Robert Pence

They're badly mismatched, as if they were designed by two different architects who never communicated with each other. The building would look better with no dome at all, than with that one. I haven't been to Lansing yet, but I remember a photo thread from a few years ago because of the Knapp building, and downtown looks much better now than it did then. The power plant photos look almost like renderings; the transition in brick colors at the different levels is unique.

Me, too -- although last year I bought a Toro electric snow thrower that actually works even better than I expected, and that has made the task much less onerous. I like hot summer days; not so hot as to keep everyone indoors, but just hot enough that the runners on the greenway past my house are shirtless and shiny with sweat.

Quit complaining and do something about it!

It annoys me when people leave voicemail messages on my phone. I get annoyed when my phone rings. Very rarely is it anyone I want to talk with, about anything I want to talk about; almost always it's family-related demands or someone wanting me to do something they haven't bothered to try to figure out for themselves. My first reaction at the ringing of my phone usually is, "Oh f**k! What in hell is it now?" Then I put on my "nice" voice and answer pleasantly, "Hi. This is Robert." Maybe I should try answering, "Yeah? What the f**k do you want this time?"

I had a Jeep Wagoneer 4x4, and when summer came I took off the snow tires and put on a set of oversized highway-tread tires that I kept mounted on an extra set of wheels. I never took it to Assateague, but I took it to the southern Delaware beaches a few times. I'd let the air down to about 15 pounds and I could go out on the sand with no problem. I saw people drive out with regular sedans with ordinary tires at full inflation and usually they were OK so long as they kept moving. If they stopped, as soon as they'd try to start up, the wheels would slip and dig in and they'd need help from a lot of bystanders to get moving again.

Beautiful photos; I've always been a morning person, and sunrise still is my favorite time of day. In the 1960s I didn't often get beyond the Rehoboth area, but occasionally I got as far as Ocean City. It wasn't built up anything like it is today; I don't remember any high-rise chain hotels/resorts, and off-season it was completely desolate, the whole area almost completely shut down. We used to go over to Assateague sometimes and almost the only way to get around there without a 4WD vehicle and flotation tires was to walk, which we did for miles.

The street lights look functional. If they are, and if you have some sort of working lighting inside the buildings, you could have a lot of fun with nighttime HDR photography on the layout. You could photoshop the headlights and taillights on the vehicles, and position trains and set signal indications. If you wanted to get extreme, you could create some GIF sets with vehicles at a crossing, a train passing, and crossing signal lights alternating left-right-left-right. But there probably aren't any photographer-railfans who would consider trying anything so complicated as that. :wink:

An example of collateral damage caused by government's use of taxpayers' money to cripple or destroy a private enterprise and the communities it sustained. Massive federal spending on construction and operation of interstate highways continues to subsidize the trucking companies in direct competition with railroads, using three to five times as much oil per ton-mile of freight hauled as part of the bargain. The outdoor exhibits at the Railroaders' Museum look in desperate need of TLC, but the visitors' center at Horseshoe Curve and the viewing pavilion accessed via funicular are well worth a visit for anyone who likes to watch heavy trains working up the mountain. Altoona shares a Roman Catholic diocese with Johnstown, and there's a second, less-imposing cathedral, St. John Gaulbert, at Johnstown.

An even 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius) at 4:45 p.m. I went to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription a little while ago, and walking across the asphalt parking lot was like walking through an inferno. Humidity is only 36%, or the misery probably would be even worse. I'm glad I have AC, and I ain't goin' out during daytime any more until this hot spell breaks.

Nice! Add up the people who lived here, and the people who lived on Cleveland's long-gone Millionaire's Row, and you'd have a significant percentage of the names that were prominent in America's growth to a leading industrial power in the late ninteenth century and first half of the twentieth.

... And a powerful example of the social costs of prioritizing convenient automobile use over the integrity and vitality of city neighborhoods.

It's good to see this thread bumped. In the 1980s I worked with a man my age (born pre-WWII) who grew up in Hough and then came to Indiana with his family in the late 1950s when his dad took a job relocation with GE. He remembered the stores and the pleasantness of the neighborhood and taking transit downtown with a buddy when he was twelve or thirteen and how his Mom had been concerned but not alarmed when she learned what they had done. In the 1970s he and his family went to Cleveland to visit relatives, and he took his dad on a drive through Hough to see the place where they had lived. They found nothing but devastation; the block where they had lived was totally obliterated. His dad said later that he wished he hadn't seen that.

Excellent tour. Detroit still has many treasures, despite decades of decay and demolition. In the 1970s I attended a Metropolitan Community Church district conference at the Metropolitan United Methodist Church on Woodward. During a break in the scheduled activities I was roaming the building. A couple of organists in the group had gotten together with the organist from the host congregation to try out the church's impressive instrument while I was in the balcony of the sanctuary. I can't remember what one of them was playing, but I sort of recall that it was a Bach composition. I can remember feeling the floor (and my rib cage) reverberate when he opened up on the bass. Many cities' big downtown churches have lost their congregations and been stripped and boarded up or converted to commercial or residential use. It's reassuring to see that this one appears to be well maintained and surviving.

Nice. Kalamazoo had one of the earliest pedestrian malls in the area, in the late 1960s. I went there with a friend who was a planning consultant, to take photos that he used in selling the notion to Huntington, Indiana. Huntington's was unpopular from the get-go and didn't last long. Virtually no traces of it remain. Kalamazoo's fared substantially better, with a fair amount of pedestrian amenities preserved while accomodating limited auto traffic.

Great thread. It's hard to imagine the hours spent by the most skilled craftsmen to decorate St. Theodosius, even after the marvelous structure was complete. And Polish enclaves usually are good for eye candy, regardless of one's preference. :-)

My impression from the first photos was "Lots of asphalt and concrete," but it gets better as it goes along and there are more trees and more grass and shrubbery. I like the older stone buildings.

Thanks. I have a few more locations in mind that will be good for nighttime HDR shots. With the heat we've been experiencing and that's in the forecast for the near future, night is the only time that's fit to be out. We hit 95 before noon today, and at 7pm my digital thermometer said 98. Next Tuesday's forecast calls for 100, and for the past several days the actual has exceeded the forecast. I went out yesterday to take photos of Three Rivers Festival, our biggest annual whoop-dee-doo, and had to give it up after a short time. As it was, the shots I got were crap because hardly anybody was out and I was so miserable.

It's good to know at least one town knows how to lay down the law to the young whippersnappers! Clearly, there will be no foolish shenanigans in the Downtown Center! :x

Sweet!

Very pleasant. Except for the evidence of rail transportation, it looks like a lot of nice neighborhoods in midwestern cities.

Ever been to the Adirondack Museum, at Blue Mountain Lake?

... but I knew you would. You just can't help yourself ... and ... and ... and ... and ... and ... and ... and ... ... and I'm sure we've not seen the last of "... won't go there ..."

I was about to make the same comment. A few of those still stand in my home area in northeastern Indiana, some of which have been converted into residences. The asymmetrically-placed exterior chimney in front makes me think this one might have been converted into a residence before being abandoned; all the township schools I know of had their chimneys on an interior wall and going up through the roof, usually toward the rear. Also, the transom and stone lintels would be atypical for a farmhouse of such modest proportion.

Sense of Decorum? What's that? Last Thursday my Aunt Margaret passed away at age 98. She was Dad's younger sister. Funerals and weddings are the only time our family gets together because we're so widely dispersed and the youngest generations have little common ground in experience and interest with us geezers. I manage to avoid most of the weddings with their chicken dances and cake-smearing and other whippersnapper nonsense; "Too far to travel" serves as a good catch-all excuse for skipping those events. Anyway, to get back on topic, for the visitation and funeral I wore my dark-charcoal suit, clean and with sharply-pressed trousers, a starched white shirt, tasteful lightly-patterned dark red tie, and polished cordovan dress shoes with plain black socks. At the funeral home, other than the funeral director, my cousin and I were the only ones wearing suits. Most other folks at least dressed respectably, with men wearing nice slacks and buttoned, collared shirts. There were a few polo shirts among the thirty-something men. I'll cut folks a break because of the hot weather, but a polo shirt is pushing it for a funeral. How about a pressed, solid-color short-sleeved shirt with a collar and buttons? My cousin's twenty-something granddaughter wore some sort of whorehouse-purple, shiny frilly top that exposed too much of her excessively abundant flesh -- all of her shoulders, about the top one-third of her back, and the final approach to what looked like a perilously-deep cleavage, along with numerous ugly inked tattoos. The locations and direction of some partially-exposed tattoos led me to assume that they extend to places that we respectable folks would prefer not to contemplate. She finished off the outfit with black stretch -- I guess they're called Capri pants, 'way too small for her copious posterior and hefty legs. My brother wore a white-and-blue plaid western-style shirt with pearl snaps, accessorized with a bolo tie with a turquoise-and-silver slide; tan twill elastic-waistband pants two or three inches too large in the waist owing to his latest effort to shed his sagging potbelly and held up by wide red suspenders, with a wide tooled-leather belt and big jeweled silver buckle for a finishing touch; fancy cowboy boots; and a cowboy hat. Dammit, he's old enough he should know the difference between dressing for a funeral and dressing for a barn dance! Every year I become more convinced that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and folks just don't know how to present themselves any more. I blame it all on cable TV, automobiles, and suburbia. :x

You're welcome. Virtually all the photos on my web site from before 2004 were scanned from negatives or slides. If you have film that was shot with a good camera and lens, working from slides or negatives is way superior to working from a machine print; often machine prints aren't entirely faithful to the colors in the original neg or slide and their permanence isn't as high as custom archival prints done by a good technician. Even negs and slides will degrade over time under the best storage conditions, but at least you have less adjustment/correction to make and you'll get more of the fine details. BTW, Kodachrome is pretty amazing if stored in a cool, dry place - especially the old ISO 10 stuff. I have some slides that are fifty years old and still rich in color, and the grain is very fine. Good luck with whatever approach you choose.