Robert Pence

Delightful! Cute kitten, too; I wonder what happened to its tail.

Wow! You certainly did justice to the city's monumental core, and went inside the World War Memorial! Those are beautiful photos; "breathtaking" is an appropriate description of the central shrine room there. I first saw it during an eighth-grade class trip in 1953, when our class visited the legislature in session and did some other scheduled stuff and then had some free time to explore on our own. While a lot of the kids went shopping, a fellow nerd and I went to check out some monuments and found an open entrance door. When I reached the top of that narrow interior stairway and emerged into that room, I stopped in my tracks and was speechless, an unusual occurrence for an adolescent blabbermouth like me. I had never seen an interior space so ornate or so vast. I could only whisper to my friend as we walked around in it. On a visit years later I found the names of one of Dad's uncles and one of Mom's cousins on the tablets of World War I veterans. Fortunately, both came home alive and with their bodies intact. Your partner has a good eye and excellent camera skills too. The red brick Romanesque building with the tall clock tower is Union Station. Amtrak still uses the train shed thrice-weekly for the Cardinal (NYC-Chicago via Cincinnati) and for the Hoosier State (Chicago-Indianapolis) on days the Cardinal doesn't operate and shares a ticket/waiting area outside the main structure with Greyhound. For a while in the eighties Union Station saw some life as a festival marketplace, a concept that has failed in every case I know of. The great hall housed several upscale restaurants, and in my experience their food and service were good. The passenger concourse beneath the tracks was full of shops peddling frivolous junk that nobody needs but that visitors might buy to take home for gifts to people who will throw them away after a short time. The place thrived for a while until the locals got bored with it, and there wasn't enough tourist trade to sustain it.

Nice multi-car pileup! I've never seen signage like this on a bike path. Maybe that's because we don't have any significant steep hills on our paths.

I know exactly how you feel. With two visitors from overseas we went to lunch at a fairly well known restaurant at Fishermen's Wharf. The maitre d' looked us up and down and asked if there was a circus in town! I am 6'2" and the shortest of the trio. Mildly funny, but stupid. He then asked if we were locals or visiting, and commented how wonderful it was that I took my grandchildren out to lunch. My guests were 30 and 32. Of course my guests thought it hilarious, but I was p.o.'d all day. The years taken their toll, but I don't think that old. I would be pissed! I'm still not over my situation as my nephew has called me "gramps" since it happened. Reminds me of the time I was paying the check at a restaurant where I'd taken a date. I was in my early 40s then, and the teenaged cashier asked me if I qualified for a senior discount. As we left the restaurant, my date was snickering. I wanted to say, "You're walkin' home, bitch!" and leave him standing in the parking lot, but being cute saved him from retribution - for the moment. As long as you keep having birthdays, you know you're still alive. I'm now in the 61-and-older bracket; whoever created the brackets must not think there's any difference between 61 and death; probably a young whippersnapper did it.

Your photo sets certainly have expanded my view of New Jersey. I've only briefly visited the state, in the Camden area almost fifty years ago, and didn't realize there were all these very attractive places.

Nice! It has some characteristics in common with Midwestern Ohio River towns; I'm thinking of the Cincinnati area.

The Circle is a great place to hang out with a brown-bag lunch on a pleasant summer weekday; a lot of people go there to take a break from the indoor environment, and it's a good place for people-watching. Meridian Avenue going north to 38th Street is a good example, with some attractive older commercial buildings, apartments, a few mansions, and the wonderful Children's Museum. At the north end is the Art Museum incorporating the Eli Lilly Mansion and its elegant grounds with a woodland path along the old Indianapolis Water Canal.

Grit was a weekly newspaper published in Williamsport: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grit_(newspaper) My grandmother used to get Grit by mail, and read it thoroughly. Her parents moved to Indiana from the Lebanon, Pennsylvania, area in the late 1800s, and probably read it to keep up on what was going on back home; likely my grandmother got in the habit of reading it while she was growing up.

Although I don't have a record of the date, that was shot on a weekend; I was dating someone in Cleveland then, and only was there on weekends. It might have been a day when there was a big-crowd event like a football game.

I wonder if that's the same car that was on the Zephyr in July/August 1973 when I traveled from Chicago to Oakland. That car was a full-length dome, and as I recall, it had upper level seating in about half to two-thirds its length and a bar/lounge on the lower level that was open through both levels all the way up to the dome. I rode up there at night going into the Wasatch Mountains as a thunderstorm developed, and had a front-row center seat for a spectacular show. The car was a great ride until the AC failed the next day, and then it fully demonstrated the effectiveness of solar heat. I held on as the car cleared out in about ten minutes, and for about half an hour I had it all to myself until I, too, took refuge in my cool, comfortable seat in a former Santa Fe coach. It was a memorable trip, my first long train ride after the startup of Amtrak, and the last time I traveled that far in a coach. To quote the late E.M. Frimbo, "A gentleman always rides in the sleeping cars."

Excellent photo tour. I knew about the railroad, but didn't know anything else about the town; it looks like it has a lot of charm, and it will be good if the town and the railroad can create a synergy by drawing visitors who will do more than take a train ride and move on, spending more than a day and spending some money. The campus is visually interesting, and the scenic shots are gorgeous.

Thanks. Interesting images.

The mill is a remnant of what once was a big industry in the U.S.; Paterson, New Jersey was home to more than 300 mills and dye plants that employed more than 25,000 workers. One of the great formative events for American organized labor occurred in 1913 in the form of the Paterson strike, a response to the doubling of the workload assignments for silk weavers.

Thank you for sharing these, and for reminding me of Zanesville. Years ago, I used to go through Zanesville en route to the Sistersville, WV area but that was before I took an interest in urban photography. I rememember the historic charm of the place, and should make a return visit the next time I have a good excuse. A random unrelated fragment from the mental archives; J. I. Case, who in 1852 in Wisconsin founded one of the pioneer industries in mechanizing grain harvests across the globe, was Jerome Increase Case.

On the way to the pharmacy, I just saw a Crosley Station Wagon going down the street! I think it was about a '51. It was baby blue with white trim, and it looked very nice and was purring right along, keeping up with the traffic. I think that's the first Crosley I've seen on the street, not at a car show or museum, in about fifty years. The original smart car!

Just you wait, young whippersnapper, 'til you're an old fart and and you get dissed for your reminiscences about sharing your photos on Urbanonio.com back when the internet was still a big thing! :wink:

Handsome and historic-looking town.

Probably Northwest Indiana (Hammond/Whiting) early October, possibly Brookville/Punxsutawney PA after that, likely Chicago mid-month. After that, I will burrow in and hibernate until Spring. Next summer is too far away to plan.

Looks very comfortably middle-class/blue collar and unpretentious. I like it.

Neat stuff in an area that's not often photographed. Thanks for sharing it.

I agree one hundred percent with North Andre's position on turns across bike lanes, and with the comments about impatient drivers who get angry when I wait for pedestrians to cross instead of cutting them off like I've seen other drivers do. One guy where I worked would come in hacking and coughing and sneezing with whatever pestilence his kids brought home from school, and spread it around our closely-confined, poorly-ventilated office until at least four or five other people ended up taking multiple sick days and possibly spreading it to their kids and other family members. He probably was patient zero in waves of sickness that swept through other households and probably other schools and workplaces. He took pride in never having taken a sick day, but the cost to the company in lost productivity was high and he fostered resentment among the other employees.

Quite nice! As I recall, the lake has a tempering effect on summer temperatures in that area. When I used to visit there, there always seemed to be a nice breeze and it wasn't as hot as parts of the city farther from the lake. That Norfolk-Southern line -- is that the old NKP mainline that crosses Rocky River on a viaduct above the marina? If so, I rode through there behind NKP 765 in the mid-80s on a deadhead move from Struthers to Bellevue via Ashtabula. We were barrelling past backyards with the whistle blasting for crossings, and it probably gave some older residents quite a start to hear that. To the younger ones, it would have been just another train. Where the line crosses W117th, if my memory is correct, there was a brick post office that had a carved-stone RPO logo over the entrance and the gantry where they used to hang mailbags for on-the-fly pickup was still beside a dock-level door on the side next to the tracks. There was a former Studebaker dealership nearby, too, with a nice white facade that included some terra cotta, I think. I'm dredging up memories from 1978 here, so they may be a little sketchy.

Excellent photos - the power plant looks largely intact. It's unfortunate that turbines and generators in good condition from abandoned power plants usually are scrapped and seldom salvaged for reuse. I suppose it costs more to remove them and transport them than to buy newer, more efficient ones.

Cory West's Dayton Trolleybus Site is up: http://cw.daytontrolleys.net/ There are quite a few shots of ETBs from various eras and a number of his photos taken at the shop facility showing the Skoda buses being serviced and repaired.

It's not necessary to know any facts in order to have strongly-held and unwavering opinions! There are plenty of people on Cable TV and in local pulpits who can tell you everything you need to know and what to think. At work I often overheard enlightening conversations about what people learned on Sunday from their pastors. Example: Our paper money was redesigned with colored inks as an excuse to issue all new bills with patterns of metallic threads embedded in them so that government agents in airplanes with special sensors can identify houses where people are hoarding large amounts of currency. The mullahs don't have a corner on rabble-rousing exhortations.