Robert Pence

They should be laid out so that the roads interconnect from one tile to the next. Imagine trying to trace a route across the length of a wall while experiencing substance-induced euphoria! The effect could be enhanced by using the color spectrum, so that a yellow road and a blue road converging would blend into a green road, etc.

It would be easy to take off on a long ramble on this topic, and I probably will. I'll try to restrain myself. You were warned. I have mixed feelings about gay enclaves. In a way, they're part of recent urban evolutionary cycles; gay men are often among the pioneers who move into marginal neighborhoods where once-fine properties can be bought for a modest price and renovated/restored to some level of attractiveness or even grandeur. After they've brought back attractive housing, good restaurants, shops, clubs and a feeling of some degree of safety on the streets, it's only natural that progressive-thinking, mostly younger heterosexuals will find the area attractive and start to move in. Somewhere in there, the lesbians see decorating opportunities in the stuff the gay men put out by the curb, and start to rent apartments in the area. :wink: Neighborhoods become gay enclaves after all the gays who haven't had the balls to make their own space in society move in to take advantage of the pioneers' risk, hard work and investment. In many cases, I haven't been impressed by visits to gay enclaves. In mainstream businesses, I've found that many gay employees rank high for proficiency, customer service and general demeanor. On the other hand, I've often encountered too much attitude when dealing with businesses in areas noted for their gay presence. Some of the poorest meals I've had, served with the most pretentiousness and priced most outrageously have been in gay-owned restaurants. People who live in the enclaves too often become insular and think that their microcosm is representative of the whole world, and they become clones of one another. They reinforce all the negative stereotypes. Rather than cloistering ourselves with people exactly like ourselves, we should be staking our claim in mainstream society and welcoming others who appreciate the neighborhoods our risk and investment have created. We need to ditch the heterophobia. Let 'er rip, guys and gals. I've got my flame-resistant suit on.

Neat stuff!

Wonderful thread! I think I read somewhere in the early 90s that a gentleman who had headed one of the private companies and then served on the board after the transit system became a public entity, had fought hard to keep the trolley buses, and had managed to rally enough support to thwart every effort to eliminate them. After his death, at age 93, I think, the anti-trolley-bus folks headed up by some developers, thought they would finally succeed. They got as far as cutting short the catenary on at least one of the longest lines before a virtual citizen/rider uprising headed them off. It seems to me that one of the issues was air quality, and that a study determined it would be foolish to get rid of a paid-for, successful electric transit system in the face of impending stricter controls on air quality. I remember going to Dayton in 1991 to get what I thought would be last-chance photos of the trolley buses. I think that was in September, and the service was slated to end in November. I was delighted to learn some time later that plans had changed, a line had been extended, and new buses had been ordered.

Thanks for posting those, mrnyc. Interesting info and photos.

Great shots!

Thanks for the tour! In 1991, I rode the Staten Island Ferry with a friend just for the ferry ride. We didn't look around the island, and now I wish I had.

What a wonderful place! I never knew about this, and now I want to see it. After the snow melts, when the grass is green.

Pretty neat - a historic community holding onto its identity.

Wonderful photos!

Amen! And in knee-deep snow, too!

Another fascinating industrial thread! I have a Dayton Computing Scale like the white candy scale shown in one of the pictures. I picked it up in a flea market in Wisconsin around 1967. The glass is broken, and the body has been spray-painted flat black as was the fashion for nostalgic knick-knacks in the sixties. It still works perfectly, and goes up to two pounds by one-ounce increments. Maybe one of these days I'll get around to cutting a new glass for it and cleaning off the black paint.

It's good to see the line preserved and put to use. I wonder, though, if the dinner-train folks have any grasp of the cost of repairing/maintaining track and rolling stock to safe standards and the cost of liability insurance. Even if it proves very popular, I doubt if the operation can generate enough revenue to cover costs and show a profit. Crossing rehabilitation alone can be staggeringly expensive; I believe that if crossing signals and/or gates exist, they must be maintained in operating condition. If the operators don't have private or public sponsors to help underwrite the costs of capital and operations, they probably won't last long.

Very moving thread.

Weird that Silver Lake Village would be concerned about noise and congestion from one short train a night. They must have more than their share of village idiots.

:roll: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

Fun to look at from a safe distance, happy to not be part of the scene.

It ain't all history; racism is still an issue in Muncie. A friend who used to work on canvassing teams for Citizens' Action Coalition told about going to Muncie with a team that included a couple of black canvassers and having people call the police on them. An infamous lynching took place on the courthouse square in Marion, just one county away, in 1930. That whole area is still pretty strongly bible-belt, where "Love your neighbor" carries the stipulation, "if he's WASP and hetero." I'm probably being harsh on the region; there are a lot of good people there, but the intolerant rednecks are the most vocal and they tend to influence outsiders' perception.

Beautiful pics, ink. I think, though, that large concentrations of waterfowl should be called "waterfoul." The duck and goose overpopulation at a pond in one of our parks caused the place to be declared a health hazard because of the poop. They put up signs admonishing people not to feed them, but some folks kept doing it anyway. If the college administrators didn't have privileged parking, and had to use sidewalks like everyone else, you'd probably see a shift in snow-removal priorities on campus. That first German Village photo would make a beautiful Christmas card.

Good job! You captured not only the images, but the spirit of downtown Muncie, and the gray skies helped bring out its character. :| I used to hang out there a little in the late sixties, and it was far from Nirvana then. It looks like it hasn't exactly improved. The Mark-whatever Tap was typical of small-city gay bars of the era, dark, stuffy and full of stuck-up queens who didn't have all that much to be stuck-up about -- among whom was the then-owner of the now-closed florist shop; he ranked among the top three most pompous, loud, unpleasant queens I ever encountered. Hmm. I seem to harbor some bad feelings toward Muncie. It's probably somewhat revealing of the feelings I had about myself in those years. :roll: Some of the residential neighborhoods are still pretty nice, and Ball State University is a credit both to Muncie and to the state. You'd think that having a university with a fairly respectable school of architecture would be reflected more in the appearance of the city. The downtown has some good vintage buildings tucked in among the overabundant sixties-seventies stuff, and it would be nice if more folks recognized what they had and took some pride in it.

Wonderful tour. I love the shot through the chain link fence at the busway and railroad. I've seen wood-block floors in old factories where there was heavy traffic, but never heard of a wood-block street. I wonder how they keep them from popping up from expansion when they're wet. In the factory where I worked, the individual blocks were treated with a sealant and then the floor was sealed after installation, but a significant water spill from a broken pipe or sprinkler discharge would still cause a large area to swell and pop up.

Beautiful shots!

Great photos! Seeing downtown with so little traffic and activity on a weekday is really strange.

The similarity among the houses is fairly typical of some of the older neighborhoods I'm familiar with. The infill looks pretty good, and typically dense. As some trees and shrubs grow in, the area will look very established.

Spectacular ice shots! The light is just right.