BigDipper 80

From an "operations" standpoint, Tokyo is hands-down the greatest city on the planet. Everything works flawlessly there, from the efficiency of the rail network to the unreal levels of cleanliness to the virtual lack of crime, to the incredible (and endless) dining options. Kyoto is more photogenic and Osaka is more boisterous, but Tokyo's mastery of urban life can't be matched anywhere else. I miss Japan every day - we desperately need more Yoshinoyas and curry houses stateside! There's no way gyudon wouldn't be a hit with the drunk college crowd.

Hey all - I'm hoping to call on the UO collective hive-mind to help me out a bit with finding a suitable location for my friends' wedding rehearsal dinner. They're getting married in Lakewood, but the bride's family lives in Aurora and Cuyahoga Falls. So... what I'm looking for is a place either near Lakewood, Ohio City/Tremont, downtown, or somewhere along 480 or even as far south as Macedonia or Hudson. As the title suggests, a private dining/party room is a must, with a menu that isn't too heavy on seafood and isn't too haute, and probably around $30 or less per person. So something with quality food but not really over-the-top. It's essentially a hipster millennial wedding and they said they'd be fine with even a place like Great Lakes, but I wasn't sure if they had a private room there. Anyway, any suggestions are appreciated! Thanks in advance for the help.

I know, that Beethoven is so obsolete! Let's move on :-( I actually like the 3rd and 4th movements of Beethoven's 5th way more than the significantly more-famous first movement. And for reference, I'm in my early-20s and love classical music :wink: - I think a lot of people like classical but it often can come across with an inaccessibility to the "plebians". Pretty much anyone can get behind a concert of pieces from Bugs Bunny cartoons, but sitting through a Philip Glass concert is a lot more challenging for people with little exposure to the genre. And when people go around saying "the orchestra only for old rich white people", people will be less willing to engage in that institution.

#63-66 were all in Shawnee, which is maybe a half hour from Nelsonville. And I was in Seattle for work and unfortunately had next to no time to even take many iPhone photos. Maybe next time I'll stay out for a long weekend. :laugh:

3rd Street has a ton of potential, and Texas Beef could definitely use some more neighbors, and W-D needs all the love it can get. I think the biggest problem, besides the stigma of being the West Side, is that it's pretty isolated from the other gentrifying areas south and east of downtown.

The most "big-city" urban neighborhood in Ohio - thanks for the photos! When I was there on Christmas Eve, two guys got into a shouting match in Italian and I thought I had walked into a time warp.

^It's been changed for probably about a year now. The rumor I heard was they wanted to be higher up in the phone book, which doesn't really make sense since no one uses phone books any more.

How's the traffic at Fields-Ertel now that they finished up that cloverleaf? Did it actually do anything to ease traffic at that intersection?I'm (thankfully) never up that way any more to check it out for myself.

In the five years I lived in Cincinnati, I visited more neighborhoods/obscure pockets and learned more about the region's history than any of my friends who had lived in the tristate for 20+ years. It's disheartening that Daughterty'a view is that it's purely a tourist attraction - it's not The Beast, it's a streetcar! Transit is rarely a "must-do" on any tourist's list unless you're one of those weird urbanist people.

"Doesn't go anywhere people work"? Nobody works in the CBD?

Maybe they can capture some of the dozens of stray cats roaming the south and east neighborhoods to use at the cafe. :laugh:

Part of the irony in this is that signal priority would make the streetcar MORE a convenient and attractive to people, which should theoretically boost the numbers being complained about here.

2016 turned out to be a pretty productive travel year for me. I've shared a few of my trips throughout the year, but some of them were shorter, or I didn't get around to putting a thread together, or whatever other reason. So I figured I'd put together a thread (in roughly chronological order) that covers some of the places I went this year that didn't make it into other threads. BALTIMORE 1. 2. 3. Way more Baltimore photos at http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php/topic,30487.msg786283.html#msg786283 WASHINGTON D.C. 4. 5. The newest Trump luxury resort. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. MINNESOTA 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. PENNSYLVANIA 17. 18. 19. NATIONAL PARKS 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. LAS VEGAS 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. CLEVELAND 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. INDIANAPOLIS 38. 39. 40. SANDUSKY 41. 42. DETROIT 43. DAYTON 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. SPRINGFIELD 51. COLUMBUS 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. SEATTLE 62. Yeah, I took a whopping one photo in Washington. Sue me. APPALACHIA 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. DENVER 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. Aaaand out of DEN and back to Ohio. That pretty sums up my 2016 - hopefully that trip wasn't too overwhelming!

It's such a grand entryway but it needs a LOT of work. The frescoes in the upper balcony are crumbling away and that staircase seems to be on the verge of falling down the hill. It'll be so nice to have that area all fixed up.

^Yes, it's located in Brush Park, about four-ish blocks from the stadiums.

They need to open on Fairfield sooner rather than later so that I can get the guys at the office out of their boring lunch rotation and actually go somewhere GOOD! Or get that UD one going so that I have quick access...

^Yeah, I highly doubt that we'd actually ever see some sort of remotely smooth agreement given all the needless chest-beating and mismanagement present, but I can dream ;).

Those are some serious gems. Please EC, just get annexed already.

^Turner "technically" does, but only at the main entrance. Everyone just goes in the side door that doesn't have a person at the check-in table. Schneider and CRC are mostly athletes so I doubt UC cares about what they do. Maybe if/when they get around to re-doing Siddall they can put the rooftop deck back in place. I've been up on Calhoun's roof and it's a pretty cool view from up there.

That lot is yuuuuuuge and this building will be too, if the rumor is true. I'll be interested to see how Dan plans on siting Michigan's (presumably) second-tallest skyscraper there.

Beige is the least sinful of all colors. Drives down the premarital sex on campus.

^^It's the same thing with people who complain every time a new roundabout gets added - never mind the other benefits, it's just too confusing and hard, and instead of bothering to figure out how to properly drive through it they just crash all the time. ^Speaking of lobbies, I'm almost surprised that police unions haven't come out against driverless cars. When you remove speeding tickets and moving violations from the roads, the revenue streams for a lot of these suburban police departments is going to dry up.

It's really not that huge of a difference. Enrollment in both diocese's school districts is around 45,000 for elementary and secondary schools, and I'm sure even if you wash out Dayton and Akron's schools they'd be neck and neck. Cincinnati has 114 schools in 14 counties, and Cleveland has 115 schools in 8 counties. Cincinnati might be a bit denser in distribution of Catholic schools when you include in Covington but I don't think "Catholic density" really changes much. I think it was mentioned earlier, and I'd agree with, that it has more to do with high school football than almost any other factor in terms of how "important" a school seems, rather than it's religious affiliation.

^But you have to remember that the dioceses don't overlap the metro areas. The Archdiocese of Cincinnati includes the Dayton metro, and the Diocese of Cleveland contains Akron. And as a matter of clarification, an archdiocese doesn't mean that that is "more Catholic" than the others or anything, it just means that it was the original diocese (and still has some extra administrative duties) because Cincinnati was the only big city out in the Province of Cincinnati (aka Ohio) until the pope subdivided the state into other dioceses. Cleveland's Catholic school tradition is just as strong as Cincinnati's but it just so happens that really only Ignatius and Ed's get the attention, so everyone forgets about the other ones out in the suburbs. Beaumont is the effective equivalent to Summit Country Day. And John Carroll is a good school (shoutout to John Cranley :-P), it just doesn't get any attention like Xavier does because it doesn't have any big-time sports teams. Xavier in my mind is Catholic the same way UD is Catholic -- it's "Catholic" but no one in the region really cares or makes it the sole identifier of the school.

Ultimately, Ohio is a bunch of disparate cities/regions that happened to have a border drawn around them. They feel like different parts of the country because they were different parts of the country before 1803. Which is a big reason why Ohio is so poorly-defined in the minds of the rest of the country, and hell even among other Ohioans. I'm sure the differences between the C's and the second-tier cities was even more pronounced before the Great Homogenization post-WWII. As someone who has lived for various lengths of times in various corners of the state, really the only factors that tie the state together are the manufacturing jobs (and even the industries represented are different across the state) and some abstract loyalty to the idea of "Ohio-ness" that somehow holds the state together even though relatively few people travel outside their respective corner of the state. So in that regard, there are five Ohios because there are... five Ohios. None of the five Ohios are more or less prone to feeling like a city-state, because in many ways they already are. Cincinnati just happens to be loudest about it. :-P