Robert Pence

It's a shame they couldn't have come to an agreement. The Van Sweringens' development put something noteworthy on Public Square in a run-down area that previously hadn't been considered developable because of the soil structure. They were able to spend the enormous amount of money it took to sink concrete caissons up to ten feet in diameter, some going down as much as 200 feet to reach bedrock, to support their massive building above unstable old river-delta sediment. Still, it looked then and is beginning to look again as though Burnham's proposal made more sense from a logistical standpoint, and the Van Sweringens' political and financial manipulations kept Burnham's integrated design for a civic center from ever being completed. I guess it did come out as a sort of compromise in the end, though. Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, successor firm to D.H. Burnham & Co., created the Vans' tower, and although it's no longer Cleveland's tallest, in my book it's still the city's iconic building. Burnham's Union Station was more on the scale of the courthouse and city hall.

"It's Istanbul, not Constantinople anymore!" "Even old New York was once New Amsterdam" I first heard that song when I was about 15 years old. That would make it around 1954. :laugh:

If there's a sentient afterlife, Daniel Burnham probably smirks when he looks at the North Coast Transportation Center proposals. They put Cleveland's rail station right where he said it should have been, albeit without his imposing Union Station.

Nice! Looks like a comfortable neighborhood to live in.

Beautiful! I knew there was some impressive topography in that part of the state, but I didn't expect anything that dramatic. The last photo looks like remnants of a railroad bridge. Do you know what kind of turtle that is? On the farm where I grew up, there's a stream through a wooded area where there used to be dozens of those. When I was 13-14 years old, I used to sit under a tree on the bank, across from a spot where they'd haul out to sun themselves. They're amazingly fast at getting back into the water, and at the slightest movement they'd all head into the water in a flash. I learned to sit still as a rock, with my only visible movement an occasional blink. If I sat there long enough, eventually I'd see a pointed nose with a tiny knob on the end poke up here and there, and eventually they'd begin to cautiously crawl back out onto their sunning area. One time we caught one away from the water, probably going someplace to lay eggs. We measured it, and the shell was just shy of two feet, end-to-end.

Wonderful scenery. The colors in the blue flower against the bright green foliage in #31 seem almost luminous.

Marvelous shots again. I harbor a suspicion that you make mental notes of the right time of day to get the right light in some places.

Nope. For some info and a link to trailers, click here Combine strikingly bleak visuals, drama, suspense, murder and Russian intrigue, involving people brought together on a train ride. My brain is still trying to sort out what happened, and I may go back for another dose.

I saw Transsiberian last night, and after I got home it was a while before I wanted to try to go to sleep. It's a complex, suspenseful story with a sufficient amount of gruesomeness for most people. Technically it's a very well-made film, too. The train is an integral part of the story in the sense of participants being brought together with noplace to escape, and the railroad shots are good, but it's not a train-geek movie. I saw it at Cinema Center, the local art-house venue. A lot of the older male patrons there are grumpy old Philistines whose wives make them come along when they'd rather be at home watching ESPN, or maybe something featuring boobs while the wife is out doing artsy stuff, and some tend to numb themselves with alcohol beforehand and then can't keep their mouths shut. Every once in a while I have to shush one of them, a fairly safe thing to do in the theater because those old bastards' poor night vision isn't exactly enhanced by alcohol. Besides, sometimes afterward I'll hear a wife whisper, "See?" Tonight there was some dumba$$ a couple of rows down who was laughing at inappropriate times (which could have been any time -- there is absolutely nothing remotely funny in the film). It was loud enough to be distracting, and I could see that other people were turning their heads in his direction. Finally when he did it, I said rather loudly, "SHUT UP! There's nothing funny about it!" Not another peep out of him.

Skateboard repellent?

Oh, yes! You can contribute more anytime! That's really nice work. And welcome.

From the looks of it, I'll bet that place is just infested with liberal, tree-huggin', Democrat-votin', pot-smokin' hippies! :-D [Edit] ... liberal, tree-huggin' Green-party-votin', hybrid-drivin', pot-smokin' hippies. :lol:

There are some genuine old goodies there, but a lot of it looks like more recent construction imitating old. Probably the grittiest thing in Worthington is the Ohio Railroad Museum, and they've cleaned it up quite a bit since I first saw it in the seventies. It used to look more like a railroad scrapyard.

It's sad to see these places get into such a state. The old-school coal-fired power plants were the very essence of industrial technology when they were operating. Their pure functional design made them beautiful.

I agree. It looks like it got a Queen Anne addition. Also the dormer looks like 1920s, and I'm not sure what that thing is sticking out of the roof. At first I thought it might be the truncated remains of a belvedere but the proportions are wrong, and then I saw the vent pipe sticking out of it. They may have done that to get room to install a furnace in the attic, to heat the 2nd story.

Some remarkable stuff. I especially like the Doron Flats building.

I understand the point that Alex Marshall is trying to make, but until he learns a little bit about transportation history and gets his historical references right, he'll make his point poorly. Early automobiles resembled carriages because the early coachwork was made by carriage builders and patterned after what they knew, and like carriages, the early autos had high wheels and high ground clearances because of the roads they traveled on. Most roads, and even minor streets in villages, towns, and small cities, in the ealry 20th century were made of dirt. I don't mean gravel or crushed limestone, I mean they were just paths worn in the dirt. Any significant amount of rainfall turned them muddy, and traffic of horse-drawn and motorized vehicles churned them into a quagmire. Often after they dried out, they were channelled with foot-deep ruts. The big wheels and high ground clearance weren't some mindless adherence to tradition. They were a functional necessity. Now, about overhead luggage racks; a visit to a good railroad musem and a walk through a railroad coach from the early days of rail travel will show that coaches had overhead luggage racks before scheduled commercial air travel existed. I'm not denying that Amtrak has consciously tried to pattern itself after airlines in some respects, in an ill-begotten attempt to win back riders. The dreadful Amfleet cars were designed to mimic the cramped and inconvenient ambience of an airliner, with their curved sides, tiny windows, and duck-and-watch-your-head low clearance when getting into your seat, especially if it's by the windows. My first cross-country trip on Amtrak was in 1973 before I learned that "A gentleman always travels in the sleeping cars." (E.M. Frimbo) The coach that I rode in on the westbound trip was of Santa Fe provenance, almost certainly pre-WWII, and hadn't yet been desecrated by an Amtrak rebuild. The ride was solid, smooth, and quiet, not at all like the jiggy-rattly cars of post-Amtrak construction that I've ridden in. The seats had spring cushions with padded upholstery, just like real furniture, and they had leg rests, plenty of legroom, and reclined waaay back. Had it not been for the boy scout troop that boarded somwhere in Colorado, the car would have been entirely satisfactory for a good night's sleep. Amtrak replaced the spring-cushioned, steel-framed seats with molded fibreglas buckets with thin foam pads and no springs. OK for a short commute, maybe, but after a couple of hours the pain sets in. Imagine traveling overnight in those. Oh. And they got the legroom down to airline standards, too. :x

Excellent shots. The National City/PNC certainly makes a statement. My family has a long-standing business relationship with National City, only because that relationship started with Fort Wayne National Bank before it was eaten by National City. I'm waiting to see what happens to client service under PNC; it wasn't exactly outstanding with National City, compared to what it was before they took over.

Indeed they do. A friend who used to work for them says the Nazi's could have taken lessons from NS regarding unquestioning obedience and utter submission to authority.

Speaking of putty, did you hear what happened to the gay couple who couldn't tell the difference between putty and vaseline? . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. All their windows fell out! :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

I guess we have to give you props for trying. Seriously, really nice shot with good dynamic range; you caught the brightly-lighted buildings well while keeping shadow detail so that the stonemasonry in the bridge shows up well.

That came out of the Pittsburgh Division's Superintendent's Office, so I'd interpret it as applicable only in that division. If I understand correctly, the Pittsburgh Division extends from Harrisburg in the east to Cleveland (via Youngstown) and Crestline (old PRR) in the west. I'm not sure what division controls the chokepoint in Northwest Indiana, but it sounds like that's not covered by the memo.

My first thought when I saw the photo was West Virginia, too. The comment about vegetation similar to Maine or Canada made me think of Monongahela National Forest; the area had abundant red spruce that was mostly logged off in the first half of the 20th century, and regrowth has been slow, especially at the higher elevations. Even in mid-summer it can be suprisingly chilly up there. I think Neville pegged it.

Gorgeous place! A poor economy and hard times may have contributed to the intact survival of some of those places; there wasn't enough money or commercial activity to afford "modernizing" or razing and replacing historic buildings, and not enough business activity to motivate clearing downtown blocks for parking. They were dormant or in a sort of state of suspended animation during the sixties and seventies when more-prosperous communities were destroying their heritage.

Anyone who follows Craigslist personal ads scares me just a bit, and I'm darned near fearless. Or maybe it just seems that way because I don't go where scary things are. I used to read those things once in a while, but afterwards I had to put my head under the faucet and let warm water run in one ear and out the other to wash away the mental pictures.