Robert Pence

KJP, I don't anticipate any more site restructuring for a while, so the photos will remain available in the foreseeable future. I have the jpg and NEF (camera raw) files on hard drive, too. That was exciting to see. In the past, rail advocacy events have attracted mostly "railfans" (in the pejorative sense) in their hickory-stripe bib overalls and engineer caps, who are there to play can-you-top-this with other railfans with their tales of fantastic locomotive sightings and rail adventures, along with old ladies who just want to talk at great length about when daddy was an engineer on the Nickel Plate. This group was diverse in age, with some minorities present, and for the most part the people were there to find out what was happening to bring back rail passenger service in Fort Wayne, and what they could do to help make it happen. The mayor and supportive city council members were there, and Rick Harnish and Derrick James are strong presenters. NIPRA has a stronger professionalism component than some previous grass-roots pro-rail movements in Indiana. Tom Hayhurst is a physician with a lot of respect in the community and a history of activism in areas related to public good. He ran unsuccessfully for the senate seat held by Mark Souder. He ran a good campaign, but in the absence of an informed electorate, ideology triumphed over the common good.

Wizards are now the Tin Caps. New park, new name. Tin Caps is a reference to Johnny Appleseed, who according to popular legend wore his tin pot for a hat. He's reputed to have been buried near Fort Wayne.

Gorgeous campus and buildings. It looks like something transplanted from Virginia or eastern Pennsylvania.

It's time to start a movement; we can call it New Urban Renewal, and bulldoze all the suburban style crap that was built on the site of former urban neighborhoods, and then put the space back the way it's supposed to be. We can accompany it with Rural Renewal, where we bulldoze the strip malls and subdivisions and rip up the parking lots, and return the land to food production.

I was just getting ready to post info on the Fort Wayne Rally for Rail. You had to have been there to have understood how strong the feeling was. With all the economic stimulus money being made available, it seems all Indiana's Governor Mitch Daniels and the legislators can talk about it roads-and-bridges, roads-and-bridges. Here's the photo thread that I just posted: http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php/topic,18897.0.html

On April 3, 2009, Northeast Indiana Passenger Rail Association (NIPRA) held a rally at the Baker Street Rail Station to give people an opportunity to show support for passenger trains in Fort Wayne and to tell them of the importance of communicating their desires to the governor and the legislators. I make a point of arriving at this type of event fifteen or twenty minutes early in order to get a good seat. Friday as I approached the station I saw people streaming in from the parking lots across the street. All the seats were filled and the standing room was being filled rapidly, and people were lined up at the doors to gain entrance. By NIPRA's estimate, more than 800 people turned out. It was a diverse and enthusiastic crowd and made a strong impression on speakers Rick Harnish of Midwest High Speed Rail Association, and Derrick James, Amtrak's Senior Officer for Government Affairs, as well as the mayor, city council members, and state representative Win Moses. I doubt if there have been many other occasions during the station's 90-plus years that it has seen that many people at one time. Rick Harnish addresses the crowd: I stayed around afterward as the crowd thinned out. A small group stayed to watch videos presented by Rick Harnish showing High-Speed rail in Spain, and by Derrick James showing Amtrak trains in various places including Acela trains on the Northeast Corridor; Fort Wayne's Baker Street Station was designed for the Pennsylvania Railroad by William Price, of Price McLanahan Architects, and built in 1914. It saw its last passenger train in 1990 when Amtrak rerouted its trains to the former New York Central line through Waterloo and the former Baltimore and Ohio line through Garrett. It stood vacant and vandalized for several years before being bought and extensively and impeccably restored by MartinRiley Architects. The station now houses MartinRiley's offices as well as those of other businesses. The main concourse can be leased for for private events, with catering available.

As a sports-challenged total klutz I know from nothin' about baseball but this looks pretty nice to me; let's see what you think: Parkview Field, Fort Wayne's new downtown ballpark, is home to the Fort Wayne Tin Caps, Midwest League Affiliate of the San Diego Padres. The ballpark replaces an area of mostly auto-repair shops and parking lots and will be a boost to downtown, following on the heels of the expanded and enlarged Allen County Public Library and Grand Wayne Convention Center. Work is moving along at a brisk pace to prepare for opening night, April 16, with the Tin Caps meeting the Dayton Dragons at 7:05 p.m. On Friday afternoon, April 3, I walked over to get a few pictures of the entrance area. Construction of hotel and residential/retail has yet to begin, although it looks like financing may finally be coming together. On April 4 an open house gave the public a chance to see what the ballpark looks like. The weather was perfect, the crowds were enthusiastic, and I saw a lot of happy, excited people. The North Gate, off Jefferson Street, and the splash pad are still under construction. Some views from the parking garage. Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on the left, St. Paul's Lutheran (Missouri Synod) on the right. The building in the center distance, with the arched-roof skylight running the length, is the Allen County Public Library. The building on the nearer right edge of the photo is the Grand Wayne Convention Center. I retired from this place in 2000. General Electric complex - I was an apprentice machinist-toolmaker there 1958-1961, and then worked on the top floor of the building with the GE sign in the 1980s. About 3,000 people worked there in the 1950s, and I'm told that nearly 5,000 worked there during WWII. Now it's mostly vacant, and several buildings have been razed. Former PRR depot, now known as Baker Street Station. It's the site of the previous day's Rally for Rail.

I read someplace in the last week or two that Cleveland's Soldiers and Sailors Monument is undergoing major restoration; the roof and structural repairs are already complete, along with the exterior granite, and the tablets on the inside with the names of those who served are being cleaned and restored letter-by-letter and the stained-glass panels are being taken apart, cleaned one piece at a time, and re-leaded.

All the legendary names in photo equipment of the 30s and 40s and into the 50s on that wall!

Great stuff! I can imagine what a ball you're having! In the early '80s I spent a few days in the small yard at Orrville, Ohio (home to Smucker's jams & jellies - yum!) with NKP 765, alongside Conrail's former PRR main west of the big hill at Massillon. There was a lot of heavy Conrail freight, and they'd come barrelling through town with lots of horsepower on the head end, and then a pair of locomotives pushing. Heck of a commotion. A little while later, we'd see the helpers running light, heading back west. I don't know where they put them on, but it was an impressive show. Before Conrail would allow the Pittsburgh excursions over their tracks with 765, they had to be reassured that 765 would be able to maintain 70mph with the passenger train so as not to get in the way of their freights.

Some amazingly grand buildings!

Wow! Much more city than I expected! Excellent photos.

Excellent thread. I'm always impressed by the detail in your research.

HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY!! I SWEAR YOU KIDS GROW UP SO FAST. Yeah, but you get to say what you want and nobody thinks your crazy, just mean! Thats a plus in my book! Dream on! Just a couple of weeks ago a woman in my neighborhood implied that I had dementia. Demented, sometimes, but dementia, NO! Did you hit her? If not, you should have, it might have knocked some sense into her! Insults and accusations run off me like water off a duck. I never hit a lady, and I always give the benefit of the doubt. If a woman hits me first, though, then she's no lady and all bets are off. :box:

You used to live in a Burger King? :-o

HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY!! I SWEAR YOU KIDS GROW UP SO FAST. Yeah, but you get to say what you want and nobody thinks your crazy, just mean! Thats a plus in my book! Dream on! Just a couple of weeks ago a woman in my neighborhood implied that I had dementia. Demented, sometimes, but dementia, NO!

A belated Happy Birthday to our birthday kids! :clap: The milestone birthdays, the ones ending in zero, always seem to provoke irreverence and gag gifts in the office, until you reach the one that begins with a six. I don't know if it's awe or pity, but you get respectful treatment on that one.

Lawd. How in the world did all those people fit in that little house. When you eliminate the spa, the commercial-grade kitchen with its stainless steel refrigerator/freezer and double-oven range, and the media room/home theatre with wet bar, there's a lot more room for people. :-)

Showing some wear and tear and the general decline that has hit many small towns as retail moved to strip centers and big boxes in nearby larger communities. Overall some interesting building stock, though. It's places like this that make me hope Kunstler is right, that economic forces related to peak oil soon will drive a return to more local living, buying, and selling. That tavern on the corner makes me want to steal an SUV in the middle of the night and drive it through that tacky exterior enclosure, and then abandon it and get out of town fast. Oh! For what little I know about architectural styles, this looks like sort of a hybrid; the roof line says Carpenter Gothic, but the windows and porch deviate from what I'm accustomed to seeing. Italianate, maybe? I wouldn't be surprised if that's timber-framed, with vertical board-and-batten siding under the asbestos shakes. And it still has its terne metal standing-seam roof! What a honey this could be if someone had a bundle of money sitting around.

Kind of cute. There's a generous amount of vinyl and aluminum siding, but that's not always a terrible thing; not every neighborhood can be an upscale museum park, and this looks comfortable, safe, and affordable for people who aren't making six-figure annual salaries.

I know; it seems to peak around 13 or 14. I used to belong to a local cycling club, and in addition to our regular weekend and evening rides, we'd sponsor occasional community events. One was during Three Rivers Festival and involved a Century with optional shorter routes. I drove a sag wagon (van to render assistance or pick up riders who crapped out or broke down) for some of those. The ride was in July every year, usually hot and humid. About the sixty-mile mark, we'd start to find the college-age jock-boys with their colorful lycra and expensive Italian bikes in the shade of trees along the road or in front yards, completely wiped out. Then we'd pass some short, skinny thirteen-year-old chugging along on a beat-up wobbly-wheeled 35-pound Schwinn Varsity. He'd slip in behind the van and draft at 20mph for five or six miles until the next sag stop in a country churchyard, where he'd dump his bike in the grass and inhale a handfull of cookies and a banana. Then he was back on the bike and on the road. I worked with the dad of one of those kids and he said, "Yeah, and after he gets home he'll eat, shower, and head for the tennis court."

Nice! Many of those look well cared for. I've always liked that style. In the 1920s the interurban lines in the Insull empire used it in their stations, few of which survive. I remember the former station in Bluffton, Indiana, repurposed as a Ford dealership in my youth. The South Shore station in Beverly Shores is the best, perhaps only, surviving Insull-era station I know of:

I think an occasional backhand upside the head will do the job. He means well and he's smart enough, but maybe you just need to get his attention before you try to tell him stuff. :wink:

That's a beauty; clean and modern, and talk about "full service!" It looks like the kind of place you would welcome for a break while on a long drive. With legal segregation so far in the past, it's sometimes a smack upside the head to be reminded that it was pervasive in every sort of business and public activity venue, and mostly unchallenged, then.

In my day, we were taught to comb our hair before we got our pictures taken. You might see if you can find your razor, too! Here's an example of presenting one's self properly: Whippersnappers today act like they were raised by wolves. :roll: :wink: