BigDipper 80

I wish CP had just gotten a more traditional flume in the first place. A few of my ride host buddies have told me about the amount of work that went into actually making sure the StR boats were balanced evenly just so that they wouldn't sink. No water ride should have to have the ride operator making decisions about where guests should sit just so that the boats actually float.

It's been a long enough hiatus since Part 1, I figure now is as good of a time as ever to revisit the Charm City! 1. Stop one of this day was to visit Johns Hopkins Hospital. Why, you ask? Well... 2. For the subway (mode #3) of course! I needed an excuse to take it somewhere, so I rode from JHMC to the Lexington Market. 3. The Lexington Market station. Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of Lexington Market itself! 4. Eutaw Street, I believe. This one was in significantly better shape than Howard Street, which the light rail line runs down. 5. 6. Speaking of light rail, here's mode #4 now! We actually rode this the first night we got in, and we were all pretty surprised at how vacant the storefronts along the route were. There hasn't been much revitalization along Howard Street, it seems. 7. Baltimore's CBD in general wasn't particularly family-friendly. It was strange seeing a whole strip of sex clubs and porn shops in the heart of downtown - it felt like something out of Taxi Driver and way out of place in a 21st century city. Totally unrelated to this photo, though! 8. 9. 10. 11. Back in Fells Point now. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. Beautiful houses along Patterson Park. Reminded me a lot of Montreal. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. The dawn of a new day! I hung around in Fells for the morning to watch the neighborhood wake up, and then I decided to finally head over to Mount Vernon to find out what all the fuss was about. 24. 25. This neighborhood feels so very "British". Such a great area. 26. Hopped off the Circulator somewhere on Charles Street near the cathedral and just started wandering. Honestly, I probably could have spent my entire trip just in Mount Vernon, and I probably would have if I had hit it up on my first day instead of waiting toward the end. 27. Charles Street was narrow and packed with buildings, which made it feel very intensely urban. The way it undulated up and down hills added a lot to the streetscape as well. The topography of Baltimore was one of my biggest "pleasant surprises" of this trip. 28. I think I stared at this house for five minutes. Abso-freaking-lutely magnificent. 29. The inside of the Basilica. 30. 31. 32. The urban fabric around here was just so foreign and crazy and fantastic. 33. 34. Have you ever been somewhere where you've just been moved speechless? I was at a complete loss for words walking around Mount Vernon. Every single corner was a new surprise and the sheer size of the collection of these historic mansions completely blew my mind. This neighborhood is absolutely a national treasure and I was shocked that it doesn't get talked up more. 35. It's as if all of the West End had been built to the same quality as Dayton Street. It was completely overwhelming to see such elaborate structures piled on top of each other. Completely unreal. 36. 37. 38. Such a strange and brilliant juxtaposition. 39. 40. More gorgeous brownstone. Seriously beautiful architecture. I can't accurately begin to describe what it's like to move through this neighborhood. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. Probably the most impressive rowhouse street in the whole city. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. It just goes on and on for blocks and blocks and blocks and almost all of it is perfectly preserved. I didn't want to ever leave. 52. Penn Station looming in the distance. 53. This was an old B&O station I believe. 54. After picking my jaw off the ground, I headed up to the art museum until it got dark. If I hadn't had other plans in store for the next day (to be seen in Part 3), I probably would have managed to spend an entire day just in the area around Johns Hopkins Univ and headed back to Mount Vernon. There is literally too much to see in one day. But I know my plan of attack for next time! Stick around for the final part, which I'll try to get posted sooner rather than later.

That stretch of Reading actually used to have a pleasant streetscape! I wonder if anyone back then complained about the streetcar wires :wink:.

As a UC student, I can tell you that I would have used the hell out of Metro if it was free for students. I just really hate leaving my car alone for extended periods of time if I'm out taking photos downtown or NKY or wherever. The campus shuttles take such circuitous routes, and the North shuttle (which runs along Ludlow and Whitfield) is so jam-packed that they run between 2 and 3 buses, one right after the other so that they arrive at each stop at the same time. It's super inefficient and it would make a lot more sense to just have everyone who lives off of Ludlow hop on the 17 to get to campus.

The original base on the Kroger building reminds me of the fire station at 5th and Central: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1000352,-84.5193504,3a,75y,84.4h,87.05t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s5GuyNZR3sAV0h5JNa97h8w!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 I think I'd have to see it in person as it originally was to make a judgement. A lot of steel-and-glass modernist stuff by, say, Mies van der Rohe, is really nice, but his buildings also tended to use high-quality materials, which a lot of the derivative modernist towers often lacked.

This is exactly the sort of scale that Central needs so as to not feel like a traffic gutter. It could be a really nice boulevard if it gets the right massing along it. I like that the streetcar makes an appearance in that rendering!

That wiggly stretch of Pike Street is one of my favorite stretches of street in the metro area. I loved taking Dixie down the hill on the days when I-75 was backed up in the afternoon (which was most days). Covington is so full of cool stuff - sometimes I wish everything within the 275 loop could just become its own city-state.

The rumor I've heard is that they wanted to be the first Indian restaurant in listings. Everyone around here has been making fun of the off-color "A" and we all refuse to call it anything other than Deep. ^ and ^^ it's just a terrible double-entendre. Every kid at UC makes a joke about it at some point.

Great thread! I love your editing style. I'll be moving to Dayton over the summer and I'm very excited to have a new city to explore for a few years. I've been Street Viewing the city a lot recently and there looks like there's a pretty sizable collection of historic houses.

^ and ^^ I definitely agree about the neighborhoods off of High Street being in great shape and true gems to walk around. German Village is unique in Ohio just for its scale, and Victorian and Italian Villages and even the areas right off of High around OSU are interesting and highly walkable. And they're all in pretty great shape, which makes them all the more impressive Cbus has a great collection of urban neighborhoods (although downtown is comparatively weaker), but I think the clout of those 'hoods gets unfairly overshadowed by the sprawl that makes up much of the city proper. I've been living in Cincinnati for school and very rarely went to Cbus when I lived up in CLE, but really the only reason I headed up that way was to visit friends at OSU. I'd like to go back to actually spend more time going around the city other than my handful of jaunts through German Village, but all my past trips were for... "college-y" reasons :drunk: so we didn't get around the city too much. The Powell Zoo is pretty great though. I went to Zoofari a while back and it was a good time. The exhibits at that place make it almost feel like an amusement park more than a zoo.

^ I pretty much agree with your sentiments. Baltimore's blue-collar culture felt a lot like Cleveland, but the built form is a lot more like Cincinnati. It exists in a weird sweet-spot as an early eastern city that developed most of its culture during the Industrial Revolution. The Inner Harbor is pleasant enough, but I much preferred just wandering around the outer neighborhoods. It was actually really nice going into this trip knowing virtually nothing about the city, since it let me really experience it without any preconceptions. Mount Vernon (which will show up in a later post) completely blew me away, and I didn't even know that it existed before I got to Baltimore. I don't know why, but I was really surprised at how different a built environment feels when it's just being "lived in". Most of the Rust Belt cities that I know more intimately have a stronger contrast between the blighted neighborhoods that have been deserted for decades and the newly-rehabbed trendy 'hoods. There was a bit of a culture shock going to a place like Upper Fell's Point that has more-or-less been continually occupied for probably a century and a half, where nothing is really abandoned but everything is clearly "well used" and a bit rough around the edges (which isn't a bad thing). There aren't too terribly many places like that out this way, and certainly not on the same scale. Such a very different "vibe" that's hard to describe but you know it when you experience it. Obviously Baltimore has large stretches of blighted areas just like any city grappling with post-industrialization, but the fact that they've held onto such great urban neighborhoods for so long is really a treat to experience.

A couple of friends and I decided to take the Cardinal from Cincinnati to Baltimore to go visit the B&O museum, and it turned into an exploration of nearly every mode of transportation currently available in eastern cities. I'll try not to narrate too much as we venture around Baltimore for a week over the course of these posts. This was my first "extended" trip to an east coast city, and having gone into the trip knowing next to nothing about Baltimore, I came away surprised at how well preserved its urban way of life was. I'll be breaking this trip up into 3 parts so that I don't tax everyone with too many photos at once. 1. Goodbye for now, Cincinnati! 2. Passing under the New River Gorge bridge on the Cardinal (mode #1). 3. We made it to Penn Station on time, but 16 hours is an incredibly long time to be cooped up in a rail coach. America definitely needs better rail options. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. The B&O museum was fittingly in an old B&O roundhouse. Makes sense. 9. 10. Love the streamlining on this one. 11. The Bromo-Seltzer building and #10 Light Street. 12. 13. A bit chilly for a baseball game today. 14. 15. 16. 17. The interior of the above building. 18. 19. 20. 21. I took the bus (mode #2) out to Fell's Point, where I would be staying with another friend for the rest of the week. 22. 23. Anyone who claims that OTR is getting too oversaturated with bars and restaurants needs to visit a fully-intact urban neighborhood like Fells. I think it's really difficult for Cincinnatians to imagine that a neighborhood can thrive in this manner. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. Little Italy. Baltimore's neighborhoods, especially the current and former working-class ones, seem to bleed into each other architecturally. They derive a lot of character from the people who live there instead of dramatically different housing styles, since the rowhouse is ubiquitous in this city. 29. 30. Morning traffic. It was great how easily you can get around on foot here. It was only around a 20 minute walk to get downtown from where I was staying. This was helpful, because the circulator buses do a good job at getting you into the outer neighborhoods but aren't as good as getting you back downtown or at connecting to other routes. 31. A church in Federal Hill. 32. I can't be the only one who doesn't care for formstone all that much. 33. 34. These rowhouses were a bit curvier than some of the ones on the east side. I wonder if this was a bit more affluent of an area? 35. 36. The Harbor East area was in the middle of a huge building boom. 37. 38. A better view of the Domino Sugar plant. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. Baltimore doesn't have a very impressive downtown skyline. It derives its charm from the street level and the harbor. 45. I was completely caught off-guard by how hilly Baltimore. I went into this trip knowing virtually nothing about the city and no expectations, and I was pleasantly surprised at everything I discovered. 46. 47. Back at the Inner Harbor. 48. Some of the huge infill in Harbor East. 49. I wish Cincinnati was getting more quality infill like this down in the Banks. 50. 51. 52. A nice sunset. 53. A bit blurry but still a cool shot of the National Bohemian sign. One of my favorite things about Baltimore was the huge factories with big neon signs always looming on the horizon. It's a very unique and different city. I think that's good for this first run. I'll be putting up Parts 2 and 3 in the coming days. The best is yet to come!

Wow, very interesting! Would have been cool to see this come to fruition. I didn't even realize that bus rapid transit existed as a concept in the mid 60s.

The sightlines from MLK west when trying to turn onto the jughandle are terrible as well. I stopped going that way to get to Central Parkway because I didn't trust that someone wouldn't come blasting up the hill while I was making that incredibly huge left turn.

If that list was ranked by overall alcohol and not just beer, I'd bet Cincy would have fared even better due to our proximity to bourbon country.

Case in point is DAAP at the University of Cincinnati, which you're familiar with jmicha. Cutting back on materials on a big project will come back to haunt you.

Merry Christmas from the Terminal Tower and Innerbelt Bridge!

^All of the Cliftonites I've talked with seem excited for it, and I know I was excited when I still lived n Whitfield. Cliftonites are pretty big users of their NBD compared to other neighborhoods so I'm sure it'll get a lot of use.

My grandparents and even my mom still refer to Macy's as May Company from time to time, so it's very likely that's the same reason why the Penneys thing has stuck around still. I know I've always called it Penneys.

I did some digging this morning and it seems that before the highway was constructed, there was a battle between Don Hyde and Al Porter (as usual) over what would be in the median. Porter was quoted in the PD as saying the plan to use the median for transit was "monumental nonsense." Porter was a more obnoxious Moses, which is a hard feat to pull off. The Power Broker was one enlightening book; it's crazy how much power these people had in the 50s and 60s.

Thanks for the info everyone! I figured someone here would have an answer :wink:. Wow, we were lucky that all of those east side highways were either canceled or blocked.

Mods, feel free to move this if there's a better thread for it, but I was wondering if anyone had an answer to this: Why does I-90 widen to have a grass median between Warren Road and W 44th Street? Most of the other urban stretches of freeway in the county are separated by a concrete barrier instead of a grass median, and I-90 was rammed through one of the most built-up sections of Cleveland. I know that a few locations were supposed to be home to interchanges for north-south connector roads... was there at one point plans to put in express lanes along this stretch or something

I was over at my grandparents' place helping them set up for Christmas today, and I noticed how distinctive my grandpa's dialect is. It's definitely Great Lakes-y, but you can tell he was raised by Italian immigrants and he sprinkles a little bit of Pittsburghese on top from when he commuted between CLE and PGH for work. He could say something like "On Sundee I sat on the Davenport cutting kewpons with the skissors and I tied 'em together with my gumbands". I don't know how much of it is actually dialectical and how much is just archaic! Also, the Amish have a pretty distinctive accent. I was down in Holmes County on Wednesday, and it's pretty obvious when you hear an Amish person speak, although I'm sure a lot of it has to do with the fact that most Amish are bilingual. It's definitely a rural accent, but not the stereotypical twangy accent. A lot more, well, German or Scandinavian, which makes sense given their heritage.

Yeah, that's exactly where I first noticed it and it bothers me in any context now. Even if it's not Six Flags' fault for starting the trend, I feel like we should blame them for it anyway :evil:.

I still get tripped up when I hear a Cincinnatian say "please?"instead of "I'm sorry?" or "could you repeat that?" I've only come across it a very small number of times, generally with older people, but it's the one thing that really sticks out as 'foreign' when I hear Cincinnatians speak. Well other than the dreaded Kroger's. Thank god Clevelanders and Pittsburghers don't say "Giant Eagle's", LOL! The unnecessary "'s" is up there for me with needlessly putting "the" in front of proper nouns (THE Millennium Force), but that seems to be more of a case of misinformation than a particular dialect.