PigBoy

I declare this thread to be better than the beans which share the town's name. Great photos! If not for the sign in this picture, I think there would be an illusion of a really tall skyscraper (the building's surface kind of looks like windows).

So that's why a couple military planes came screaming by when I was in downtown Cleveland one day two years ago! (Probably.) Speaking of air shows, I decided the coolest thing about an air show (as I observed in Dayton) is this condensation cloud that sometimes appears around a jet as it travels near the speed of sound. I won't even attempt to understand the physics of it. Some example pictures here: http://chamorrobible.org/gpw/gpw-20040817-English.htm

And as long as I'm here, I might as well post a picture. This is a still frame from a video; I always enjoy it because it seriously makes me look like a monster... or maybe a genetic experiment gone wrong. :-o (If you're wondering, my head is rapidly approaching, and about to make contact with, the camera.)

My couch looks like it's from 1974 (although it's probably in too good a condition to actually be that old). Old thrift store furniture for college students=cheap=yay!

No kidding?

Wow, I think this is the first time I've heard of anything at all being planned for downtown Xenia! This article doesn't seem to say what the building would be used for. Curious... It'd be good to have something new, but it's a little sad to have to destroy a historic building when it's right next door to all the crap in place of what nature already destroyed in 1974. I suppose if they feel bad about demolishing the old building they could just wait for the next tornado to do it for them.

Don't forget the monorail! MONORAIL! MONORAIL! MONORAAAAAAAAAAAAAIL!!! ... Mono--d'oh! It did wonders for Ogdenville and North Haverbrook!

I'd sell my soul to buy a church.

A timely resurrection of this thread! I've moved to Madison, Wisconsin for graduate school and am on the 5th floor of a 6-story apartment building (built in the 50s maybe?) close to lovely Lake Mendota in what I believe is called the Mansion Hill district, close to the downtown area and in walking distance of the UW campus. The immediate area is a mix of old, large houses (hence the name), some smaller houses, some larger apartment buildings like this one, and even a couple decent-sized office buildings. Nice tree-lined streets, pretty convenient to the various amenities of a college town... seems like a pretty nice place so far. And while there are plenty of students around, this particular spot seems pretty quiet, so it just might be possible to actually sleep at night. God willing, from this point forward, I will never have to mow a lawn again. (I hate doing that so much!) I think I need to live in a city. :-)

Great photos as usual! I'm a sucker for colurful skies like in the second pic. I'm curious what exactly you mean... are you talking about just managing to get the camera straight or is it something more complicated? Do you have before and after examples of the straightening you're talking about? I'm intrigued...

I don't think a good community would tolerate the kinds of activities that would go on in a Clinton park. (Nudge nudge, wink wink)

This was being followed in the thread about the unruly crowds and such at the downtown bus stops, but since it's kind of evolved into something else, I thought I'd spin this off into a new thread if that's all right. Call it speciation. :-) RTA plan may end hub woes New system could be in place in downtown Dayton in January, transit officials say By Joanne Huist Smith Dayton Daily News DAYTON | The Greater Dayton Regional Transit Authority could launch a new downtown bus routing system that significantly reduces transfers at Third and Main streets as early as January 2006. On Tuesday, the RTA board voted 6-3 to authorize its staff to work out the details of adopting a recommendation from Louisville-based consultant, the Corradino Group Inc.

Well done, sir! Beautiful city indeed.

Well, that is downright offensive... we've got to be at least in the 1870s!

^ Sadly, that seems to be a typical approach to "smart growth" in suburbia. There is zero interest in containing sprawl. It's fine that they want to ease the strain on infrastructure and so forth, but unless their maximum density is going to be outright rural (which it surely won't), then it's still just bad suburban sprawl.

Mostly because of this guy.

This "crossroads" thing is going to be an ongoing series, I guess. Here's this week's article, about the Arcade. There were also a couple short articles profiling businesses, which I didn't really read. Arcade important to residents By Jim DeBrosse and Ken McCall Dayton Daily News DAYTON | In the last few years, downtown Dayton has tried to rebound with minor league baseball, loft housing, RiverScape MetroPark, the Schuster Center for the Performing Arts and a dazzling renovation of the Old Court House. But ask Miami Valley residents what's missing from the puzzle of downtown revitalization, and the Arcade will be near the top of the list. A recent Dayton Daily News survey found strong support for the Arcade: 70 percent of those polled said the Arcade was either important or very important to Dayton's efforts to revitalize its urban core. And it didn't much matter if the respondents lived in Dayton itself or one of its distant suburbs. "If you leave the Arcade out of the mix, you're setting yourself up for failure," said Yyetta Whitehead, 58, of Sugarcreek Twp. "It's such a central thing — the history of it, the size of the property. If you don't do something with it, everything else will seem sort of half-hearted and cosmetic." The poll also found strong backing for policies that would revitalize vacant and abandoned sites all over the city: 65 percent of respondents said they would support spending their tax dollars on such a program. Again, the support was consistent across income levels, areas of residence and race. It seems the public understands and endorses what many community leaders have said for years: A vital urban core is crucial to the region's prosperity. http://www.daytondailynews.com/ Some graphs... http://img.coxnewsweb.com/C/06/36/74/image_1774366.jpg http://img.coxnewsweb.com/C/04/36/74/image_1774364.jpg ----- I am quite surprised by that second survey question, shown in the graphs above. I really would not expect such high support for having tax dollars spent that way, especially among people in the "outer belt." I wonder how the question was phrased.

I don't see the word "waste" anywhere in your post. Are you turning soft on us? :-D

Those people already are paying taxes for schools. Nice distortion of the issue. This is exactly why it didn't pass, because those who wanted it to pass probably used the same old, simple-minded "IF YOU DON'T VOTE FOR IT, YOU'RE AGAINST THE CHILDREN YOU EVIL PEOPLE!" type arguments that even the most clueless Democrat nowadays is smart enough to not fall for. When people already are paying a lot of taxes for schools, can you imagine how insulting it is for them, when people like you start accusing them of being selfish for not supporting even more unjustified increases? The real question here is how much money do you have in your pocket? How much money do you have in your bank account? Before you accuse other people of being greedy by not supporting your favorite cause, you should go and donate all of your money to that same cause. Otherwise you are nothing but a hypocrite. That's not what I mean. The point is not about how much money people are paying; it's the attitude toward school taxes. I only mean to say that there is a certain segment of the population that seems to feel it owes nothing to schools, regardless of wether the spending is justified or not or even whether they can afford the taxes; they don't seem to weigh the merits of a levy at all. I wouldn't call them selfish or greedy, and it of course makes sense to oppose increased taxes that are not going to do any good. But it bugs me when people oppose the school levies simply on the grounds of not having children in the system or whatever. I wouldn't advocate placing an excessive burden on citizens, but in the end sometimes people have got to make peace with the way taxes work: sometimes you pay for something that you personally aren't using.

Question for you guys... Some of you have mentioned the 75/275 interchange. What was all the construction that just finshed around there in the past few years? Is something now planned that is going to make that have been all for naught? Or was it just widening? (Sorry, I haven't been following things closely.)

I recall a tale of a pot and kettle... :roll: It's hard to be sypmathetic to the "conservative" side in this kind of thing, because the typical attitude is "why should I pay taxes for schools when I don't use them?", as though the kids should fend for themselves. That said, I'm inclined to agree that throwing more money at the schools isn't going to improve education given the factors mentioned. I also don't see how spending money is going to help when the kids and their parents just don't give a shit about education. On the other hand, I could see more spending being justified, depending on the asnwers to a couple questions: -Is the enrollment in Cleveland schools dropping at the same rate as revenue? Taxpayers may be disappearing faster than students. -What was the money needed for? Things like buildings that are falling apart and 40-year-old textbooks deserve some money, for instance. And there are probably other things that would justify it for me. I don't know anything about Cleveland schools in particular, so it's hard to truly take a side here, but those are my general attitudes.

Interesting place... I don't think I've ever been through it.

As part of this the newspaper had a nice page with all kinds of graphics and maps showing statistics, advantages and disadvantages, etc. of the region. I didn't expect to find it on the DDN web site, but lo and behold it actually is there: it's a 4MB PDF file: http://alt.coxnewsweb.com/daytondailynews/pdf/crossroads.pdf (I don't know if it can be accessed without registering for the site.)

In my experience Ohio's traffic problems are pretty insignificant in comparison to larger cities, but I don't know about how cities similar in size to Ohio's compare. But from what I hear on Cincinnati traffic reports on the radio (not from personal experience), you people in Cincy must be cursed by something... seems like every day there is some ludicrous accident in which a car or truck flips over, explodes, turns inside out, gets taken over by an evil computer and plows across all lanes of traffic, or SOMETHING that causes traffic to back up for a few thousand miles in either direction! And you just know ol' Brent Spence is going to fall into the river during rush hour one day...

Beautiful!