jjakucyk

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Also keep in mind that New York and even many 3rd-world megacities aren't seas of skyscrapers. Yes, Manhattan is filled with high rises more than anywhere else in the US, but the overwhelming majority of Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island, not to mention the rest of Long Island and New Jersey, are decidedly low-rise.

Time to beef up the #11 bus route, at the very least.

^ Glad you got out of it, though it's not really an OTR-specific kind of incident. I saw a similar road-rage episode on I-71 a number of months ago with brake checking, swerving, cutting off, speeding, shoulder running, but the only difference is it was between two people in their cars, rather than one being in a vehicle and one not. For all we know that guy could be doing the same thing in some suburban cul-de-sac or rural highway.

Hopefully not demo the whole thing. The building at the corner is actually an old telephone exchange that was incorporated into the rest of the Anthem complex, it's just hidden by a lot of trees and shrubs. https://goo.gl/maps/Lh34v

A couple of the buildings on Lang Street (which is just around the corner) have similar details, including the continuous sills, though in those the band is almost flush with the brick while at the windows it projects farther out (see the building on the left here https://goo.gl/maps/xO4U0 ). The building whose facade collapsed also had a similar detail. Continuous sills are much more common in Chicago which is more late 19th century and early 20th century, whereas here a lot of these row houses are from the mid to late 19th century, with the 2nd Empire style coming into fashion around the turn of the 20th. The building immediately to the right in the last Google view has ALMOST the same lintels as on Mulberry, but with some extra carvings in the flat area and omitting the "eggs." It's that building that the new cornice design is based on https://goo.gl/maps/1V3VF

Yeah, most of these places do full-service mechanical work, so while a place like Jiffy-Lube or Valvoline does basic oil changes, A/C refrigerant, fluids and stuff, at Tire Discounters, Bob Sumerel, Midas, Car-X, etc., also do brakes, shocks, exhaust, spark plugs, belts, suspension, and I think they'll even pull transmissions though they might have to send them out for the actual work. Basically they're competing with the dealers and local mechanics.

^ They're decorative angled brick panels, sort of like in the attached image at the bottom but without the Moorish chevrons. They're going to be rebuilt. It was definitely a fancy and expensive building, though apparently it was built as a 3-unit apartment. There was a door directly into the front parlor of the first floor apartment, with a side door into the stairwell to access the 2nd floor and basement apartments. There was also a narrow hall behind the stair to get from the front room to the rear rooms on each floor.

^ Unfortunately it's a bit too rusticated. If they were more careful about carving the stone away, fine, but there's some big chunks that cleaved off and in fact one of the windows was originally a door, so there's pieces that also need replacing anyway.

Well those metal panels do give it the same "morning sweats" as the blue and white Mercy Health building at I-71 and Edwards. Bring on the grimy streaks and need for full-wall "window washing" that these buildings with no drip edges or overhangs develop after just a few months. Anyone notice how dirty Morgens Hall at UC is already?

They're sandstone lintels and sills throughout. The plan is to replicate them with wood and/or molded plaster to match.

The metal screen on the 2nd floor is finally gone!

^ That Anthem complex on Taft is a fortress that doesn't add any activity to Taft or Woodburn, and in fact it sucks the life out of them. Seems like the only businesses that employees might regularly frequent are the McDonalds and Skyline at Victory Parkway, which they'd probably drive to anyway. The parking crater is an abomination too, so good riddance I say.

But it doesn't have to be throughout the city to be a problem, just like lower housing prices in Oakland don't matter much to San Francisco because Oakland is a dump by comparison, or that Chicago's south and west sides are going down the toilet compared to the Loop and north sides, or that Queens or Newark are cheaper than Manhattan. In the same vein, it doesn't matter to Mt. Adams or Hyde Park that there's cheap housing in the East End, South Fairmount, or Klotter Avenue, because that's not where people want to live. Rents and purchase prices are a problem TODAY in Mt. Adams, Hyde Park, Mt. Lookout, and an ever-increasing amount of OTR. That doesn't mean elevating other neighborhoods wouldn't be a good thing, but it's not really going to help relieve the pressure on the more desirable neighborhoods.

No point in living a compromised life today while hoping for some unknown better tomorrow.

Here's the thing, suburbs can't keep sprawling outward forever. Eventually they become just too far-flung to have any meaningful relationship with their parent city. Rural sprawl or suburbs that aren't attached to any major city are a thing, but they're economic and cultural backwaters by comparison. It's the same reason that VMT can't keep increasing per capita, because nobody can drive 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

The wire over the track may be bare, but the feed wires from the poles aren't, and the support arms are all insulated. Someone painting a 3 story building is closer to the primary distribution lines, which I believe are 12,500 volts, never mind the 120/240 volt secondary distribution that's lower and feeds individual buildings.

With a pantograph the wire is deliberately made to zig-zag a bit so it doesn't wear the pickup bar constantly in one place.

Since the car bodies snug right up to the curb at the stops, it looks like the concrete paving is a pretty good indicator of the width of the cars. Maybe they overhang 2" or so but not much more than that. So as long as no vehicles are on top of the white line they should have plenty of clearance

At 2:23 you can also see a new streetcar signal to the left of the two regular traffic signals. It's wrapped in blue plastic and only has two heads. I figure it's one of these? http://oldtrails.com/LightRail/SeattleStreetcar/raillses36.htm

That's why the streetcar gets a special signal phase. Regular traffic won't get a green light when the streetcar needs to make that turn. Same at Central Parkway and Walnut.

There's also a sizable assisted-living facility on the property. So it's ok for old people to live there but not anyone else?

^ Would it though? You can find McDonalds and 7-Eleven and other chains in the most urban cities of the world. There's no reason to make this an either/or proposition, the neighborhood is big enough to support both. It's not necessary to cater to the chains, as most municipalities do to their own detriment, but there's no reason to actively discourage them either.

^ I do actually. The company I work for put together a proposal to do architectural work for this project, and at the time they said that they'd already submitted the application for tax credits, but they hadn't done any as-built documentation (that was part of our scope of work).

You realize this happens everywhere right? People get murdered in West Chester too, kids get run over by cars constantly (automobiles are the number one cause of death of children over the age of 1), and if you want to avoid stray bullets better stay away from rural hunters and suburban convenience stores.