Jeff

Drexel content provider to the local scene since....???

^ I think i know you

hah..i missed this comment. Yes, these fog pix do remind me a bit of some of those Edward Steichen shots of NYC, though I think his shots where earlier than the 30s?

Yeah, well, I was thinking of high rise clusters. Would Catalina be visible from that spot, or would it be obsucred by the Palos Verdes hills?

People don't go downtown because they have to pay to park and theres nothing there. One or two way streets have nothing to do with it.

Excuse me?

For me it seems like a bad idea. This is going to cause what traffic there is downtown to become a bit more confused and congested, due to left-turns at intersections causing back-ups, or even if there is some sort of "no-left-turn" rule. I don't see how this helps pedestrians, as when crossing a one-way street one has less turning traffic to keep an eye on. If the arguement is that this is going to "slow traffic", then that will make donwtown more of hassle for people who drive downtown. I wasn't aware that this proposal was going to drive a reduction in on-street parking, which is a real bummer as I usually park on-street, not in lots or garages (if I can help it). Seems like another one of those "urban planning" fixes that is just going to screw things up more.

I am going to have to do another line chart from the forum stats again....

Ive used the Montgomery County Historical Society, now Dayton History, website as a source for the backrounder parts of some of my threads. Here is their link to the "Making Progress" thingy...same thing I think, but via links from the Dayton History homepage.... Making Progress

^ indeed, and there just isn't any place in Ohio that is what the UP is to Michigan.

Now this is interesting....people from Ohio go to Morehead, in Kentucky. Heck, not even Kentuckians go to Morehead (not any I knew at least). WSU...I think whats going on there is that the kids who can't afford room and board at places out of Dayton, or who cant afford UDs tuition, go to WSU. So turning up ones nose at WSU is sort of class thing (disparging the WSU's butt-ugly campus is purely an aesthetic critique and in no way reflects on the student body).

Oh, and the most famous product of the Kentucky Knobs: (made across the road from Bernheim Forest) ...the tie in to MP is that that rebuilt Main Street entry feature that leads up to Museum Plaza will have a "microbrew" bourbon distillery. I'd like to see how they store the barrells for ageing! (could be a cool design, if done right).

Once you get into the Knobs, deeper into them, there are quite a few cultural similarities to Appalachia, too....hollows, ridges, jeep trails, four wheel drives, and the infamous Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot If you or anyone is familiar with the I-65 drive from Louisville to Lexington, I found this online...land cover map of a part of the "Interior Low Plateaus"....(Cincy shows up here too) And a close up of the area between Louisville and Nashville, with some key features that I was talking about labled. For woodland preserves, Mammoth Cave, Bernheim Forest and the Jefferson Memorial Forest (and Fort Knox) are the most extensive. The places I know well are the Jefferson Memorial Forest and Bernheim Forest. Knox, though really busy during the Cold War for manouvers as the topography matched the German/Czech border somewhat, also worked as a giant wildlife preserve, and had an annual deer hunt. Heres a good ariel of the Jefferson Memorial Forest, my home country (I-65 to the right). People lived in the lower valleys and hollows, but the upper parts, the deep hollows and hogback ridges and high flats was all preserved.... And some maps...the height was not super high, but the slopes where quite steep and the place a real maze of hollows, gaps, saddles, ridges, etc....so there was the illusion of being in deep hills (plus little pay-lakes and county lakes up in the hollows) The countryside somewhat...(dont have real good pix of this place), and a geological cross section of an outrider knob...these outriders are a distinctive feature of this part of the Knobs, especially since they are sometimes sitting on a dead flat prehistoric lakebed Further south is Bernheim Forest. Probably more popular for its aboretuem (one of the last designs of the Olmstead firm), the forest goes way up in the hills. again, I-65 is labled, to the left this time. Some pix of the more wild areas of Bernheim..this fire tower was used fairly late, but its closed now. I was up in the cab once, a few years ago. The Jefferson Memorial Forest had one too... For more on Bernheim, link here: Bernheim Forest,...this place is really worth a side trip from Louisville, especially if one is interested in landscaping and flora. I guess this digression is far afield from Museum Plaza, but this has revived an interest I've long had in the landscape down around Louisville...maybe some pix on this in the future? For Ohio, there is a similar country to the east of here...out along OH 41, Bainbridge to Peebles and south...Fort Hill, Buzzards Roost Rock, the hills around Chillicothe, etc...

From the A/E firms wesbite, I think this is the front, and it works better in articulating the entry (though they could have done better with the rear, would have been easy to do via a canopy or something) I can see they are doing some play with figure-ground relatonships, and I like how the firestaris are big windowed spaces, not the usual CMU utilitarian stuff one sees. Side facade. Ok, this essentially a bar building, with different slabs sliding past each other. I like what they were trying to do, but they got too fussy, I think, with the facade. The metal skin being pulled back, ok, but the angles on the skin seem arbitrary and a nod to "decon", which is not the esthetic source for this building.... ...i do like that they didn't default to band windows, but tried to be a bit more "different" with the fenestration. The base works fairly well (good that they acknowledge the ground plain), but whats up with that upper level and the big "window" up there? Seems like this was a real miss in how they dealt with that. I like the interior.....utilitarian, but spacious, really more about space than volume ...and now for something compeletly different, one of their buildings at UofL (proving they can do a good facade if they wanted to) Omni Architects You need to go earlier than the 90s for the influences. The designers where influenced more by the The New York Five, and also by the Texas Rangers (no not the sports team). I think if they would have avoided the decon fillips to jazz up the facade, they could have had a more honest building and stayed trueer to the design intenetions..but id love to see what this building is like in real life, as I suspect, given what I think are the influences, the interior spaces and the parti are whats really the key parts here. We tend to get distracted by the voumetrics and facade details, when this approach to architecture is more about space, secton, and plan.

And behind you you can take a pano of LAX area/El Segundo, Englewood, and in the distance, Long Beach. The real bad smog apparenlty is more inland...yet this is a particularly good day. and with a dusting of snow on the San Gabriels, too...nice!

It is interesting to see the fairly large Michigan presence in that poll....there are more Michiganders than the Dayton/Akron people combined..

Such a pleasant handle, too! Welcome.

..a shuttle? why not sedan chairs?

...yeah, Cochran Hill Tunnel, opened in 1970. This was done to appease park preservationists who opposed the routing of I-64 through Cherokee Park. The alignement is fairly unobstrusive through the park, so the preservantionsts did have some say, apparently, with KDOT. The tunnel is indeed bored, and averages 424 length. It cost $1.2M in then-year dollars. I've been to Nashville once, through it a few more times, I do recall that descent into the Nashville basin, between the Tennessee line and Goodlettsville, I think. I am fairly familiar with that stretch of country south of Louisville to, say, Bowling Green and Barren River. I used to live in those hills south of airport..these are the northern limit of the Knobs. Much of that is now a forest preserve, the Jefferson Memorial Forest, one, Burnt Knob, is one of Louisvilles 'Olmstead Parks"...I spent a lot of time up in these hills hiking, packing, and camping...lot of it off-trail bushwacking. some nice pix of the Knobs, as they merge into the lower Bluegrass region..... Beyond the Knobs iis Muldraughs Hill itself. Above Muldraughs Hill, the plateau area starting at around Elizabethtown, but really starting south of Mumfordville & the Green River running past Bowling Green and to the west is the Pennyrile (so called in Kentucky). There is another escarpment even above that called (by geologists) the Dripping Springs Escarpment (locals call it "them thar hills")..this is also pretty visible to the west, or to your right if you are driving south on I-65, starting around Cave City and Horse Cave. This is all karst country, lots of sinks, springs, limestone caves, etc, etc, and on the escarpment hills you can find rockhouses...i've done some cave exploring in wild caves in that part of KY when I was younger. Seems like my image of that part of KY is a line of blue hills always on the horizon...

The history of the territorial period and early statehood, gee whiz...interesting if you are a history buff but how relevant to modern times ??? The issue of statehood was really tied up with the Federalists and Jeffersonians or Ant-Federalists, at the national level....locally or regionally it was a political division between the Marietta settlers and the Scioto Valley settlements... factions lead by St Clair vs one led by Thomas Worthington.. With criteria in place, and amid a flurry of westward expansion as statehood-seeking settlers poured into Ohio, the process accelerated - but not without controversy. Ohio's boundaries are well known today, but in the early 1800s, they were a hotly debated issue, fueled by politics and personalities. Territorial governor Arthur St. Clair led one faction that sought to divide the state and delay statehood indefinitely. Statehood supporter Thomas Worthington led another group. Called "the father of Ohio statehood," Worthington urged Congress to keep the divisions set forth in the Northwest Ordinance and reject St. Clair's plan.

Im not sure they had a single arched one, for this bridge (there are two bridges being proposed, one is further upriver)...the mulitple arched one on the renderings necro posted looks a bit goofy

NKU has a great site. Too bad the buildings there all suck. This one might be a bit better than the ones I remember, but I cant tell if this is the front or rear facades. I need to see more of the building before makiing a judgement, particulary the interiors....

I like that rendering. But for a real neat site, or set of sites, for infill housing, look at the neighborhood between Broad and State, directly east of the Statehouse..that grid of little streets and small blocks.... Now that area would be really neat to redevelop as housing or even mixed use. Particulary since one street s right on axis with the statehouse.

The Ohio leaves the Appalachian plateau between Vanceburg and Maysville, around Ohio Brush Creek on the Ohio side. The bluffs the Ohio passes through to near Louisville are due to its cutting through the geological feature called the Cincinnati Arch, which is sort of a low plateau whiich rises to its highest points around Cincnnati and Lexington. In Kentucky this is more or less the Bluegrass region. When the river reaches Louisville it is near the western end or low part of the arch, entering into glacial outwash plain and lake features, which is why the land around Louisville is so flat. Yet this ends west of New Albany when the river hits one of the escarpments of the Interior Low Plateuas, called Muldraughs Hill in Kentucky and the Knobstone Escarpement or (locally) Floyds Knobs in Indiana...this feature runs from Brown County, Indiana, deep into Kentucky. The river passes bisects the escarpment just west of West Point, KY, and regains bluffs again as far west as Hawsville and Tell City as it cuts through another plateau: Madison would be last of these, but the bluffs continue on south of Madison to some exent..that stretch of the river isnt easy to get too. The nondescript aspect is due to the lack of bluffs close in to the city. The river itself is quite a dynamic presence, due to the islands, the widening of the pool just prior to the falls and the dams, the canal and locks, and the configuraton of the river as it reaches the city an NE/SW angle, offering view directly upstream for miles. then widens and pools across from downtown, before crossing the rapids n a set of sharp bends, settles and pools around Sand Island, then sweeps in a great arc past New Albany, defining Louisville's West End, the flows due south through a broad valley, following the wall of the escarpement till it breaks the escarpment in a great bend at West Point. The river really does drive the urban form of Louisville to a great extent...

They should go with that cable-stayed deisgn, or get Caltrava to design one (would be a great commission, but that wont happen). The Big Four approaches on the Indiana side where up as late as the early 1970s, and where quite imperssive. I dont recall when the Ky side ones came down. The bridge was the biggest local white elephant for years, but one proposal, to hang housing on it, made it into that Unbuilt America book...for a number of years the Big Four was lit up durng Xmas as a Toys for Tots fundraising gimmick ("Bridge the Gap"). www.8664.org ...a pipe dream, but others see 64 as an issue as well. The freeway hasnt doomed any redevelopment yet, though. The bridges are impressive in their length as the river is at a particulalry wide point here. The river width and the way it encounters the city at an angle is what makes it interesting. Whats not interesting is that there is no obvious valley here. There is a short sharp slope, but its not used very well. The CBD here is interesting as it comes so close to the river, particularly between 8th and 1st streets, where some of the high rises start to crowd the river. Beyond this, to the east, there is a lot of open space. I think this close crowding of the river and the possibility of decking over the freeway was a missed opportunity. Its almost that I'd want this MP tower to go where they are proposing that new arena, to really intesify the crowding along the river. I always thought a good conceptual model for dealing with a riverfront like Louisvilles, where one is working at different levels, dealing with a slope to a river, was Robert Adam's Adelphi Terrace, fronting the Thames... ...the upper section: The issue with the river at Louisville has always been floods and flood control, not so much the freeway. This is going to impose a limitation on what one does on the river side of the floodwall.