of Kentucky across the river are doing that. Ripley already has that abolitionist house, the Rankin House, and they restored this freedmans house (he owned a foundry but was also active in the UR), and are marketing themselves in relation to the Underground Railroad. You are seeing somewhat similar tourist pitches across the river in the Maysville area....though this could be developed more. This area has a lot of inherent value in terms of vernacular architecture, townscapes and landscape, and could be tied in with the Freedom Center as day-trip destination to see the environment where events transpired.