Robert Pence

Replacing oil with electricity to sustain present transportation habits doesn't solve the real problems, poor land use and affordable transportation for the working poor.

I hope he pressed charges against the guy for assault. :whip:

The way I've seen it described is as a successor, not a spin-off, in that D.H. Burnham didn't continue to operate after GAP&W started up. I think that means it started up by assuming the assets, liabilities, and works-in-progress of D.H. Burnham & Co. after Burnham's death, but I don't really know the particulars. It seems likely that at least some of the founding principals of GAP&W were estwhile major players in D.H. Burnham & Co.

^Clever and thoughtful!

Then get out there and paint them! I'm sure you can come up with a more pleasing color scheme than the garish oranges and traffic-yellows typically used on such things! Show those traffic engineers that safety can be pretty! :-)

Yes. The tower stands on concrete caissons, some up to ten feet in diameter, sunk 200 feet through old lakebed sediment to reach bedrock. If I remember correctly, there are about 200 of those caissons. Again if I remember correctly, the cost of the building was in the neighborhood of $88 million, quite a stack of money in those days. The architectural firm was Graham, Anderson, Probst, & White, successor to D.H. Burnham & Company. Even though Daniel Burnham was deceased by the time the tower was designed and built, he had a hand in earlier proposals and the building seems to me to show some strong carryover of his influence into the new firm. The same firm completed the designs for Chicago's Union Station begun by Burnham. May I contribute some photos? 1978: Airport-Windermere Rapid Station (now Red Line): 1979: Shaker Rapid Station: 1988: Lavish Christmas Displays: 2003:

It's a financial services company, and at the time the local office housed corporate headquarters. The division where I worked dealt with high-dollar clients, including institutional investors and very affluent individuals. Sometimes they were on site to transact business or just get a courtesy tour, and we usually didn't know who those people were who were being escorted around by a corporate exec, but we could be pretty sure there were big dollars involved. I worked in tech support and had to go into areas where face-to-face client interaction took place and into corporate HQ including the CEO's or company president's office on a moment's notice. Besides, you can get by with a lot more when you're young, slim, and cute. The way some of our middle-aged, overweight men and women presented themselves was not a pretty sight! :-o Edit: ... and when I accepted the job offer, the next thing the HR guy said was, "You have 24 hours to report to Redi-Med for a drug screening. They'll be expecting you. Fail to show up, or fail the test, and the offer of employment is void."

Many years ago at GE I worked with a guy who was the consummate suck-up. The boss always wore a charcoal-gray suit and white shirt with a tie. This guy bought a very similar suit, and wore it with a white shirt. He kept a collection of ties in his desk so that he could wear one similar to the one the boss was wearing that day. He often admonished me that my life would go nowhere unless I changed my attitude and stopped being so independent (a bad word in his vocabulary). Years later, when we worked in different departments, he locked in a contract price for the company's annual copper requirements based on an inflated market just before the price dropped sharply. It was a $10 million mistake or thereabouts, and all the ties in the world couldn't save him. At his level people seldom get fired except in cases of felony arrest or theft of company assets. He got put on "special assignment" which means occasional inconsequential busy work while one looks for a new job. Just look at this trio. This is a tiny crop from a photo from last week. < :speech: > In my day, women who dressed like this were only seen at night, and then mostly around truck stops or on street corners in seedy-nightclub areas. We had a special name for them; "Whores." For that matter, there's not a single person in this photo dressed appropriately for Michigan Avenue. On a Sunday, yet! It's not Women's Lib or gay marriage or organized labor or universal health care that will destroy America; it's the loss of dignity, self respect, and a sense of decorum that will undo us all. </ :speech: >

Beautiful photos and a pristine-looking downtown. Kind of interesting that a Deco theater is named "Gothic."

That first shot, with the rising vapor clouds illuminated by city lights, is quite dramatic. Nice work.

When the suit-and-tie office where I worked started Casual Fridays, they published some general guidelines defining what was and was not appropriate. Either some people were too dense to comprehend, or they just didn't read it; there were several (out of about a thousand in my building) who showed up on the first Casual Friday looking like they were headed for a day at the beach, everything but the blanket and picnic basket. There were, yes, flip-flops, accompanied by frayed-and-torn denim cut-off shorts, worn out logo T-shirts like something I might wear when painting the house, and even an occasional tank top. Gross offenders got sent home, and it took a couple of times to get the message across to some. On the other hand, when I saw the legs on one twenty-something cutie who worked in payment processing, I thought he ought to be required to wear shorts every day, just nicer and maybe shorter ones. :evil:

The author has a gift for word pictures. I enjoyed that a lot.

That's an eloquent, fact-based response, KJP. I think it's one of your best.

Excellent photos!

Great photos, lots of people having a good time, and a bit of eye candy thrown in! :clap:

Beautiful!

Neat shots! A trip aboard the Belle is interesting, because it's an authentic old-time steam-driven sternwheeler (1914, I think). Most of the boats in day-excursion service now either use a diesel engine to drive the sternwheel, or are completely fake, propeller driven with a dummy wheel dragging along behind. It's been a long time since I've been there, but the white building at the waterworks used to still have at least one of the original giant Snow-Holley triplex steam pumps still in place, all shined up and on display. I think I read someplace that those limestone flats at the falls are a very rich repository of fossils.

This building burned around 1990 while undergoing renovation. The fire gutted it to a shell, leaving nothing but the walls and a portion of the clock tower. It was rebuilt with an all-new interior structure while the exterior was restored pretty exactly to its original appearance. Edit: And Nick's, then only in the smaller, white faux-tudor building on the right, was the most popular place for students to get drunk when I was there in 1962, and my aunt said it had the same standing when she attended medical school at IU in the 1930s.

Nice! Catlettsburg was the western terminus/origin of Amtrak's Hilltopper, a charming ride with a lot of local stops and some gorgeous scenery. The train consisted of an F40 and two Amfleet coaches and ran to Washington, D.C., where it gained additional cars and ran through to New York or Boston (can't remember which) as the Nightowl. I rode it around 1979, but never saw much of the town because I arrived at 11pm on the Cardinal, caught a nap on the station platform, and then boarded the Hilltopper at 5am.

Interesting photo. That place has been vacant for a long time, to have deteriorated so far.

Especially in the rural and small-town Midwest, there's a pervasive cynicism that provides fertile ground for naysayers on every issue. Folks don't trust the government, and think that politicians are out to tax away all the fruits of their work and give the money to rich urban idlers, they don't trust big business because it'll cheat them with bad products and services and fixed prices, and they blame unions for the decline of US industry and loss of jobs. They form their opinions and political persuasions on the basis of self-reinforcing rumors and rants that circulate and then recirculate. I've often been within earshot of the passel of knuckleheads who gather for coffee at my small hometown's Hardees, reinforcing each other's ignorance with lies and exaggerations. Get a local boy who has memorized the discourse and who is astute enough to promise low taxes, good roads, cheap gas, a strong national defense, and freedom from government regulation, and he'll go far. Combine some rural representatives and senators with power-and-fame-seeking infotainers, and you get a borderline-cult following. Think Tea Parties on courthouse squares all over the Midwest. A lot of those folks, especially farmers, don't condone using tax dollars to build a passenger rail network for the comfort and convenience of what they think is an upscale market. Often they can't get beyond the passenger-train opposition to realize that the expansion and improvement of rail systems will bring them more economical movement of supplies and products and improve their profitability.

That's it; Franklin frames did the work on my Eisentraut, and it was an excellent job. That Melton frame is gorgeous. He built the team bikes for Huffy back in the seventies, and the dealer in Dayton where I bought my Eisentraut knew him. When I wanted to get the Eisentraut fixed, I took it back there and he gave it to Melton, who had it a year without getting around to it. Finally I reclaimed it, and took it to a local racer who did frame repair as a sideline. After six months with no word, I went to check on it and found the guy loading a U-Haul to move to California. I don't know what might have happened to my frame - abandoned in the garage, junked, taken along? That's when I took it to the dealer who sent it to Franklin. I had it back in just a few weeks for a fair price. Are they still in business? I want to look into getting another one (Peugeot) fixed, and build a quirky geared-hub city bike with it. Probably cost more than the frame is worth, but I have a sentimental attachment to it

^Living proof of my theory that there are cracks in the space-time continuum. :-)

You're one of the few who recognizes the Eisentraut name. When I was looking for a kit to put on upright bars, I took it with me to the Uppity-Bike-Jock Store where the uppity bike jocks thoroughly dissed that "old, obsolete bike" and tried to tell me some entry-level $250 bike was better and I should buy it instead of modifying mine. The one they were promoting as "better" was like middle-aged folks would buy to ride around their subdivision on a summer evening. Unfortunately, that frame has been repaired, although with good materials and workmanship. On a return trip by train from San Francisco, I used one of Amtrak's boxes and did everything according to the rules. When I claimed the bike at home, there was a hole in the shape of a forklift fork punched clean through the box. There was a big scraping dent in the top tube. For whatever reason - Eisentraut may have quit by then - I had a good local bike shop that no longer exists send it to someone near Columbus, Ohio. They did a nice job on the tube replacement, but weren't set up to replicate the original metallic gray hammertone finish, so I had it repainted in black. All that sort of trashes the market value, but it's still a quality ride.