Robert Pence

Damn, David! I love that shot! So many things just come together in a way that pleases my eye; the light, the sky, the vintage buildings, the way the street vista terminates ...

Beautiful shots. It looks like an attractive campus and a pleasant place to work.

Youngstown's economic catastrophe was tragic, but there's still a lot to like about the city, and its people, at least the ones I met, are among those assets. I just hope they can reestablish a sufficient economic base soon enough to preserve and utilize the good artifacts, structures and public works that have survived.

Haarrrrumphh!! As the resident geezer here (I'm older than a few of these whippersnappers combined), let me add some balance to this collective rant. I like Bob Evans. I don't often dine out, but when I'm traveling in the Midwest I know I can count on the brand for consistent quality, and I've seldom had any complaints about the food. I like local mom-and-pop places, too, but when you're in unfamiliar territory some local places can be AYOR. Been there, done that. I like mashed potatoes and gravy with or without roast beef, meat loaf (when it's nice and moist), creamed corn, peas, lima beans, and comfort food in general. Heck, I even like brussels sprouts. No, I'll take that back; I love brussels sprouts! For breakfast; sausage and biscuits; eggs over-easy with crisp bacon and biscuits with butter & honey; pancakes with butter and syrup; waffles likewise. Or a sliced banana with milk will do if I'm not starving. The "country" decor is neither here nor there. I'm not moving in, I'm just stopping by to grab a bite to eat. So long as the place is reasonably clean, the service is friendly, and the food is hot when it arrives at my table, I'm happy. Bob Evans nearly always meets my expectations. Sometimes there are families with noisy children, but I still prefer the surroundings there to the contrived hype, razzle-dazzle and commotion in joints like Ruby Tuesday or Applebees. So yeah, I like Bob Evans. Incidentally, I'm about 5' 10", 140lbs. And jpop, all my own teeth are still firmly attached to my jawbone, and I don't need that extra glass. I wouldn't have it any other way. :-D

Y'alls like grit, ya shoulda been there in the sixties. Grimy and dirty and run-down and devoid of street life except for panhandlers and vagrants. It fit what I imagined an Eastern European city might have looked like after years of Soviet domination. But back to the photos - gorgeous camera work, and you had some perfect weather for your photos. My favorite downtown monument is the 1920s World War Memorial. If you haven't gone inside and explored, you need to. It's a trove of mostly-unmolested late-twenties deco, lots of brass and marble, well maintained and not altered. Photography is allowed. My favorite Indianapolis sculpture is Pro Patria, the bronze sculpture on the steps of the memorial. It's a significant work for its size and detail, and it's beautiful. The young man who posed for the sculptor must have stood out among the peers of his generation and turned a lot of heads.

Beautiful pics! Downtown Indy on a nice day is gorgeous, and I love the weekday lunchtime crowds that gather on the circle. I haven't done a photo excursion down there in three or four years, and it's obviously just getting better and better. Regarding pedestrians on the bike paths, have you thought of a cattle prod? You can get one at Tractor Supply (TSC). It's a rod, two to four feet long, with two probe-contacts on one end and a handle with a button and space for batteries on the other. It's used for persuading reluctant beasts up the ramp into the truck that will take them to the slaughterhouse. Some are adjustable from a finger-in-a-light-socket tingle to a grab-a-spark-plug jolt. You could have a lot of fun with one on your bike until the cops bust you with a taser. :evil:

Margaret Bourke-White made another Cleveland photo that I like, of the Cleveland skyline framed by the ornate railing of the Old Viaduct. I don't know where one might find an online copy of it.

Good shots. I think Philadelphia may be ahead of some other major cities in the cycle of thriving to dead to revived. I used to go there often while stationed at Dover AFB in the sixties, mostly for good camera shops and darkroom supplies, and then it was still the old-time gritty eastern downtown, with lots of activity from commerce during the day to a decidedly seamy side until late at night. When I went back in the late seventies, there wasn't much going on during the day except around the historic centers like Independence Hall. There weren't even crowds lined up at the Liberty Bell, then, and at night the downtown area was desolate and scary. In a visit in the early nineties I saw that there was once again a return of some activity, and now it looks like it's hoppin'. I love seeing that. I think it must be one of America's most photogenic cities; lots of forumers visit there and take different views of the place, and almost all of them come back with really good stuff.

Excellent photos. The juxtaposition of the United Methodist Church and what appears to be a pagan-themed fountain is a little strange, but overall the outlying areas look pleasant despite the suburban look of some of the businesses. Downtown reminds me a lot of Youngstown, but without winters and with a longer growing season. In fact, the two cities do have something in common in their vanished industrial base of iron and steel making.

I think I probably still have some Kroy type and border tape somewhere in my roll-top desk. :-)

Neat shots! I don't think you need to apologize at all for the quality; they're excellent views, and they're clear with good color saturation.

Ohmygosh! How utterly perfect for a dairy plant, especially considering the time when it was built. All sleek and gleaming-clean. How that must have stood out in comparison with the grittiness of the steel industry! I remember visiting a dairy as a kid in 4-H when I was about 14. I thought it was the most beautiful place ever, with the cream-colored glazed-block walls and red tile floors and all the stainless-steel pipes and tanks, and everything spotlessly clean. Isaly's was a big outfit, with branches in other cities. I vaguely remember an Isaly's creamery that stood in Fort Wayne on Main Street at Broadway, diagonally opposite St. Joseph's Hospital and just west of Henry's tavern. It was torn down to build the present Fort Wayne Newspapers building. Yeah. Like I said, I got on a roll there. I like the idea of people leaving the burbs and returning to the city's core, and there are definite environmental and social advantages to people living in dense multiple dwellings instead of two adults and one or two or no kids rattling around in 4,000 square feet with a three-car garage on two-and-a-half acres with a ten-mile commute. I just hope that the resolution of the financial crisis is allowed to take enough time to bring about a major reboot of our cultural values and an insistence upon a return to discipline and order, and that we don't just borrow a bunch more from the future in order to put off until later an even bigger collapse. Oops. There I go again. Shut up, Robert!

I assume that the striking building seen as you come down the hill and across the bridge on Mahoning Avenue (2nd photo) wasn't always UHaul. Does anyone know the story behind it? It's a great building and makes a really dramatic visual statement. One of my first thoughts was that UHaul needed a really big facility to serve all the people leaving town as the steel mills closed. :cry:

Nice shots, cortlandgirl79. It's interesting to see such different aspects of Warren. One of my close friends from my teen years was born in Warren and lived there until high school, but I've never been there. He passed away recently, and I've thought about making a memorial road trip.

It may have to do with your scanner and scanner software. I use a Nikon scanner and Nikon Scan software (v4.2). The software includes Digital ICE (Image Correction and Enhancement) from Applied Science Fiction (now Kodak's Austin Development Center), but in my experience all the built-in image correction features of the scanner software should be turned off when scanning B&W negatives. I do a preview and adjust the black and white points in the scanner software, but usually everything else waits until I get the image into Photoshop. Some B&W negatives seem to scan better as RGB, although I'm not sure why. Once you get them into photoshop or whatever software you're using, you can tune them up and then convert them to grayscale. I started out with a Microtek 8700 flatbed with film/transparency capability, but it didn't have sufficient dynamic range to handle a lot of my slides and negs. Everything came out flat and muddy, and areas that were outside the scanner's dynamic range just grayed out in B&W or dithered on color transparencies. I upgraded to a Nikon 4000ED and found it infintely better than the Microtek.

Beautiful photos. I've long wanted to go there, but somehow I never think of it until too late in the year, after it's shut down for winter. You might like New Harmony, Indiana. It's an Indiana DNR site that intermingles with a charming small city. The Harmonists were a communal society culturally similar in some ways to the Shakers, and the two groups engaged in some commerce wth each other. I think you could have a great time with your camera there.

Super-nice shots! Matthew Brady couldn't have done that with his wet plates and darkroom on a wagon!

Most likely the round windows are attic windows. The house is of wood construction, and I don't understand the use of the quoins on the corners, but they certainly do work well with what I take to be the Italianate character of the house. I would have liked to have gotten a closer look at the front windows, but was hesitant to go up the steps to do so. They're floor-to-ceiling windows, but I don't know why they are divided into three sections. Perhaps the bottom sections aren't glass, but solid panels fitted into the casings for safety; I've seen that done in homes with floor-to-ceiling windows where children were present.

Good shots, good scans. That first one is particularly striking.

I made a public admonition to KJP that was out of line. I've removed it and hereby publicly apologize. :oops:

Thanks for the comments, John S. I took the photos on August 21, and haven't been back in Youngstown since then. I assume the wood church is still standing, although as I remember it's surrounded by parking lot. It's right across the street from St. Columba's and just up from the Industry & Labor center. I'm not holding my breath waiting to see a lot of residential conversion in former commercial space either in Youngstown or in most other cities for quite a while. In fact, I think we'll see a lot of works-in-progress suddenly grinding to a halt. Virtually all that kind of development has been sustained by the illusion that wealth can be created by creating and manipulating financial instruments, and the fallacy of that notion has suddenly become inescapable. We've experienced the dismantling of our manufacturing base and the looting of assets from our industrial economy, and it's going to take a while to get things running again. When we do, we'll relearn what we once knew; there's a need for bankers and brokers and lawyers and financial advisors, but there's no such thing as a functioning economy that impoverishes everyone else so that they can have all the money. The so-called services economy is like a bunch of people sitting around a table and starting with a wad of money, passing it around and each one taking some, until it's all gone. Wealth is only created by applying labor to raw materials to produce tangible, useful goods. Some examples are mining, agriculture, and refining of metals and turning them into the necessities of human life. OK. I kind of got on a roll there, but I'm not sorry. </rant>

Sweet photos Hydrobond. Good eye, steady hand, and apparently, patience.

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