Robert Pence

Interesting stuff.

Incredible place! I can't even comprehend anyone accumulating that kind of personal wealth.

I had forgotten about that. It was a horrendous blast and destroyed a big chunk of the downtown, with numerous injuries, too.

I'm sorry! I'll try harder to be nice. :oops: He started it, though.

Wonderful views!

Wonderful photos! Although the brutalist concrete doesn't fit my concept of pretty, the area certainly is visually fascinating.

Nice! I love that area.

I bought a camper from Tom Raper about 1995. They were kind of high-pressure on the selling, but I got it for a good price. They ran an extremely efficient sales operation, right down to the paperwork processing, and their service department was probably one of the best overall for RV dealers - competent, fast and courteous. Some of the photos show vestiges of the downtown pedestrian mall that they had in the 1970s: It was pretty popular for a little while, until the newness wore off. I came through Richmond on the return leg of a bicycle trip from Fort Wayne to Louisville, and was walking my bike through the mall just to look it over when some dumbsh!t a-hole cop came up and said bicycles weren't allowed, and I'd have to leave it at one end or the other if I wanted to walk through the mall. I had my camping gear tied on, and wasn't about to leave it unattended. Officious Ba$tard! As you enter Richmond from the north, you cross a bridge over the railroad tracks. On the left you can see a very large and once-grand brick Pennsylvania Railroad depot with brick columns in front.

Interesting contrasts. Looks like some pretty hard times, overall.

Yep, that would have been this place. It's a triple storefront; the hobby shop was in the two single-story storefronts on the left:

One thing worse than a slut is a tease, and paybacks are hell. One of these days you'll be selling your a$$ on the street corner for booze or drugs. Dirty old men will use you and abuse you and then refuse you your $20. :-D

Lively place!

Gorgeous photo!

It's moving along, maybe even picking up speed. Demolition and site preparation for the hotel have begun with razing Belmont Liquors and the Palace Restaurant. The open house at the Grand Wayne Center drew about 300 people last Thursday evening, and most of the public input was positive, even enthusiastic. Councilman Tom Smith, the most visible public figure initially opposed to the project, appears to be climbing aboard, if somewhat cautiously, and one local realtor said he has more requests for downtown residential space than he can accomodate. Check out this site for updated info: http://downtownfortwaynebaseball.blogspot.com/ There's a link to a vimeo fly-through of the proposal; they presented it on a projection screen at the open house and it stirred a lot of interest.

Quite nice! Lots of historic buildings and the Sullivan kicks butt. Amazing that it survived the fifties and sixties without being stripped and cladded. Compared with a lot of towns its size and age, comparatively few of the upper stories have been boarded up.

Good stuff! Cleveland has a distinct identity, and you caught it well.

Looks like a laid-back good time. Berne, Indiana has Swiss Days every year in July, kind of fun, with various music acts, a play, and events at a historic farm just outside the town. It's sort of gotten corrupted with things like a car show that's mostly customs and street rords, but still a good time. Fort Wayne's Three Rivers Festival includes events featuring various ethnic communities and there are ethnic festivals mostly at Headwaters Park in summer. The big bash is Germanfest, reflecting the city's German heritage, but there are Greek, Hispanic and other events including a Black Expo. The old German neighborhood has sort of diiffused with the advent of suburban sprawl, and aside from a few street and place names the early French heritage of the settlement seems to have faded away into the mists of time. I've often thought that if we want to liven up our image, we need to see if we can exchange a bunch of our German Lutherans for some Polish, Irish and Italian Catholics.

Sounds like the 412, named for its location at 412 East Washington Street. From my earliest memory in the 50s up until the late 70s or early 80s, that building housed Krull's Hobby Shop, packed full of Lionel Trains and just about every other wonderful gadget a kid could drool over. For a few years the 412 had some of the best Mexican food in town until the cook left to start his own restaurant at Zulu, a crossroads on US 30 about halfway between Fort Wayne and the Ohio line. I don't think I've been in the 412 in the last 20 years.

It stands to reason that your ability to remember would diminish after all those! :wink:

I shaved mine when my hair started to fall out during chemo. That was 10 years ago. After the chemo ended it started to grow back, but then my genes from Dad's side of the family kicked in and it thinned out fast on top. Now, I just have it buzzed every few weeks. Tidy and low-maintenance, without the bother of shaving it.

Beautiful! My parents visited there in the sixties or seventies, and I rescued Dad's slides when Mom was about to throw them out. They're safely archived, but I haven't yet had time to scan them.

... with black calf-length socks! :-D

Excellent job! I enjoy seeing my town through a visitor's eyes. The interior shot of the Baker Street Station turned out quite nicely, especially considering that you had to shoot through the glass on two doors. Here's the building that the Starbucks folks started with. It had been on the local "endangered" list for several years, and they planned to raze it and build one of their generic stores until the local historic preservation folks and redevelopment commission talked with them about the local landmark status of the building. They willingly embraced the restoration, spending more than they would have to raze and replace it. The One Summit Square tower gets mixed reactions; I think most people locally have become indifferent to it, but I've heard from some out-of-town skyscraper buffs who think it kicks butt. It's definitely different, if out-of-scale compared with everything else here. For a long time I didn't like it, but it has grown on me. On the north side, the way the building is raised above the ground floor and the way it works with the plaza are rather imposing, I think. The Window Garden Cafe on the 13th floor, open for breakfast and lunch on weekdays, has some good views of downtown. The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception dates to about 1860, and other related structures of that era also stood on the square until the 1950s, when the deco-styled McDougall Chapel was built. On the far side of the Cathedral is the diocese office building, also limestone but more of a typical 40s - 50s style. The Cathedral has had several renovations over the years that changed its appearance, and the stone facing was applied over the original brick some time in the late 30s, I think.

Verizon FIOS costs me $39.92/month including surcharges and taxes for 5mb down / 2mb up. When I've tested it, it does deliver reliably and consistently on those speeds. They just announced FIOS TV availabiity in my area, but I'll take a pass on it; I haven't turned on my TV in over a year. It's in a corner, unplugged, facing the wall.

Not Ohio and not new, but while I was cleaning up some earlier sloppy work I came across this one that I like. It's a state historic site near Lafayette, Indiana, taken near dusk in autumn.