PigBoy

The little banner actually says historic Central Ohio images, not Ohio in general.

I also don't think it's good to create a city that is nothing more than an occasional playground for suburbanites, but I see no reason why the city shouldn't be that in addition to a vibrant place on its own. And again, regarding downtown in particular, there has got to be more emphasis on non-residents there than in most other urban neighborhoods, although they still shouldn't be the primary focus. A shift in status from the suburbs back to the city would be great, but what I'm reading in some of the posts here is advocacy of a shift in snobbery and exclusivity to the city as well. That's bad enough as it is, but returning once more to downtown specifically (which is what this thread is--or at least used to be--about), it's especially not productive say "this is MY neighborhood which serves ME and not YOU" in a place that ought to be a center for an entire metropolitan area.

^ I agree with that. The anti-suburbanite attitude is not helpful. It's especially important in downtown of all places, because downtown is not just another urban neighborhood, but rather should be a regional center. I do agree with many posts here that priorities should be to make downtown into a livable neighborhood rather than trying to rely on outsiders or suburbanites, but I don't think this means that those people should be dismissed entirely. Downtown should be a special neighborhood that caters to the entire metro, not just its own residents. Otherwise it's not much of a downtown.

The map says "preferred" growth areas, which I'm guessing means that the orange shows where they want the growth to be in the future, not where it has occurred or is occurring. Or something. If that's the case, though, they seem to be trying for leapfrog sprawl development in a lot of places.

Delete? No. Lock? Perhaps. I'm not in favor of ever deleting anything except spam or outrageous trolling. It's too much like rewriting history and makes me want to stick it to The Man. :shoot: But I wouldn't mind seeing this thread die by being locked. Then we could start over with a recap of the legitimate information and constrictive discussion in which we'd all be on our very best behavior! (Dammit, where's an angel smiley when you need it?)

It would be interesting to see people draw on a map what they think "downtown" is.

The word "penis" sure is being thrown around an awful lot here lately.

Cool! I found a great photo already. The tower of Delaware's old city hall falling down.

I sure hope the 20th is good for me. I don't want to miss this!

For some reason I have a picture of what must be the back of Piqua's city hall. Is the part on the left possibly the older building you're thinking of? It doesn't look particularly old in my photo, but the exterior could have been redone.

I agree on the size of the books; it's kind of annoying. As for getting "excited" about them, remember that they really are written as traveler's guides, where ideally you're looking at the actual building as you're reading. As I believe she wrote in the introduction, it's not an architectural history. So it is a little less than thrilling to sit and read the books without actually going to look at the buildings. (Even worse when you don't even have the option because you're out of state! :wink:) I only wish there were pictures or drawings of all the buildings. A lot of the entries are meaningless to me because I don't have any idea what the building looks like except what little I can guess from the text.

I find that fascinating for some reason. I guess I hadn't expected "Wisconsin" to be a word with much freedom of pronunciation, but apparently it is.

As long as I'm looking at this thread, here's a picture of my stupid face up here in America's Dairyland.

Very nice shots.

Thanks for posting! I like that pineapple gate.

I'm giving this a bump (and restoring the image link that I broke recently) because of a recent discovery. I'll cut to the chase first. This is a map of the outlines of all the buildings in the county, which I think is another interesting way of viewing the development patterns in Montgomery County. It's based on the same orthophoto I originally posted, which unfortunately means that anything built more recently than 2000 is not included. Basically you can see the same things as with the orthophoto, but with all the non-building clutter removed some patterns become clearer. I think it's easier to compare built densities, for example. PLEASE CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE THE FULL SIZE! It's a lot easier to see things in the full size image, but it's too large to comfortably include in this post. The "discovery" I mentioned is that I just found out that the Montgomery County Auditor's web site has the usual set of GIS layers available to download, which is unusual enough in my experience, but even moreso because the site doesn't seem to have one of those handy viewers like many other counties have. The building outlines is one of the layers, and obviously you can zoom in much more than I have shown on this map. Perhaps the biggest prize is an orthophoto of the entire county at 6-inch resolution (but grayscale and 6 years old). If anyone besides me is into this kind of thing, the files are here: http://www.mcauditor.org/downloads/gis_filedownload.cfm. Be warned, though, a couple of them are HUGE. (The orthophoto was 630 MB.) There are also files with real estate data, if anyone's interested in that: http://www.mctreas.org/filedownloads.cfm

An interchange has a name? What is it with everything having names in the Cincy area?

Thanks for the tour! Providence doesn't get the attention it probably deserves because it's overshadowed by Boston, I suppose, but it's certainly an interesting city.

How about a bacon covered penis? - ink

Aha! You can edit yourself and put in exact coordinates (or change the zip). Now I'm in the right place.

Indubitably!

^Ah, a hobo waiting to catch the next boxcar. :wink: I see that Cincinnatizach lives in the southbound lanes of I-75. I think I prefer my lake over that.

Crap. I knew I should not have clicked on the link. I knew it. Their stupid song is going to be in my head for the rest of the day.

Check it out, I live in the middle of a lake!

Nice!