Robert Pence

The only visible remnant of Rivage, City Hall has been ravaged by scrappers. :cry: The one aspiring subdivision, the impending sprawl that unraveled everything, never got beyond the developer's model home:

How large do you want to print? The Epson R2880 has become the industry-standard for sharp, brilliant, archival quality prints up to 13" x 19". MSRP $799 less $100 mail-in rebate = $699 If you want to go larger, the R3880 prints up to 17" wide and accomodates both sheet and roll paper. Standard Edition MSRP $1,295 Graphic Arts Edition MSRP $1,495 Canon and HP both have their devotees, and both are reputable makers. My experience for several years has been with Epson printers, and I've been entirely satisfied with the quality and reliability of the products, ease of setup, and quality of output.

I'm not addicted. I just walk a fine line between addiction and dependency! :wink:

I clicked City Photos - USA & World, General Photos, and Raliways and Waterways because of the limit of 3. In addition, I almost always hit Roads & Biking if there's anything new, City Photos - Ohio, and Urbanbar

El Paso and Juarez Work Trip, March, 1988 All Photos Copyright © 2010 by Robert E Pence Return to Robert Pence <a href="../index.html">Index</a> These are scans from some negatives I found recently while cleaning out a cabinet in the basement. I hadn't seen them in a long time, and had given them up for lost. Who knows what else I'll find as I clear away accumulated junk? I went to an employer's assembly plant in Juarez to help with the implementation of a real-time production and inventory tracking system. Leaving Fort Wayne, the scene might make one wonder just what kind of Podunk town this is. I can't remember what my routing was or where I changed to a real airplane, but probably because of lousy visibility I didn't take more photos en route. A couple of sunset shots. I think these might have been taken from somewhere near my motel in El Paso. I never got around to taking many photos in El Paso. I did slip away from work early enough one day to photograph Amtrak's Sunset Limited, which was on time. The big GE P30CH six-axle locomotives were bought to haul heavy Superliner consists on long-distance trains, and for some reason were never a great success. They entered service in late 1978, and by the time these photos were taken, they were nearing the end of their run. Not long afterward, I saw some on the dead line at Amtrak's Beech Grove shops (Indianapolis); one of those had burned up. Notice that the second car up is different from the Superliner in the foreground? It's one of the bi-level cars that the Santa Fe had built for Super Chief and El Capitan. They were the inspiration for the Superliners. I think that one might have been running as a crew dorm. 1905 - 1906 El Paso Union Station, designed by Daniel Burnham. Lots of glass in interior partitions to let outside light come in. It was very well-maintained. Ruben, one of the managers at the factpry in Juarez. Good guy. A Saturday-night stay got cheaper air fare, and my motel would throw in free Saturday nights for all-week stays. The company was happy to let me stay into the weekend, because it saved them money. Most co-workers I traveled with wanted to head home as early as possible on Fridays. I took advantage of the opportunity for some sightseeing, and on Saturday I drove my rental car to a parking lot on the US side near the bridge and walked across. Note the guy climbing over the gate on the railway bridge. Railroad station - at first glance, a rather nice, modern-looking building. Closer inspection, though, showed the maintenance standards weren't stringent. First impression - screen door hanging from one hinge. I didn't know if this might be a pay car, or if there was some other reason for the bars on the windows. El Paso Santa Fe freight house, near the border. Flying out. I wish I had taken more photos of both El Paso and Juarez; sometimes I passed up a lot of good opportunities to take photos on business trips, and looking back now, I wish I had done differently.

Beautiful work! A visit to Gettysburg on a sweltering summer day imparts a sense of reality that can't be gotten from high-school history classes or from only reading books.

Beautiful shots. I've ridden the St. Charles streetcar round-trip from Canal Street all the way to the end of the line and back. It was a beautiful ride, and busy with regular residents going about their business, not just tourists. I believe virtually all of those wide park strips down the center of the major boulevards once were where the streetcars ran, and the roundabout at Lee Circle had a stub track going to Union Station.

I like this thread. Despite the areas of blight, the bright spots of commerce are neat; the two restaurants look like the kind of places I'd like to frequent, and the residential areas look like well-kept working-class housing, the places where the ordinary people live and take care of their homes. It's anything but a boutique neighborhood, and it's what most Americans experience, day to day.

I tend to see some of those countries/cultures as wiser and more mature than ours, and I think we would do well to learn from them instead of going around all smug and feeling superior and thinking we have a God-given mission to remake the world in our image.

My aunt had a Caddy, 1972 or thereabouts, and I could put my bike in the trunk of that without taking anything off it. Heck, I probably could have crawled in there with it.

The best operating streetcar museum near Ohio is the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum in Washington, PA, just south of Pittsburgh. While you're in the vicinity, drive on over to the village of Library and ride the PAT light rail into Pittsburgh, explore the downtown, and ride the Mon and Duquesne Inclines. Golly. Since you've come this far, you might as well get a hotel room for the night and then head for Orbisonia and the East Broad Top Railroad and Rockhill Trolley Museum. Heck, while you've already driven halfway across the state, you shouldn't miss Strasburg Railroad and the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania. By now, you're too close to Steamtown and Electric City Trolley Museum at Scranton (sorry, no links) to pass them up. Before you start the trip, maybe you should just get a big Ryder truck and load all your stuff; after you've driven the backroads and byways across Pennsylvania, you probably won't want to go back to the Western Ohio's flatlands. :wink:

Everything I needed as a freshman when I moved into my dorm at Purdue was in two suitcases, plus a clock radio. It all fit nicely into the trunk of my Dad's black '57 Mercury Monterey. I think move-in took all of ten minutes, and then we went to lunch and then I was on my own. After a couple of weeks I decided I wanted my Raleigh Sports 3-speed, so on a later visit Mom and Dad brought it. With the front wheel removed, it fit into the Mercury's trunk, too.

Trolleyville, USA About 1990 All Photos Copyright © 2010 by Robert E Pence These photos once were lost, but now they're found! Gerald E. Brookins was involved in the mobile home business and owned Columbia Mobile Home Park at 7100 Columbia Road in Omsted Township. He was interested in streetcars, and in 1954 he started collecting them and moving them to a site near the mobile home park. He constructed a 3 1/2 mile loop from a shopping center through the mobile home park. Brookins died in 1983 and his son, Mark, became the owner of Trolleyville. In 2001 the Brookins family sold the property and the terms of the sale allowed five years to remove Trolleyville. A new entity, Lakeshore Electric Railway, moved the cars to storage on Cleveland's waterfront with visions of creating an operating museum. That fell through, and in 2009 the collection was sold at auction. One of the earliest types of of electric streetcar, single-truck car 19 sometimes was known as a Birney. Its short wheelbase and only two axles/four wheels gave it a yawing, bobbing ride on anything less than manicured track, and city street rail generally was not manicured. It's the "Toonerville Trolley" of cartoon fame. The car behind it looks like a Cleveland center-door car, but I don't recognize the paint scheme. If I remember correctly, the depot came from Berea. I don't know what became of it when Trolleyville vacated the premises. 1225 is a big Cleveland center-door car. 451 is a Chicago Aurora & Elgin car. It's all steel, heavy, and fast. 303 is a wood-bodied interurban car. Cars of this type typically operated about 40mph on the open road. That sounds slow by today's standards, but in a era when most vehicles still were pulled by horses and few automobiles could sustain 30mph for any distance, 40mph was blazing fast. An interurban wreck with wood cars was a terrifying thing; the heavy steel frames, trucks, and drive motors could turn the carbodies into a mangling storm of splintered wood and shattered plate glass in an instant.

My house is the last one between a city park and the neighborhood, and I'm right on the rivergreenway. Some people cut across my yard with their dogs, and other dog-walkers just let their dogs crap in my yard and don't pick it up. After I mow the grass I don't realize it's on my shoes until I come inside or get in my car. The neighborhood association has these cute little green engraved signs admonishing people to "Please Pick Up After Your Pet." A lot of good that does. I saw a sign once that I want to copy and put in my yard. It was shaped like a tombstone and the epitaph said: "Here he lies all cold and hard The last damned dog that crapped in my yard!" Then, I'm going to buy some fatigue pants at GI Joe's Army Surplus on Wells Street and make a dummy shotgun and sit on my steps and scowl :x at everyone who walks past with a dog.

I have no use for any of it; I'm utterly antisocial. :x Well, I do have a Classmates.com account to keep in touch with a few good friends from high school. I check in every month or so if I feel like it. I opened a Facebook account, immediately became overwhelmed and paranoid, and deactivated it within 20 minutes. UO and SSP are all the online interaction I can handle.

Exactly. He's actually taking advantage of the decline of downtown to pick up under-utilized properties at distressed prices. His "restorations" are largely cosmetic, and he rents to people who are there because they can't come up with the money to buy a beat-up trailer, as I mentioned before, in Mobile Manor or Kozy Kourt (those are actual local trailer park names). My barber, in the building next door, has invested a lot in his residence. He has complained about the tenants in the now-burned-out building, who sat on the back balcony drinking and loudly talking trash and arguing. The Stag Bar, across the street, shows up frequently in police reports in the newspaper, along with arrests for public drunkenness, fights, and domestic violence that started with an evening there. Bluffton still has some beautiful downtown buildings, and it used to be a tidy, proper farm-country town. The decline started years ago with the arrival of K-Mart on the North and a Supermarket-anchored strip center on the South. The arrival of Wal-Mart and Lowe's a few years ago not only polished off the remaining downtown retail, but killed off K-Mart and the strip center. All that remains of the strip center is the supermarket, where business has dwindled. K-Mart had a clearance and closed their doors as soon as the impending construction of Wal-Mart was announced.

Indianapolis has some beauties! The Indiana Freemasons Hall is beautiful, and the Scottish Rite Cathedral's beauty is shown off by its landmark location downtown. Didn't the Scottish Rite Cathedral have a serious fire several years ago?

How 'bout some from Indiana? I'll add to this post as I unearth more in my archives: Exquisite architecture in Bristol: The first floor is rented out: Decatur: Noblesville:

I'm aware of that. The particular individuals I'm talking about could easily afford the price. My aunt is a retired M.D. My brother didn't have any trouble dropping $30K on a hobby a couple of years ago, and it doesn't seem to have made a dent in his finances. Yeah. That's exactly the situation I face, and then something comes up later revealing that they didn't hear what I said. In some cases it's just an aggravation, but I'm involved in a business partnership with my brother. It's more than an aggravation when we're discussing business/legal issues. Maybe I should compensate by buying a bullhorn? About the time I haul out that thing in a restaurant, they might decide it's better to get a hearing aid.:-D

The exterior photo of Cleveland's is unimposing, but the soot-shadows make it clear that it once had more elaborate ornamentation including cornices and columns. The interior looks ... well ... WOW!

Intermittent episodes of slowness continue. Could the problem be related to the recent proliferation of spammers?

Peeve - When people who would benefit greatly from hearing aids, and can afford them, refuse to get them. They make family and friends work extra hard to communicate with them, and then wonder why sometimes we don't try. Hearing loss runs on both sides of my family. Dad's hearing was poor, although sometimes it was selective, too. My next-younger brother's hearing is very poor, but I speculate he lost it through atrophy; even when he could hear, he never listened because he already knows more than anyone about everything. My mom and her sister are both well into their nineties so they have an excuse. Mom has dementia, so there's no use in looking at alternatives there, but her sister still is 120 percent mentally, and has email access but refuses to use it. My speech is impaired as a result of cancer surgery, chemotherapy, and extensive radiation therapy. Most people (except any teenaged girl working in a fast-food place) understand me well enough, so long as I choose words that I can articulate clearly (hard consonants are a problem). People with hearing deficiencies who don't avail themselves of proven technology sometimes require me to repeat and restate, sometimes over and over. Often I carry a notepad and pen just so I can communicate when I absolutely have to. Over the phone, well, it's hopeless. Sometimes I get damned tired of it.

Lisbon:

Valid points. In response to your query and Eigth and State's comment: It's true. How many twenty-somethings will sit indoors and listen to speeches on a Saturday afternoon? Age is relative, and I'm older than all but two of my close relatives. <pause for laughter> :wink: I'm seventy, and although some of the attendees were my age and older, I saw quite a few people in the crowd who probably are in the 35-55 age range. I didn't attempt to take a count, but a lot of women were there, too. Maybe not 50-50, but not far from it IMO. Older people vote and are more likely than younger ones to phone, email, or write their legislators. They're an important demographic and elected officials know this issue matters to them. Congressman Mark Souder previously has danced clumsily around the passenger rail issue, trying to avoid stating his negative position in a sensitive forum, and he delivered a reprise of that awkward performance on Saturday. He wouldn't even have been there except that the man who hopes to unseat him, Dr. Tom Hayhurst, was a there to make a strong case for the benefits. As to the absence of minorities in the crowd, that happens too often. The NIPRA organizers certainly aren't racist by intent, but I don't know if anyone has discussed with them the lack of participation by Fort Wayne's minorities. We have large black and Latino communities and Koreans, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Burmese as well. It's a topic I'll bring up if I get a chance to talk with Geoff Paddock and Dr. Hayhurst. And yeah, Fred Lanahan's mustache is classic. It's not hard to visualize him in a sharply-creased dark blue uniform with gold piping and a stiff cap, collecting fares aboard a turn-of-the-century streetcar.

Maybe it has something to do with Fort Wayne being a modest-sized city where within living memory most families had a relative or connection with someone who worked for the railroads. We had Amtrak service later than some of the rail-isolated cities in Ohio, too. Add to that, Dr. Tom Hayhurst knows a lot of people and is an energetic personality, Geoff Paddock is the consummate organizer, promoter, and public presenter, and Justin Stalter and the DID (Downtown Improvement District) staff have contributed a lot of technical support and feet-on-the-ground support at the events, setting up the facility, registering visitors and handing out materials, and tearing down afterward. The PRR depot always was the grandest (well, the only grand one) of the Fort Wayne depots, and Vic Martin of Martin Riley Architects, owners of the building, who restored it to elegance after years of abandonment and vandalism, is a strong advocate for return of passenger service. The station holds a lot of powerful memories for long-time Fort Wayne residents.