Robert Pence

When the link dies, you wont have the full article. So how will you be able to comment on a partial posting? It's not a perfect world. Life moves on, and you have to do your best to keep up with what you can and let go of the rest. :-)

My experience was in the seventies, but relevant to what Jake just posted. I spent a vacation on and around Mackinac Island. I took my own bike to the island on the ferry. Almost immediately after walking it off the pier and starting to pedal down the street, I was hit by two girls careening out of control on a tandem they had just rented. Fortunately there were no injuries or damages. I liked riding on the road around the island at night, seeing the moonlight on the water and smelling the pine trees. It was quiet and very dark on the road with no streetlights. I had a light, but encountered several riders who did not. Some were going in the opposite direction and not riding carefully, assuming that since there were no cars, they had nothing to fear. I speculate that if I had not had a light, I might have been hit. All the rental bikes back then were cantilever-framed, ashtabula-cranked, balloon-tired tanks, and the rental companies had mechanics on staff who could do "road service" for people who wrecked or broke down. Among the tools in the baskets on the back of their bikes, there was always a sledgehammer. Probably for straightening a bent wheel, although I would have been inclined to apply it to some of the riders.

Nice work! I've never been to Ardmore, and you did a really nice job of catching the architectural variety in Center City. Welcome to the UO forums.

Super thread! I love that you got interior photos of some amazing places.

Seriously nice stuff! I love the early-morning mist shots.

The Fly Ferry at Fly, OH That be the one! I always heard it referred to as the Sistersville Ferry, though. I thought it was owned by the city of Sistersville. I haven't ridden it since about 1999, and I heard that they had taken bids for a new one.

I'm a bit rusty on my old cars (pun, sort of - get it? :roll:), but I used to really have them nailed. My dad was a teenager in the 1920s, and he knew them all on sight. Whenever I'd see a photo of one I didn't know, I'd ask him. I'm guessing the car in your avatar is a 1929 or 1930 Chevrolet. 1929 was the year they introduced the solid disc wheels, and the wire wheels were an option on the sports models. By 1931, they appear to have gone back to wire wheels on all models. 1929 was also the year they introduced the six-cylinder engine.

The Wisconsin proposal sounds good; there's already a waiting market, and the Hiawatha Service trains do their job very well. Speed things up and add more service, and the demand would increase in direct proportion. Anyone who doubts a demand for more service trains should see the weekend lines at the ticket counter in Milwaukee, especially around holidays. And if they haven't fixed that abysmal train shed since the last photos I saw, that would be a very good place for some of the stimulus money.

Charlotte, now that you've found Urbanohio.com, if you haven't already spent some time looking around the City Photos - Ohio and City Photos - USA/World sections, I recommend that you do so. I think you'll find it very enjoyable. There's a lot of outstanding talent among the people who frequent the site, and some are very well-traveled, too.

Great shots. Baltimore has so much history within walking distance of Federal Hill and the Inner Harbor, and I think Philadelphia may be America's most photogenic city.

Those wonderful commercial buildings with high ceilings and huge windows that let daylight stream in, and provided abundant natural ventilation in summer! I now value the memories of going to work in one such building as an apprentice machinist-toolmaker at General Electric in Fort Wayne in 1958. The building dated to 1914; there were three like it, five storeys tall, in the complex, all built with reinforced concrete columns and concrete floors. One had a sixth floor added later, and it had 90-ton punchpresses on the second floor. They bolstered the floor in that area with added columns that went through to bedrock. I worked in it in the mid 80s, and the pencils on my desk on the sixth floor would jiggle visibly when the presses ran. Although mosty vacant now, it still stands solid as a rock.

Sherman, I'm glad he enjoyed them. It's amazing how the interest in that stuff has grown over the years. I've been attending and photographing shows off and on for more than fifty years; when my brother and I first started collecting and restoring, there probably were fewer than a dozen shows across the country and now there are hundreds. We were among a half-dozen in our area who actively participated, and now it seems that anyone with two acres and room for a storage shed has at least one tractor, often one he remembers from his dad's or granddad's farm. Some of us second-generation collectors (the first were the guys born before WWI who grew up farming with the stuff) got into it because we were born with grease under our fingernails and the smells of gasoline and coal smoke in our nostrils, and it was more affordable than collector cars and easier to haul, store, and work on than a locomotive. Now the prices of some of the rarer, older farm machines have equalled or outpaced the collector cars because those were the machines that my brother and I saw sitting in a woodlot and passed on because they were too worn/rusted/stripped for us to undertake. Years later they were picked up by affluent collectors who could put $150,000 - $200,000 into restoration, having patterns made for replacement of broken or missing castings, etc.

Excellent photos. There's another Ohio River ferry between Ohio 800 and Sistersville, WV, that I've used several times. It's in a more rural area, and not nearly as heavily used as the Anderson Ferry.

Impressive views. Despite America's manufacturing decline, a lot of evidence of Detroit's grandeur survives. Incidentally, the tractor represented by the model in my photo is ideally suited for reclaiming shopping centers. It has a lot of power and a rear-mounted scarifier for plowing up asphalt. The blade would work well for pushing in walls and shoving the whole mess into a pile for recycling into aggregate.

The St. Marys and St. Joseph Rivers flow together in Fort Wayne to form the Maumee River, which flows northeast to Lake Erie at Toledo. The watersheds of both rivers, especially the St. Marys, are mostly flat lacking in the sorts of valleys and large ravines that would provide very much storage capacity. The land in the neighborhood rises sharply away from the river, so flooding is concentrated in a small area; still there are several - I'm not sure how many - who pay for flood insurance. The last I heard, it was about $500/year on top of regular homeowner's insurance. With the increased incidence of flooding, that may rise. A further consequence to owners in the flood plain is that their ability to make major changes to their homes including expansion is restricted, even if the proposed changes meet all the guidelines for historical appropriateness. I read several years ago that in Fort Wayne's CBD, 75% of the land area is taken up by streets and parking lots. Since that time I can't think of any former parking lots that have been built upon, but I can think of buildings that have been razed to create parking lots. Our property tax structure places about 75 - 80% of assessed value on improvements, mainly buildings, with the remainder on land. It's an incentive for investors to buy undervalued buildings and houses and raze them and then lease the land to a parking operator. The policy erodes tax revenues and urban density, and provides an incentive for development of big-box stores and sprawling strip centers on the fringes of the city. I advocate inverting the present tax structure to place most of the tax burden on land with a smaller portion applying to the buildings. That would reduce the attractiveness of creating parking-lot sprawl and provide incentive for dense urban development and mixed use. Admittedly a rooftop is as impermeable as a parking lot, but there are offsets; there's been increasing interest in rooftop rain gardens, and a return to urban density combined with planned reclamation of abandoned strip malls and other sprawl could reduce the total amount of impermeable surface in our watersheds.

Is this what they mean by "Adult Toys?" With all the fine detail and a price tag at $185, I sure wouldn't let kids play with it! I'd guess this one is about 1/16 scale. For more stuff, click the photo.

Nothing like an eloquent rant to start my day! I love it! :-D

I've been PC since I bought my first one in 1983, genuine IBM with 8088 CPU @ 4.77mhz, 256K RAM, 2 DSDD 360K 5 1/4" floppy drives, no hard drive. The computer plus WordPerfect plus a "fast" Hayes SmartCom 1200-baud external modem set me back in the neighborhood of $5,000. Working in tech support at Lincoln Financial, and then outsourced to IBM, I worked exclusively with the PC platform, almost exclusively with IBM brand. I built my current system in late 2006, and I've put off plans for an upgrade until my financial situation improves. It's Athlon XP64 3700+ CPU, 3GB RAM, 700GB of Serial ATA hard drive capacity. It does the job for scanning with a Nikon ED9000 film scanner, Epson 2200 printer, and Photoshop CS3. I like the way it works and the way it looks, and I've very rarely had to do any trouble shooting with it or Windows XP Pro. I've considered Mac for photoshop work but would want to try one out long enough to get comfortable with it before making the decision. My friend tells me, "Once you go Mac, you'll never go back," but he's a lot younger. To a certain extent I'm dealing with the old-dog-new-tricks syndrome. Edit: Just read the posts immediately above. Yeah, Apple's move to Intel processors gives me another way to look at it. I haven't compared prices lately, but it used to be I could build more processing power in a PC for a lot less money than I could buy a comparable Mac. Even my Mac-using friend acknowledged after using my PC that it was noticeably quicker than his fairly new Mac.

Great pic. I had never given any thought to folks using credit cards back then, but as I thought about it I remembered my aunt using them in the 40s. They were from specific stores, though, not the bank cards accepted everywhere, that came along much later. The ones my aunt used were called "charge plates" if I remember correctly, about the same size as a contemporary plastic card, and they were thin metal plates embossed on an addressograph machine with her name, account number, and address. I'm thoroughly enjoying these. Most are a few years before my time, but not much had changed except some of the cars by the time I was old enough to remember.

Cool 350Z shots. I like the looks of those, and whenever I'm around a dealership that has a sports/performance car of almost any kind, I'll get in and sit in it. Two problems, though; after thirty years of driving pickups it was hard enough for me to get used to the being down in the traffic in the Focus station wagon, and it's a lot harder for me to get out of sports cars than it used to be.

Excellent detective work, KJP! The Willard factory service building looks like 1920s design. One of my uncles ran an auto electric service business from the early 1930s into the 1960s, and I think he may have sold Willard batteries at one time.

Good tour and some interesting compositions, especially in the Public Square area.

Fort Wayne seems go be rediscovering its passion for sports. The opening game in the new downtown ballpark sold out completely within minutes of the beginning of on-line sales. Gol-lee! Maybe we should try to bring the Pistons back to their birthplace while we're at it!

Uhhhh, boys, remember the original concept fo this thread! I think it's 'bout time for a clean-up!