Robert Pence

Shout box can be fun and interesting. After the newness wears off, this one will settle down a little, I think.

... and land taken to build/expand roads and highways disappears from the property tax rolls, diminishing the revenue available to pay for infrastructure maintenance while increasing the amount of infrastructure to be maintained. The result is higher property tax rates for homeowners and businesses, some of whose property values and revenues are being driven down by increased traffic through residential neighborhoods and migration of retail away from locally-owned downtown stores to suburban chains. ... and in most places, property taxes lie most heavily on "improvements" and less heavily on land. When investment groups buy business property and demolish the structures for parking lots, the tax revenue from the property falls while the increased parking availability keeps parking prices low and encourages more one-person-one-car commuting, increasing congestion and enforcement/traffic-control costs and creating demand for more highway capacity, in a self-nourishing cycle. The worse it gets, the faster it gets worse. Sorry. I digressed from the topic (Amtrak News).

More like thirty-plus. The commuter train quit then, and there hadn't been any significant intercity service through there for years prior to that.

As an upscale shopping venue, Tower City looks pretty much like a flop. That space sure would make a kick-ass station concourse, though!

ColDayMan has posted a bunch of excellent Indy photos in some previous threads. You can see some of mine from 2005 here

Probably railroad and station offices, possibly commercial office space, too. Edit: I added a photo to my previous post, showing what arriving passengers would see when they exited the station at mall level.

That's pretty neat! :-)

Looking north toward the lake from the location for Burnham's proposed Union Terminal: The view that would greet passengers as they leave the station at mall level (assuming Cleveland would have trains that arrive in daylight :wink:):

Nice shots; some interesting buildings, both old and new.

Haven't I seen renderings of a proposed civic center / convention center facility that would span the tracks and run down to the lakefront in the area of the present Amtrak station? I envision a handsome structure at the end of the mall with a neoclassical-derived design facing the mall and a glassed-in facade and atrium on the north side giving a view of the lakefront, with escalators and elevators going down to track level.

A fantasy - flesh out more of the Burnham Group Plan with the proposed Union Depot. The site overlooks the location of the present Amtrak station: (image linked from CSU site, http://www.csuohio.edu/CUT/UT1903.jpg) I either forgot or never knew about the Mercury running into CUT under steam. Imagine that -- someone actually cared about keeping a tight passenger schedule! I wonder what sort of hoops they had to jump through to get permission to run steam through there.

Wow! It took six years to travel from the Outer Banks of North Carolina to Dayton. I knew trains were slower back then, but sheesh! Their flight was delayed, and they missed their connection. Their luggage never did show up. :-D

My dad once said that when prohibition took effect a lot of neighborhood taverns became ice cream parlors. After repeal, even though they went back to selling alcohol, some never changed their names back. Near where I live was the Superior Malt Shop. By the time it burned in the sixties, it was something of a dump frequented mostly by drunks who had probably been regulars since before prohibition. The A&O Sweet Shop, named for August & Otto, the German brothers who started it, is still a respectable functioning neighborhood tavern that does a pretty good business.

It was a memorable visit for my bf-at-the-time and me. We didn't know about the ferries from Marblehead, so we took a boat from Sandusky that turned out to be a senior party boat. We were the only males on board not wearing Full Clevelands (pastel double-knit polyester with white belts and matching shoes, Hawaiian shirt optional). There was music, an older gent wearing a plaid sport coat and playing an organ; his entire repertoire consisted of Lawrence Welk's Greatest Hits. The sound was piped throughout the boat and there was no escaping it. Fortunately the bar was well-stocked with wine coolers, and David and I probably drank most of them. Pleasantly blitzed, we were able to enjoy the humor in our situation.

The "Red Line" bridge was built as part of the Terminal Tower project, and completed about 1929, I think. It was the western approach to Union Terminal for mainline passenger trains. Although steam locomotives didn't run into the terminal, the electric locomotives that pulled passenger trains through the terminal were pretty massive and many of the railroads still ran six-axle heavyweight cars as sleepers and parlor cars during the era that the bridge was in mainline service. I would expect that it would be up to the task, provided it's structurally sound and up to its design specs. Here's a shot from when things were at their lovliest, in 1979. It looks like the bridge is wide enough to have carried three tracks. You can see one end of the pre-tower-city concourse in this photo.

More of that: From the top, maybe 20 years ago:

I love the shots by the lake, and the solitude of beaches off-season. This one is wonderful: We've had high water in Fort Wayne going on a couple of weeks now. It never gets high enough to cause damage in the neighborhoods, but the parks never dry out. With everything saturated and the rivers already high, I hope we don't get blasted with any sudden large amounts of precipitation, or we'll have a mess on our hands.

A survivor - barely. The Lake Shore & Michigan Southern depot (1887?) at Jefferson, Ohio was a derelict hulk, falling apart with all the windows gone when the local garden club rescued it and did a thorough, authentic restoration. It houses historical exhibits and sits along tracks now used by Ashtabula Carson & Jefferson Railroad, a common-carrier short line that also runs tourist trains. When I visited in 2000, the tourist train was powered by ex-Erie RR Alco S-2 built in 1947. It was a bit wheezy, but still going strong. Edit 02/21/2010: Fixed broken links

Some impressive buildings and residences amid what appears to be a lot of desolation. The bleakness of winter without snow enhances that feeling. Good thread!

Almost certainly a drunk driver, who will lay low until he/she can pass, and then will claim that the SUV was stolen.

Yes, Sir! I did!

Wow!

For more than 20 years I worked for General Electric about 15 minutes' walk from my house in a near-downtown neighborhood. At one time I worked for a homophobic, racist redneck who told me during a performance evaluation that he didn't like my walking to work in "that neighborhood" because if anything happened to me, he'd have to find a replacement and that would be a lot of extra work. In the eighties, when the company consolidated some operations, they relocated a number of salaried people to Fort Wayne. One of the guys who came into the department where I worked had enjoyed living in a small-city neighborhood before. When he asked the company-provided realtor about city properties, the realtor took him on a tour of some of the trashiest neighborhoods and showed him some really crappy properties, and then started pressuring him to build new in a miles-away subdivision on the pretext that there wasn't much available in the way of decent existing homes. I hooked him up with a realtor who listed good properties in city neighborhoods, and he found just what he was looking for.

Classy - Elegant!

I think it looks more like the reproduction colonial buildings the US Post Office built, maybe in the 1930s. Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railroad later became part of the New York Central System; the former Lake Shore track survives mostly in pieces operated by various short line railroads. Former Lake Shore freight house The former passenger depot is privately owned. Indiana Northeastern Railroad operates out of the former New York Central division office building. The antique wig-wag crossing signal came from a road crossing in Indiana. Indiana Northeastern treats the building with respect and maintains it well. The offices and conference room on the second floor still have their original stained & varnished beadboard walls. Note the still-functioning copper gutters & downspouts. In the freight house portion of the depot at Pleasant Lake, Indiana, there are signatures dated in the 1880s. The railroad line is former Lake Shore & Michigan Southern / New York Central now owned by Indiana Northeastern, and runs south from Hillsdale to Steubenville, Indiana, where it connects with former Wabash track running west to South Milford, Indiana and east to Pergo Junction, just west of Montpelier, Ohio for a connection with Norfolk Southern. The depot is owned by Dave DeVries, who keeps his impeccably-restored 1973 Central Vermont steel caboose on a siding there. In this photo, the crew was preparing to add the caboose to a northbound freight for a trip chartered by a group of mostly-Canadian railfans in January 2004. Layover for burgers at Reading, Michigan