brorson

Awesome tour! Thanks for doing this! Regarding the following building: The IOOF insignia on the building indicates that it was built for the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, a fraternal organization similar to the Masons, Elks, etc. More info on the org is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Order_of_Odd_Fellows As for who owns the building now, that's a different question....

Assuming Youngstown has a historical society, they should have a good collection of photos (and perhaps other memorabilia) from the period you are interested in. A quick Google search on "Youngstown Historical Society" turns up this: https://mahoninghistory.org/ Contact them and see what they have.

This practice is called a "buyback". It was very common in New York City back when I spent lots of time in bars there. Happily, I got my share of buybacks. Typically, a regular customer get 1 free drink after purchasing two. I have never seen this practice anywhere else, although I am not a bar regular anywhere but in Boston now, and Boston is the kid of place where this practice would be forbidden. :-(

I think I first discovered this website on Urban OH -- thanks, guys! Here are a couple of classic Victorian mansions in Richmond, one on East Main, as you point out: http://rustbeltpreservationist.blogspot.com/2015/02/preservation-envy-1829-e-main-st.html http://rustbeltpreservationist.blogspot.com/2015/02/midwest-victorians-204-s-15th-st.html As somebody who's been on the east coast for decades, I find it amazing the quality of the house you can buy for such an incredibly low price. If I could convince my (Boston-born) wife, and if Richmond had any quality jobs, I'd be ready to move...... Stuart

My favorite aunt lived in Richmond from the 1940s through the 1990s, so I have some familiarity with the place. My family (and I) visited the city frequently in the 1960s -- 1980s. I have mixed feelings about the place. It was an important place many decades ago, but was visibly on the decline starting in the '70s. Nonetheless, my aunt continued to maintain that Richmond was a very important & special place, and was continually getting better. I think this was a common reaction in many declining rust-belt towns at that time. Regarding your last shot.... I believe this was the area destroyed by the gas explosion of 1968: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond,_Indiana_explosion By that point, downtown Richmond was on a glide-path towards oblivion, like many rust-belt cities. A few modern buildings were built in the destroyed area after the tragedy, but the economy, and general trends in city planning and construction meant that no real rebuilding would take place in this area. Even today, almost 50 years later, the area is sort of bleak & empty -- a few low-rise building surrounded by lots of parking lots. Stuart

This is very true. However, I believe there is a difference between the slow bus and the fast subway in the minds of everybody, skells included. Besides the time factor (i.e. bus=slow, subway=fast) It's a psychological barrier surely, but perhaps it's real enough to dissuade the wrong people from going to the airport to hang out. (Indeed, I took the city bus to LaGuardia once or perhaps twice, but after that I gave up and switched to cabs. The bus is simply too slow to offset the low price.) Also, don't know exactly why, but in my experience it's rare to find skells hanging out on busses, but not so rare to find them lurking in subway stations and on the train. Maybe because the bus driver is close by, so there's no anonymity? That is, the presence of a driver makes the bus feel more like a supervised environment? I dunno.... Finally, when I left in NYC the subway was around $1.25 (or maybe $1.50) and the AirTrain was maybe $5.00. I just checked the AirTrain website, and the price is now $7.50. For a business traveler that's not a big hit in the wallet, but for a wandering homeless person that may present a steep enough barrier to entry to discourage them from going to the airport to while away the day. Most European cities don't have the same lowlife problem we have, so they feel more comfortable running the subway to the airport. (But check out the population of skells hanging around the train stations in larger European cities.) Also, their public agencies work together. The Port Authority of NY/NJ is well known for being an island unto itself. Stuart

I lived in NYC when the AirTrain went into Kennedy. There was a lot of discussion at the time about how stupid it was that you had to change trains from a normal subway train to a special Port Authority train to go to the airport. And of course, it is stupid -- the A train runs within spitting distance of the airport, and it would be trivial to make it go straight to Kennedy. After all, just about every city in Europe of any reasonable size runs a normal subway train to the city's airport. The problem is that the Port Authority (which controls the airports) doesn't want the MTA to run an airport train the Port Authority can't control. There are two reasons for this, as I recall: 1. The normal, bone-headed, bureaucratic imperative for the PA to control everything within its domain. Yes, this is a motive straight out of the worst of the Soviet Union's system of governance. However, to change it requires courageous leadership at the level of the governors of both NY and NJ to force the PA to do something sensible. Good luck with that! 2. The PA wants to make sure the kind of lowlives who lurk in NYC's subways are kept away from the airport so they don't intimidate or offend airport customers. That's why the special Air Train costs more than a normal subway fare, and it's a separate system. This reason debatable, and I certainly don't want to defend it, but it does resonate with a sizable number of people, for better or worse. And I'm pretty sure it resonates with the type of people who make decisions at the PA. So that's why the PA will build a separate train to take passengers to LaGuardia, and not use the #7 (or extend the N, which might also make sense). Stuart

Here's the ditty I recall: Lynn, Lynn the city of sin You never come out, the way you came in You ask for water, but they give you gin The girls say no, yet they always give in If you're not bad, they won’t let you in It’s the damndest city I’ve ever lived in Lynn, Lynn the city of sin You never come out, the way you came in. Lynn remains an embattled place -- too far from Boston to experience gentrification. Someday the MBTA will run the Blue Line out to Lynn, but that never seems to anything more than a talking point and a dream. Lynn was once very rich, but that was well over 100 years ago -- when leather processing and shoemaking were major industries. As for Malden -- at least they're on the Orange Line, and have subway access to downtown Boston. Malden's downtown area is nothingsville (much of the old downtown demolished to make way for cars), but the city has some areas with large, beautiful Victorian houses which have been lovingly restored. At one time very Italian (with some Jews), Malden is now one of the most diverse of Boston's surrounding cities. Simply due to its burgeoning population, easy access to Boston, and lower prices compared to the rest of the area, Malden will probably come back sooner rather than later. Stuart

Thanks for the excellent photoset. :-D Bloomington is a place I know something about, since I spend a couple of weeks there every year. It's a nice, small city -- a good example of what a small, Midwestern city can be. Nice architecture, cosmopolitan population, but still small enough to be personal and friendly. Of course, it helps that the local industry is Indiana University -- a place which acts as a magnet for smart people, and not lunkheads. I got a kick out of contrasting Lafayette against Bloomington photos. I saw almost no pedestrians in the Lafayette photoset, but did see several Bloomington photos with people walking, or doing things on the street (sidewalk). Lack of pedestrians is usually a signal that something is wrong in a city. I don't know enough about Lafayette to know why it's empty, but it's a worrying sign. Maybe it's because Purdue Univ. is in West Lafayette -- the city next door?

So are you suggesting the city to emulate is Houston? If so, why isn't Ohio booming? It's got the same GOP-type governance, same sprawl-friendly policies, same pro-car, pro-highway transportation policies, a population with a similarly conservative mentality, and the same devotion to football above all else...... In any event, Texas cities are frequently held up as the counter-argument to those who advocate for the types of policies used to shape coastal cities. However, if Texas didn't have a well-developed oil industry sucking in engineers all the time, do you think it would be a magnet for the college-educated? I certainly don't. I think it would be a gigantic, hot and dusty version of Arkansas. Perhaps if Ohio had lots of low-cost oil to pump out of the ground it would be a destination, not a place people leave. (And, no, fracking doesn't yield low-cost oil at current world crude prices.) But since it doesn't, it shouldn't try to emulate Houston.

I particularly liked this comment:

I stayed at the Curtiss Inn when riding in GOBA seven or eight years ago. It was nothing special. In fact, it was clearly a low-budget operation. The building itself was a big, fat architectural zero. But at least it was brick, and fit in with other buildings on the historic square. The new Curtiss Inn will apparently look like this: http://www.historiccurtisinn.com/ Stuart

Nice buildings, no people.

Where are the pedestrians?

Love the photo thread, and welcome to my neck of the woods (New England). I don't post much, but I do enjoy following the site. I am very aware of the good work you do for public transportation. On the subject of Newport, I thought I'd point out the fun little factoid that you can go all the way from Boston to Newport via a combination of MBTA train and RIPTA bus (#60). It may take the better part of a morning (or afternoon), but the fact you can do it is cool. Stuart