Robert Pence

Nice modern building in its time, and the photos are dated June 5 through October 1. Four months is pretty good for all that, considering all the hand labor involved. Brick smokestacks are amazing; they must be one of the most demanding jobs in terms of a brick mason's skill.

Welcome to Urbanohio.com from another Indiana resident (I refrain from saying Hoosier because some take offense. Personally, I don't mind). I'm in Fort Wayne. I get to Indianapolis every now and then, but I really haven't gotten out into the neighborhoods very much in recent years. I should do that; thanks for putting up the photos.

Handsome station, and the property looks squeaky-clean and orderly. Tile roof, too! They sure don't build 'em like that any more!

Charlotte, I apologize for offending you. Indeed, some of my remarks may have been unkind. I regret that some other forumers may respond even more unkindly. I wll do my best to forestall that. I've been quite busy recovering from expensive damage to my properties during December's ice storm, and some of my comments may have been hasty. As soon as I have time to review your information in detail, I'll modify my comments accordingly. With all respect and kind regards. And you other guys who might be inclined to send impolite PMs to Charlotte, back off so that I don't have to get into a discussion with you. :bang2:

Where is Honey Hut? I'm a big fan of ice cream! Riverviewer, thanks for the research info. It's gratifying to know that maybe I'm not as crazy as people think :wink:!

How in hell ... I thought all the witnesses were dead by now. And that muddy driveway was one f...in' mess. I am absolutely sure that's a concrete-paving machine, so it must be the 1940 work that's shown in the photo. Besides, the car that barely shows beyond the machine, with the rear-mounted spare tire, is a mid-thirties model. I don't see any bricks, either; they're pouring concrete on a compacted sand base. Uh-oh! < :speech: > Asphalt was and still is mixed hot at the plant and delivered to the job site in trucks, where it's dumped into a machine that spreads and levels it, to be packed on follow-up by road rollers. This machine is clearly a cement mixer very similar to the ones on modern cement trucks, except that it's self-loading. The dumptruck barely visible on the left is dumping a cement/aggregate/sand mix into the hopper. A hoist will swing it up and dump the contents into the rotating drum, and water will be added from the tank on the machine, which might be kept filled from a tank truck or from a hose to a nearby hydrant. When the mix is ready, the drum rotation reverses so that the mixing vanes inside force the cement out into a bucket suspended on a trolley from the beam you see extending above the workers on the right. The beam can be swung left to right, and the bottom of the bucket is a valve that allows the concrete to be spread into forms for working and leveling probably by hand. Click any photo for more: </ :speech: > Thank you for your attention. Class dismissed.

LMAO! I was a guest. I could have been "difficult" but as you all know that is not my character. :angel: I understand completely. You're the only person on UO who's even close to being as sweet and innocent as I am. :angel: That place just doesn't look like NY without tagging. You could have at least taken a marker with you.

Neat stuff. Some views remind me of Chicago's CTA, most not at all - entirely a different world.

Indiana, PA has one. It wasn't busy when I visited, but it's a college town with bars, so there probably are times when there are lots of people there.

Spring in Fort Wayne's West Central Neighborhood (partial reprise of another post): I'm just being a smartass, but I'm not going straight to hell because I've already been there and back a couple times, and I didn't like it much.

If my memory serves me well, construction of the Allegheny Reservoir was delayed by a major controversy, something about taking land that had been granted in perpetuity to a Native American tribe or one of its chiefs, something like that. I was there twice in the sixties. The jeep ride in '65 was an attempt to go over the same route that a friend had shown me in '63, before it was torn up. En route from Indiana to Delaware in 1963 for a new USAF assignment I stopped to visit a friend in Erie, and we went on a quest to find the few big gas engines still working in pipeline stations and gas fields in the area. We drove from Erie through Jamestown NY and then south along the river and beyond, ending up in Roystone, just south of where the reservoir is now. That's where we found this place with compressor engines pumping gas from one of the big fields in that area: These sorts of places are almost all gone, now. Either the fields that fed them played out or they were replaced by more modern machines. A few have been semi-permanently deactived and mothballed on site, but most have been scrapped. Remarkably, two of the biggest engines from Roystone Station have been moved to museums. One went to Rollag, Minnesota, where it has been re-erected and restored to operating condition; it runs Labor Day Weekend every year. The other is at Coolspring Power Museum near Brookville, PA, and is being restored.

When will all this civilization reach the Midwest?

Long gone! Not really a very well-made machine, and god-awful nasty to travel in for long distances; horrendous road noise and really bad maneuverability. I remember stopping for gas after about four hours on the highway, and feeling something like vertigo at the sudden cessation of vibration and noise.

Beautiful shot! About 1965, when that was under construction, I had a 4WD Jeep Wagoneer. I was rummaging around the old oil and gas fields in the Bradford area, and found a closed road in the future reservoir area that had already been bulldozed. I drove along it for several miles with some great views. Just about the time I was about to chicken out and try to backtrack, I found another road that got me out of there. Adventurous times.

Wow. Those are wet-dream material! It looks like they managed all the rail access by using track panels, preassembled sections of rail and ties that they unloaded from railcars with a crane and set into place. That's the fastest way to get track in service, and it's still used for most emergency repair to derailments, and for making quick changes to rail alignment. They built all those concrete forms from timber, labor-intensive and hard labor at that, and although the girders would have been fabricated off-site and railed in, the building skeleton probably was field-riveted using hot rivets. Rivets were heated cherry-red in a furnace and then swaged into place using a pneumatic hammer. They contracted as they cooled to the temperature of the surrounding steel, drawing the joint extremely tight. The dramatic part of hot-riveting was how they got the rivets to the point of assembly; they couldn't move the furnace from one joint to another, so the furnace tender extracted the rivets from the furnace one-by-one using tongs and threw them to a man thirty or forty feet or more away, who caught them in a bucket and immediately slipped them into aligned holes in the girders to be joined, using tongs. He backed up the rivet head while another man used a pneumatic hammer to spread and shape the other end. Strenuous, dangerous work, and it required speed and coordination. Drop very many rivets, and you're fired. On the spot. Sometimes when I look at those old construction photos, I marvel that anyone survived those jobs. There was no OSHA or anything like it, no harnesses or other safety gear, and in a lot of cases, not even a union to look after the interests of the workers.

Saturation coverage with saturated colors. I love these! I don't like wires when they're power lines and communication lines that ought to be buried, but when they're catenary, I say bring 'em on! The more the merrier! ETB and streetcar catenary running side by side above the streets! :clap:

I like those Skoda cars; they're sleek and modern looking in a way that makes them amenable to all kinds of paint schemes. It's interesting to me that a company that originated in what became part of the Soviet Bloc and produced many of the transit vehicles used there has become a predominant builder of buses and rail transit vehicles worldwide. Skoda stands as a testimonial to the long Czech heritage in progressive, well-designed technology.

Everyone tries to be nice at the meetings, and I've tried to abide by that. The only ones who get strident are the status-quo advocates, and it's hard to get heard. City flood control offices don't open for another fifteen minutes or so. If the supervisor checks her email first thing, I suspect there will be city engineers in my block before noon. Continuing erosion endangers not only the street, but a sewer interceptor beneath it. This could be interesting; I'll keep y'alls posted. :-D Edit 8:55AM: I just received this from Flood Control "Robert You have excellent timing. We were discussing resurrecting this project with stimulus funds. We are having the Army Corps of Engineers look into what it’s going to take to finish the project we started. Thanks for the pictures. We will keep you informed on the progress of this project."

Monday, March 16, 2009 Delayed aftermath With the exception of a few old houses like mine, most of the area along Thieme Drive wasn't developed until around 1911 and later, about through the early 1920s. Before development, much of it was low-lying land, and I think there might have been a ravine or creek bed running in to the river. The street wasn't built until about 1911, and at some earlier time, the first route of the Fort Wayne and Southwestern interurban ran approximately where the street lies. Test borings and erosion have shown that some of the fill is coal ash, quite possibly from the interurban power plant, and a substantial layer of clay with building debris (bricks, roof slates, etc.) overlies the native sand and clay mix. The area lies on the downstream, outside of a curve in the river, and I had noticed more than twenty years ago that during periods of high water the river was cutting into the clay and sand, and undermining the fill layer on top, possibly endangering the street. I tried a few times to report the problem to the street department, and they'd send some guy in overalls who'd look over the edge, spit, say "I don't see nothin." and get back in his pickup and drive away. You could only see the undercutting if you walked on the dry edge of the riverbed at extreme low water and looked up at it (or used a boat on the river). Finally about five years ago a section gave way, and about thirty linear feet of fill, about four feet wide, dropped about ten feet, trees and all. That's when the city got serious. Army Corps of Engineers got involved and proposed a flood wall to withstand a hundred-year flood, plus two feet. By my recollection from atteding some neighborhood meetings at the time, there were objections from a few people for various reasons, most of which I personally can't validate. The whole thing see-sawed back and forth as planners and engineers tried to appease everyone, and eventually the Corps allocated the money elsewhere. Today: The prolonged high water turned the underlying strata into slurry, and when the water receded, it took the slurry with it. An addition forty or fifty feet of riverbank slid to the water level, with the cave-in area coming to within a foot of the pavement. With the soil and fill under the street still saturated and seeping water, I don't think it would take a very heavy load to collapse part of the street. This evening I sent an email to the supervisor in Flood Control, with the photos attached.

I enjoyed these photos, and I like what I see here. Olympia has the formality of the capitol campus, surrounded by what looks like a laid-back small city. I'm extemely vulernable to SAD and the region's climate might get to me in winter, but I think I'd like it a lot in summer. I'm setting myself up to be burned for heresy the next time I attend a UO meet, but I don't always hate brutalism. When it's balanced by softer natural forms it's an interesting contrast; here, surrounded by rainforest, especially on a misty, drizzly day, it rather nicely defines the built environment without overwhelming its surroundings.

These are great! I remember so many places like some of those from when I was a kid. I don't think I have any real-life photos other than the Philips 66, but I do have a few photos of restorations and museum-type displays. Here's one in downtown Lafayette, Indiana, taken in 2005: The car is a 1934 Cadillac; the photos link to more.

You can't always tell by looking. Sometimes the most ordinary-appearing people are the most dangerous freaks, and you're trapped with them in a confined space. :-o

These photos are knock-my-socks-off wonderful. In this machine shop, notice how all the machines are powered by belts from overhead line shafts. A big electric motor near the top of the nearest column drives all the shafts, providing one central power source for all the machines on the floor. When I was a whippersnapper, there were still a few old machine shops that operated this way. Delightfully full of moving stuff and a wonderful mixture of machinery noises, and everything smelled of grease and oil and old leather belts. Re this photo: Willard made automobile batteries (lead-acid storage batteries) in Cleveland. It looks like they had an auto service station at the factory. http://ech.cwru.edu/ech-cgi/article.pl?id=WSBC

Great stuff! I'm eager to see more; I love old construction photos, especially featuring the machinery. A steam shovel in operation is a marvelous thing to see, especially with a skilled operator at the controls. I've seen a few at antique machinery shows, including one that had been restored to top mechanical condition and was digging a pit and loading the dirt into a couple of chain-drive Mack Bulldog dump trucks.

I'm glad you and your mom enjoyed the photos; I had an interesting time taking them. Have you found the other Fort Wayne photos on my urbanindiana.com web site? They're here.