Robert Pence

Um....I'd rather have the speach/rant, cause that post was a dud! My job is to give you what's good for you, which may not always be what you'd rather have. :whip:

I've been in a couple, notably former Ramada Inns, that were struggling to stay open mainly with the complicity of lax code enforcement, long after they should have been shut down. The typical local decline has been from decent, fairly-new Ramada Inn to one where you need to provide your own flyswatter, mousetraps, and Lysol spray, to Days Inn where those things won't help, to independent where only the desk clerk speaks English and the restaurant smells so bad you're not tempted to risk food poisoning there, to abandoned, vandalized, tagged wreck, to bare gravelly earth at the edge of a cracked, weed-grown former parking lot.

I could come in here with a (grand)fatherly lecture/rant that would upset the majority of you, but I'm letting you off with a warning this time; DON'T SPEED! :x :-)

Move to the Youngstown/Warren/Sharon area and you'll probably find yourself wanting to learn to Polka. :-D

Excellent shots! I loved that movie. When I was a kid, our family car was just like the one in the movie, and we lived in an old house with a cantankerous coal furnace that only Dad was allowed to touch. Only things missing from my childhood were the neighbor's pack of dogs and the leg lamp. Oh. And I never froze my tongue to a pole, either, but the snowsuit sure brought back memories.

Can't argue with that. Jarvis station is foul.

I only spent a few days in Rogers park just over a year ago, and I thought there were some areas that were very pleasant, especially from Sheridan going toward the lake, along Jarvis and in that area. Great old courtyard buildings in nice shape, convenient CTA service that should soon be a lot better than what I experienced, once they finish the trackwork. It is pretty far from the Loop. When I was there, staying in a Super 8 on Sheridan, my only gripe was the long, slow ride downtown on the Red Line, or the fast, rough, almost-nausea-inducing one on the bus. Those CTA articulated buses ride like farm trucks, and when they go fast on bad streets they're hell on wheels.

The monument to soldiers and sailors is pretty impressive; the whole cemetery seems well-tended. It'd be nice if we cared as much about where people live as where they're buried.

In the fifties when we first got televison in our area, my grandmother, then in her seventies, really got into watching wrestling. She was a small, stout woman, always impeccably groomed and dressed and of gentle, quiet, reserved demeanor. I was in my early teens then, and until she started watching wrestling on TV I had never, ever, heard her raise her voice at anyone or anything. It was kind of a shock at first, and then funny, to hear her in her room yelling, "Kill 'im! Kill 'im! Stomp on him!"

Neat pics; thanks for sharing them. I've never been in Music Hall, but it looks fabulous. Prairie Home Companion is my favorite program, and I rarely miss it on Saturday nights. Maybe I can blame Garrison Keillor for my not getting out enough! I'm not Norwegian but I grew up on a farm and never got married. Two out of three ain't bad.

It sounds appropriate.

Whalebone was used in making corsets; I think they used the ribs. The building may have housed a business that brokered whalebone, or there may have been a second portion to the sign indicating that the business made/sold corsets. In the early 19th century, before there were efficient processes for extracting lighting fuel ("coal oil" or kerosene - the terms were interchangeable among people of my grandmother's generation) from coal or petroleum, the demand for whale oil for lighting drove a huge whaling industry in the Northeast.

Thank you for sharing that! One of my dearest long-time friends lived in a fourth-floor walkup in a turn-of-the-century apartment building at 62 and 1st, where from one of the two windows one could see the Roosevelt Island Tram. On my visits we often walked in the vicinity of the bridge approaches which were mostly boarded up or closed off by tall arched wood-plank garage doors. Greg told of on-again, off-again plans to reopen a market under the bridge, but what I visualized was a more primitive open farmers' market under bare-bones bridge structure. I never imagined that the space hidden by those huge doors was anything like that!

Neat thread. That's a quaint, historic town. Nickles Bakery used to run retail sales routes out in the country clear over into Indiana when I was just a li'l whippersnapper. That's before most of y'alls daddies was born. I think they had a distribution center around Marion or Montpelier (Indiana). Farm folks grew most of what they ate and didn't go traipsing off to town every little whipstitch for odds and ends, so some vendors came to the farms. Among them was the Nickles bread man who came around about the same time, same day every week. He had a general line of bakery products in his truck, and if you wanted a special order, he'd write it down in his book and bring it when he made his rounds the next week. What I remember most about the Nickels bread man was how fast he drove, zooming up and down the unpaved roads trailing a billowing cloud of dust behind his red-and-white panel truck (sort of like a suburban but with solid sides instead of windows, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term). We still had a huckster who came around in the late forties, too. He had a big, old closed-in truck sort of like a U-Haul, with steps up the back and shelves and bins inside like an old-time store. He worked out of a general store in a crossroads village that's nothing now but a church, one house, and the fallen-down remains of the general store. He had housewares, some groceries, dry goods (fabric & sewing supplies), general hardware, knick-knacks to amuse kids, and catalogs that you could place orders from for his next visit. He could get clothes, shoes and such on order. He came around maybe once a month or so. I think by around 1950 that business died off, but the general store hung on until the old lady who ran it died at 90-some years old.

You did that!? Nice. Its like Queer Eye for the Straight Farmer :laugh: You'd be surprised how many closets there are down on the farm! :roll: I just realized that I did that ten years ago. The project photos are here.

A festive time! Ice rinks rule for getting people downtown.

I walk around with a camera and capture the energy and excitement of the urban scene, and then share the photos with other geeks on a couple of weird web sites. Closer to the mainstream: Turning this: into this:

If ever there was a case for pre-emptive crowd control ... They should have used firehoses to drive the crowd back from the doors before the employees tried to unlock. I guess there's still time for that on the day after Christmas, when the savages mob the stores trying to turn all their gifts into cash.

Good stuff! I especially like the industrial shots.

One of my nephews was pretty much like that at 19, only it was the sofa in front of the TV.

Thanks for bumping that. It was fun to revisit.

Certainly does look European!

Beautiful place!

I've contemplated this question for a few hours, and come to the realization that "Civil War" is an oxymoron. War is not civil. :-P

Ever figure out what happened? Fire at a suburban apartment complex. No injuries, but the building is a total loss. As a side attraction a couple of firefighters mixed it up on the scene and the TV cameras caught it. http://www.wane.com/dpp/video/player_page/firefighter_scuffle_caught_on_tape About fifteen minutes after all the sirens I was headed downtown when I heard a siren again. I was on Jefferson, the primary eastbound arterial through downtown, four lanes wide. I pulled over and a beat-up silver Taurus flew past me going about eighty, with a police car in hot pursuit. They were blowing through stoplights at speed. I held my breath expecting to see somebody on a cross street come through on a green and get splattered, but apparently they were lucky. About two blocks after that, I saw a police cage car turn a corner ahead of me with a passenger in the back seat. The Holiday Season festivities have begun!