PigBoy

I was wondering when these pictures would finally show up! Great stuff. Glad to see you got all around those central parts. Maybe next time my car will be accessible for a broader tour! But boy, the most notable exception to this is notable as hell! Wood and vinyl Boston fascinates the geographer in me because it's what most of the city is, but it's so different from the popular brick-and-stone image of Boston, which comes from those older central neighborhoods that tourists rarely stray beyond. And as for unfriendly people, better to save your interactions for over here in Cambridge. People are much nicer on this side of the river!

I love popping back to this forum for survey threads. Home base: Cambridge, Mass. February 2011: Quebec City April 2011: Washington DC June 2011: Dayton (including a day for Camp Washington Chili/Cincy Reds, of course) June/July 2011: Luxembourg, Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris August 2011: Ocean City, NJ September 2011: The Poconos, Pennsylvania October 2011: Madison, WI (this week) November 2011: Dayton (presumed Thanksgiving trip) Plus four trips to NYC so far this year (including being stuck there during Hurricane Irene), some trips to nearby places like Cape Cod, and a couple of visits to northern NJ. There really needs to be more Ohio in all of this.

Shut me down if there's already a thread on this (apologies for now following the forum too closely these days), but it was interesting to see this on the cnn.com home page today. The name of the program is a little grammatically confusing, but I think I like its spirit. The rest: http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/08/us/ohio-dayton-pro-immigrant/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

Great tour! The "just like Dayton" building looks pretty interesting. I have really got to make some day trips to Providence. There's no excuse! That probably explains why there's no one downtown. :wink: In any case, how would they even get there now that one of the highways has been removed from downtown??

What a town. Classic ColDay excellence! Forgive me if I haven't been following along closely enough, but what's that "the one for fun" business?

What do east coast cities count as — Other or Youngstown Suburb?

^That sounds about right. It's always been hard to succinctly describe the accent in Dayton. (Except some of the East Dayton people, who sound pretty hardcore Appalachian to my ears.) But I'd never thought that it might be peculiar to Dayton. Perhaps it is. I actually used to find the local accent kind of grating. If it were stronger or weaker it would be okay, but it's right at an annoying level.

Agreed, it's really interesting to see, especially having heard remarks about Cincinnati being "one of the most segregated cities" in the country or some such. (No citations; it just seems to be something that comes up now and again.) I would believe that neighborhood-by-neighborhood the city does exhibit a lot of segregation, but it lacks the stark geographical segregation patterns of many (most?) other cities.

Thanks for the little tour! I've driven past Rockford a million times but never stopped to look... though it doesn't appear that I was missing a whole lot.

Fantastic tour! Very interesting to see the types of architecture and such in there.

Ah, memories. Living there was nice, but visiting may be even better. Great shots! I especially appreciate your closing shot of my second home, Science Hall.

This is beyond awesome.

I can't figure out what "dynamic and irrelevant" means here. Equal opportunity homicide or something? Is it really true that black males aren't disproportionally the ones being killed? (Honest question.)

Here's a house in my neighborhood. I'm waiting for the whole block to fall over like dominoes.

You can have my pencil sharpener. I probably don't use it more than once a year. I'll just get by with whittling next time it comes up. Copier, though... you're on your own!

This is such a fantastic set of images and the restoration sounds amazing. It's fascinating how the city looks reasonably modern in some ways despite this snapshot being 160 years old. It was fun to see this in Wired on a very long and dull day in which the magazine was the only available entertainment. Is a high-res version of the original image no longer available for download anywhere? Granted I did just a couple minutes of Googling but only turned up some online viewers and no download links. I could swear I used to have a pretty high resolution image (before this fancy restoration) that was downloaded from some archive site or other several years ago.

Damn, I was going to make the toaster joke! Well, at least I've got these four microwaves. Two of them even work! Edit: or an actual list of my stuff: - Laptop computer - Desktop computer (very rarely used) - 17-inch LCD monitor (shared between laptop and desktop) - External hard drive - Wireless router/DSL modem - Printer - 400 lb television with antenna and digital converter box - DVD player - Sega Genesis with Sonic 1 and 2 - 3 year old bottom-of-the-line flip phone (to be replaced tomorrow with smartphone) - iPod Nano - Floating globe - Three window fans - One clock radio and one weird LED clock - Pencil sharpener - Two digital cameras (one SLR, one point-and-shoot) - GPS for the car - Parking meter... purely mechanical, though

I'm gonna post this before even getting all the way through the thread. Just a thumbs-up, really. This is great! Pennsylvania has some of the most fascinating towns around.

An enjoyable minute! I spent a recent weekend in the East Village and came away with only a single photo. Perhaps I'll post a "New York half-second" thread.

Looks like there are three locations here in the immediate Boston area, with a couple more in outer suburbs. Sure enough, a Google Maps search turns up five other locations in Boston that apparently have closed down. I can't really offer any theories why, although local the ice cream market seems a but unstable in general. There is at least one local chain and several favored individual joints, but other local places have also closed or otherwise been shuffled around. I've only been to Cold Stone once, at The Greene back in Beavercreek. It was good, but otherwise I don't usually bat an eye at the place.

Wait, is only Jeffrey being sarcastic about the WSM, or is it both of you? Comparing a few photographs here to about 20 minutes of experience in Cleveland, I'm inclined to vote WSM! What the heck is the story with that organ? How did that kind of scene end up inside a Macy's? This is a great little thread.

Heh, Ann Arbor's State Street looks like it has pretty much the exact same set of businesses as Madison's State Street.

To echo some of the reader comments on the DDN article, there's no reason the place can't be both historic and "cool." The Oregon District has got to be one of the very few places in the city that may actually be attract people and street life—and one of the few things that perhaps can help lift Dayton out of suckitude. In the opposition to harmless knitting on some historical grounds I just see a form of NIMBYism that favors the character of the city at the expense of the life of the city.

Lately I'm pretty down on MSAs as a basis on which to compare cities. They're better than cities proper, sure, but as the conversations in this thread demonstrate the county-based definition of MSAs is problematic. County boundaries are every bit as arbitrary as city boundaries—just bigger (usually). To directly compare city stats (especially density) the urbanized area is the best measure from the Census, but sadly we only get that level of measurement once every ten years!

^ Ah yes, s'pose it is. I'm curious about places like CWRU or a huge research school like Ohio State, which I'm sure do have a lot of private enterprise surrounding them. Is there a sense that these local university-based economies are desirable to graduates? I know that the great majority of graduates are just not involved here, nor are they in Madison or what have you, but somehow I always got the impression that a lot of Madison grads really actively desired to remain local, whereas the various Ohio grads tend to be more about going wherever the job is, with no particular attachment to place. But that may be a dour outlook brought on by reading this thread...