BigDipper 80

^But will it be as amazing as the Dollar General at Third and McGee that has a liquor license?? I think not!

What are peoples' opinions on the back-building? I think the parts closest to the street look pretty decent assuming it ends up clad with high-quality materials (and based on their past works it probably will be), but the elevated portion in the back strikes me as a little uninspired.

^ I was talking specifically about Playhouse Square - completely agree about Music Hall v. Severance (though Severance is nothing to sneeze at). There's nothing like it anywhere else, especially with the way it anchors Washington Park the way it does. Its acoustics are better than Severance too.

Intimacy is a big part of it. And frankly it's a much more impressive auditorium, despite being smaller. The visual similarities to the Aronoff are obvious, but the Schuster has a more vertical "opera house style" thrust to it than the Aronoff does. This in turn allows each tier to be shallower than at the Aronoff, so overall the viewpoints of the stage are better. Cleveland still beats out both Cincinnati and Dayton for the sheer beauty of their theaters, for obvious reasons, though.

As long as they keep the Dispatch sign, I'll be happy!

^^^ Was that entire block demolished for the Schuster Center, or were the buildings to the west already gone? I'm assuming Second is running along the left edge of the photo... I didn't realize that much was torn down. As much as I love the Schuster Center, having that much heft on that block would go a long way toward making downtown Dayton feel a bit less desolate (darn you, excessively wide streets!). The Schuster Center was built by Cesar Pelli, who also did the Aronoff Center in Cincinnati around the same time, and although they're thematically similar complexes (no pun intended), the Schuster Center is far superior to the Aronoff in just about every way. I think it's one of Pelli's best works, although the condo tower is a bit bland. Anyway, I digress. This is about Macy's, not unnecessary cool old department store demolitions.

The City could think outside the box and get the engineering department to re-stripe the north side of Detroit and the chunk of West Boulevard between Detroit and Madison to add a bunch more (free) street parking if someone expects parking to be an issue in the future (which of course it won't be), but that involves "talking with other departments" and "coming up with creative solutions" (even though my solution isn't really that all creative).

I think Findlay Playground would be a good spot for something. I’d prefer something Mercer Commons-y mostly just because I don’t like how that park abuts Vine and strongly feel there should be a building along there, but I also have a feeling there would be an outcry from anti-gentrification folk if it’s redeveloped as anything other than a park, so maybe going underground yet again would be a solution.

Over Christmas week, I made a trip out to the Bay Area and got to check out a lot of the new developments. We didn't travel south but did manage to hit up a lot of the major locales in the East Bay and wine country, in addition to San Francisco itself. Luckily the weather was reasonably cooperative and I managed to get a few good shots of the City by the Bay. 1. 20171225_220443260_iOS (1) by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr Let's get this one out of the way, shall we? 2. IMG_1999 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr We got a pretty incredible deal on a hotel in SoMa, which was a very convenient jumping-off point for exploring the rest of the city. 3. IMG_2271 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 4. IMG_2108 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr This was not the hotel we stayed at (unfortunately!) 5. IMG_2106 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr Not shown: the huge piles of trash along the curb here. 6. IMG_2004 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 7. IMG_2033 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 8. IMG_2019 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 9. IMG_2050 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 10. IMG_2044 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 11. IMG_2051 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 12. IMG_2055 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 13. IMG_2078 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 14. IMG_2072 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 15. IMG_2071 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 16. IMG_2096 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 17. IMG_2119 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 18. IMG_2114 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 19. 20171225_190329000_iOS by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 20. IMG_2135 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 21. IMG_2137 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr More trash... The rest of the Haight seemed very clean (and hyper-gentrified!) but Haight Street itself was still a bastion of filth. This was Christmas Day, so not a whole lot was open. 22. IMG_2268 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr I liked Mid-Market/Central Market/Twitterhood, but it's definitely still a bit rough around the edges. 23. IMG_2269 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 24. IMG_2241 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr Thanks ColDayMan[/member] and taestell[/member] for pointing this place out! 25. IMG_2260 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr This was a true trip highlight for me. It doesn't look like too much from the outside, and I was worried it wouldn't be publicly accessible, but... 26. IMG_2252 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr ...It's now a (very, very) high-end Italian men's store, and although I can't afford anything, window shopping is free! 27. IMG_2249 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr If you haven't figured it out by now, it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and is one of his few remaining commercial buildings. 28. IMG_2256 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr Truly a treat to experience in person. 29. IMG_2270 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 30. IMG_2516 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 31. 20171227_215019140_iOS by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 32. 20171225_212405710_iOS by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr Now's as good a point as ever to sneak in some skyline shots. 33. IMG_2182 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 34. IMG_2186 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 35. IMG_2286 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 36. IMG_2299 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 37. IMG_2290 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 38. IMG_2315 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 39. IMG_2326 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 40. IMG_2328 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 41. IMG_2403 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr The weather isn't being bipolar; I've just shuffled some things around. 42. IMG_2409 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 43. IMG_2421 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 44. IMG_2417 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 45. IMG_2424 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 46. IMG_2458 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 47. IMG_2264 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 48. IMG_2440 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 49. IMG_2439 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 50. IMG_2432 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr The Tenderloin was pretty much what I expected. 51. IMG_2438 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 52. IMG_2443 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 53. IMG_2451 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr Japantown. 54. IMG_2450 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 55. IMG_2464 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr Some ridiculous Victorians in Pac Heights... those curved windows! 56. IMG_2459 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 57. IMG_2484 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 58. IMG_2473 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 59. IMG_2482 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 60. IMG_2485 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 61. 20171227_200849930_iOS by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 62. IMG_2275 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 63. IMG_2497 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr It seems as though no matter where you're headed, you always end up in Chinatown. 64. IMG_2502 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 65. IMG_2074 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 66. IMG_2090 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 67. IMG_2498 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 68. IMG_2521 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 69. IMG_2505 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 70. IMG_2507 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 71. IMG_2529 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 72. IMG_2000 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 73. IMG_2001 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 74. IMG_2549 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 75. IMG_2351 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 76. 20171226_235254000_iOS by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 77. IMG_2342 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr Even Stevie Wonder commutes via cable car. 78. 20171226_233558940_iOS by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 79. IMG_2531 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 80. IMG_2228 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 81. IMG_2391 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 82. IMG_2394 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 83. IMG_2392 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 84. IMG_2539 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr This corner building is great. 85. IMG_2545 by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr 86. 20171227_020836000_iOS by Ethan Kocjan, on Flickr I'd say that's enough for one thread! San Francisco is a bewildering, beautiful, disgusting, energetic, ever-changing unchangeable enigma of a city, that's for sure. More photos, focusing on the North and East Bay regions are incoming!

Instead of crossing directly at the Anderson Ferry site, would it make more sense to have the approaches to the bridge line up with Neeb and the CVG access road? I guess no matter where you put it you'll have to widen roads to handle the traffic, but I feel that location would be more workable than anything around Anderson Ferry/Mineola.

Total speculation here, but could it have to do with downtown business leaders trying to concentrate their power downtown? The Roebling Bridge already doesn’t line up with the street grid because of pressure from businesses on the Ohio side, and didn’t the abandonment of the subway plan and the routing of I-75 have a lot to do specifically with downtown land owners working to increase their property values by hemming in downtown?

Maybe they were extremely prescient and were waiting for the day that yuppie boxes would inevitably take over CUF and hoped to build a 5-story student community there but got tired of waiting for developers to catch up! ;D

Cincinnati’s inconsistencies, in both density and in setback size, has always struck me as a little weird and unique. Even in Pittsburgh do the houses touch more often than not and homes seem fairly consistently set back from the road, whereas in Cincinnati it’s anyone’s guess as to how much of a setback the next house in the sequence. Then you have places like Corryville which are somehow very dense and not dense at the same time, with some humongous lots over there. And then you have the extremely weird outliers like those 1.5-story second empire houses on Vine that are very small compared to the rest of the area, or that one townhouse on Clifton that’s set all the way at the back edge of the property.

I'm currently reading Ohio: A Personal Portrait of the 17th State, since it's the first book I've found that actually involves an Ohioan admitting he knows next to nothing about his state, so he sets out and visits all 88 counties and writes his impressions of the people and places he finds. It's particularly interesting because it was published in 1969, right when Ohio's inner cities had begun their decline but the economy hadn't completely collapsed yet. This passage from the introduction pretty neatly sums up what I've struggled to put into words when trying to describe Ohio, both to outsiders and to fellow Ohioans:

I absolutely love the new Music Hall renovation but I kind of wish the rose window had been painted a bit differently. It’s harder to discern the tracery with the new/old paint job.

On a somewhat related note, Cleveland and Columbus both have free downtown circulator routes. Is there a particular reason SORTA is unable to fund a similar circulator, either the streetcar or a bus route? If I had to guess, I'd assume it's a similar setup to KC with the special downtown sales tax funding these routes.

And it sounds like they’ve had issues with the battery-operated sections of the line, at least from what I’ve heard anecdotally elsewhere online. The other big complaint I’ve seen is frequency, which again is the same with a lot of other streetcar lines.

It’s kind of funny that little ol’ Dayton has three IKEAs that are all closer to Dayton than either the Pittsburgh or Columbus IKEA is to Cleveland. Actually, Dayton probably has the most IKEAs-per-capita within driving distance in the US!

Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly depending on your view of humanity), the Qline still manages to get plenty of hate from Detroiters, with the same arguments you see everywhere of people saying it doesn’t go anywhere and gets stuck in traffic and is useless for commuting. But there also seems to be more outcry for adding dedicated lanes to the system, which should be relatively easy since Woodward is 47 lanes wide. I just don’t know what the political climate for such a re-striping is like.

Exciting to see some life coming back to Grand Circus. It'll be nice to be that much closer to completely ringing the park with buildings once more. Now someone just needs to convince Gilbert to spruce up the park itself!

Oakwood, an affluent streetcar suburb adjacent to Dayton, recently completed a nice road diet along Shroyer Road. It went from being 4 lanes with no turn lane to 2 travel lanes, a landscaped median/turn lane, and bike lanes on both sides of the road. They also added very visible zebra crosswalks and flashing crosswalk signs at various midblock locations along the street. The Miami Valley really has been killing it recently with improving its pedestrian and bike infrastructure - pretty much every major road rebuild that I’ve recently witnessed has involved some combination of bumpouts, lane reductions, bike lanes added, and crosswalks.

Maybe it was a result of this particular... incident? ;D "Mr. Stewart was an agent for Aetna Insurance in 1877 when he decided to get into show business by buying a whale, a white whale, a beluga, and having it transported to Cincinnati. Stewart knew nothing, of course, about how to care for the delicate animal, and the results were tragic. By 21 June 1877, the Cincinnati newspapers were aflutter about Mr. Stewart’s whale. He had secured it in Labrador and made arrangements to transport it by ship down the St. Lawrence Seaway and by train from New York to Cincinnati. At the Lookout House atop Mt. Auburn, a huge tank was built, 30 feet in diameter and 10 feet deep, holding 168,000 gallons of salt-treated river water." More at Greg Hand's blog: https://handeaux.tumblr.com/post/107259547597/neptunes-revenge-cincinnatis-whale-captor-goes

^You'd be correct. I don't know how long ago they did the renovation into the food hall that it is now, but they did a fantastic job with it.

When your crowning achievement as a developer is "saving Price Hill" via the Incline District's Vinyl Palace, you're sure as heck not going to have enough vision to imagine anything good ever coming out of South Fairmont.

Every single town in the Ohio Valley deserves to be a bright, bustling tourist destination. Maybe one day...