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What's special about your hometown?

Started by webny99, July 16, 2018, 03:21:35 PM

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jakeroot

Quote from: Bruce on July 18, 2018, 09:59:04 PM
We were also on the shortlist for a new University of Washington campus until the project was canceled during the early recession.

Had no idea that UW was gonna build a northern campus beyond Bothell. Any idea what the areas of study might have been?


Big John

Quote from: Bruce on July 18, 2018, 09:59:04 PM
My hometown, Arlington, WA, hosts one of the largest "fly-in" airshows in the United States. 50,000 visitors and 1,600 planes every July.
Oshkosh, WI says hi.

jakeroot

Quote from: Big John on July 18, 2018, 10:46:29 PM
Quote from: Bruce on July 18, 2018, 09:59:04 PM
My hometown, Arlington, WA, hosts one of the largest "fly-in" airshows in the United States. 50,000 visitors and 1,600 planes every July.

Oshkosh, WI says hi.

"one of"

ftballfan

Robert Wadlow, who was the tallest man ever to live, died in my hometown after visiting for the 4th of July parade in 1940

Bruce

Quote from: jakeroot on July 18, 2018, 10:03:39 PM
Quote from: Bruce on July 18, 2018, 09:59:04 PM
We were also on the shortlist for a new University of Washington campus until the project was canceled during the early recession.

Had no idea that UW was gonna build a northern campus beyond Bothell. Any idea what the areas of study might have been?

There was a huge squabble in the legislature about the campus in 2007/08. The Everett Station area was seen as the frontrunner, and would have been the smartest place to put the campus (strong transport connections, an urban environment similar to Tacoma, and near-zero displacement). The Riverside area of Everett (roughly north of the trestle, but also including some of the currently-developed areas just south of Hewitt), Smokey Point (around I-5 & 152nd), and Lake Stevens (US 2 & SR 204) were the other finalists.

Would have cost $750 million to build and have 5,000 students, about the same size as Tacoma's campus. A final decision was never reached, due to the budget cuts.

Bothell was originally built to serve Snohomish County, but is rather poorly located relative to major transit corridors. Everett made a lot more sense, and would serve the growing north county/Skagit/Island triangle.

abefroman329


jon daly


jon daly

#57
^^ Yeah, abe and I have had a cross-thread convo about Dusty Lenscap. I thought he was denying that he was crying and blaming his tears on the dust. I didn't realize some folks in marketing at or on behalf of K-Mart came up with a trench-coated character to shill for their Photo department.

empirestate

Quote from: webny99 on July 16, 2018, 03:21:35 PM
It doesn't have to be specifically about the place you were born in, and it doesn't have to be road-related, but both are encouraged.

Rochester, NY, has a really good freeway network. Visitors from the East -and West- Coast seem to be impressed by it. On days when I have no other pressing obligations, I can loop around the entire perimeter of the city on my way home from work - during rush hour - often without stopping, or at least without stopping more than once or twice.
We have great food too - pizza, trash plates, Wegmans, etc. Supposedly there's this theory that anyone that was born and raised in Rochester and leaves, always ends up coming back to stay. Not sure how much truth there is to it, but I know if I had reason to move out of town, I'd want to come back and visit very frequently.

There's truth to it. If there was a living to be made in my field there, I'd consider returning without hesitation. A lot of people are keen to leave the area once they graduate; for a time, around the turn of the millennium, places like North Carolina were competitive at attracting residents away from cities like Rochester, but they weren't always found to have the cultural and social staying power to keep those transplants, and many considered returning.

I've never noticed people being especially impressed with our expressways (other than that we don't have traffic issues to compare with larger metros), but they are dazzled by Wegmans. Of course, Wegmans is now poised to become the greatest new "best-kept secret" that NYC has recently discovered and that nobody else knows about in the world; there's sure to be a BuzzFeed article about it soon.

Wegmans is very much a double-edged sword, however. For some time they've stood imperiously over the city in terms of community planning; there's but a single store left in city limits, and it only stayed because they were able to raze the whole block and expand on site. Their exemplification of, and participation in, the Great White Flight has been a sore spot for many city residents.

At the same time, Wegmans has long held a title as one of the top employers to work for in the U.S., with generous benefits such as health and education, even for part-time employees. Another Rochester institution with similarly high marks is ESL, and the two big educational centers (plus the surrounding ones) attract their share of jobs, along with the cultural and intellectual base that a vibrant community needs.

Oh, and it's Garbage Plate™–"trash plate" is just what you have to call your menu item if you're not Nick Tahou. :-)

vdeane

I think there's some roadgeek interest in Rochester expressways; Rochester seems to have had more meets (at least recently) than Buffalo and Syracuse have.

I'd love to return to Rochester (which may not happen any time soon since promotion opportunities there in my career line are few and far between), though I'll admit, Albany is more centrally located to the places that I'm most interested in traveling to, and it's nice being close to the Adirondacks.
Please note: All comments here represent my own personal opinion and do not reflect the official position of NYSDOT or its affiliates.

webny99

Quote from: vdeane on July 24, 2018, 01:31:15 PM
I think there's some roadgeek interest in Rochester expressways; Rochester seems to have had more meets (at least recently) than Buffalo and Syracuse have.

I wonder how that is impacted by the number of roadgeeks from the area.
I can actually think of more forum members from the Buffalo area than Rochester - and none from Syracuse (although there may be some I'm not aware of (meaning they're not active here very often)).

Quote from: empirestate on July 24, 2018, 01:04:18 PM
I've never noticed people being especially impressed with our expressways (other than that we don't have traffic issues to compare with larger metros)

I find the overall setup and layout of the network to be very conducive to serving a metro population of around 1 million.
Perhaps the fact that we don't have the traffic issues makes people underestimate the size of the city, rather than value the free-flowing conditions. Consider that Salt Lake City, Birmingham, New Orleans, and Tucson, are among the metro areas similar to Rochester in size. I'm fairly confident those cities have more congestion woes than Rochester does (and I'm sure the fact that I-90 runs well south of downtown is a bonus - as far as traffic, though not necessarily the economy, is concerned).

Yet there are still a number of widenings and auxiliary lanes that would lead to improved peak-hour flow. It's evident that the planners of the day failed to predict a number of growth trends, the most notable being extensive growth to the southeast resulting in I-490 between Exits 25 and 27 being chronically congested/moving below speed.
Consider also the priority given to movements towards/away from downtown, as that was thought to be where most people would be commuting to. In fact, Brighton, Henrietta, and Victor are now the major employment centers, while suburb-to-downtown commutes are on the decline, resulting in traffic flows that the system simply wasn't designed for. Take I-390, for example, where the northbound exit only lane at I-490 is being switched from the right lane (eastbound/downtown) to the left lane (westbound/western suburbs) as part of the ongoing reconstruction. This single, and very minor, change in alignment will bring massive improvements to afternoon traffic. There's simply not enough traffic headed towards downtown in the afternoon to warrant an exit only lane, while the left lane(s) clog for miles with commuters headed homeward from employers in the southern suburbs.

Brandon

Quote from: jon daly on July 24, 2018, 08:21:59 AM
Quote from: abefroman329 on July 24, 2018, 07:51:30 AM
Deep-dish pizza  :bigass:

Threads are crossing.

Don't cross the threads.

Why?

It would be bad.

I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?

Try to image all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.

Total protonic reversal.

Right. That's bad. Okay. Alright, important safety tip. Thanks Egon.
"If you think this has a happy ending, you haven't been paying attention." - Ramsay Bolton

"Symbolic of his struggle against reality." - Reg

jon daly

Quote from: webny99 on July 24, 2018, 10:19:21 AM
Quote from: jon daly on July 24, 2018, 08:21:59 AM
Quote from: abefroman329 on July 24, 2018, 07:51:30 AM
Deep-dish pizza  :bigass:
Threads are crossing.

It happens. At times, stuff will spill into multiple threads, and in multiple boards, too. Alanland comes to mind, but there are plenty of other examples.

Fictional highways might be the hardest obsession discussed here for me to grasp.

Dougtone

While I have lived in Upstate New York for 20 years now, I was born and raised in Smithtown, a town on Long Island. Legend has it that the town's founder rode around the boundary of the town on a bull.
http://longislandgenealogy.com/bull.html

There's also a bull statue in town.
https://patch.com/new-york/smithtown/smithtown-a-history-whisper-the-bull-statue

KEVIN_224

New Britain, CT is (was?) the home base of The Stanley Works, a.k.a the tool people. Roger Clemens won his first pro ball championship here with the 1983 New Britain Red Sox. 2017 World Series MVP, #4 George Springer, is from here. However...so is Paul Manafort. (His father was mayor when I was born in 1971.) We can also claim speed pitch record holder Steve Dalkowski and Pepperidge Farms' old man who remembers...Charlie Welsh.

Mrt90

#65
Quote from: TheHighwayMan394 on July 17, 2018, 12:32:50 PM

Superior has the most bars per capita of any city in Wisconsin. Yay, I guess.
You might need to come up with a source for this, because those are fighting words in some parts of Wisconsin.  I've heard the same claim made for Cudahy, Kenosha, LaCrosse, and Eau Claire, and a little bit of googling will give you stats that say it's Rhinelander or Whitewater or Sheboygan.



Kenosha (my hometown) has electric streetcars that run on a 2 mile loop around downtown.

https://www.visitkenosha.com/things-to-do/electric-streetcar-circulator

csw

Quote from: tdindy88 on July 17, 2018, 08:58:36 PM
Indianapolis is known for a really big auto race held during Memorial Day weekend.
My claim to fame with Indy is that I went to school K-12 within a mile of the track!

thenetwork

My current hometown is home to:

- Leitner-Poma -- Makers of ski lifts, chairs and gondolas, and also the ones who created the gondolas for the huge Las Vegas Ferris Wheel.

- LOKI -- Makers of unique outerwear -- like winter coats with built-in gloves,  or gloves where you can un-zip the tops if you need to use your fingertips in a pinch (no pun intended).

- Enstrom's -- Makers of "world famous" almond toffee.

bing101

#68
San Francisco Mission Bay home of the Biotech startups also the other west coast home of Venture Capitalists, Startup Accelerators outside of San Jose. Plus tourism in Norcal

South San Francisco "The Industrial city" now known for biotech because of Genentech.

Vallejo, CA known for Cal Maritime and the West Coast branch for Touro University and the Bankruptcy at the 2008 recession. Plus Vallejo is best known where the Zodiac killer conspiracies come from

Sacramento, CA state Capital of California and the scapegoat for splitting California into different parts. Plus gold processing/Trade took place in Sacramento before they became the capital of California (Note Benicia was the previous home for the California State Capital) before they went to Sacramento.

Henry

So far, in the 48 years that I have been alive, I have lived in the home cities of blues music (as well as the only major-league ballpark with ivy-covered outfield walls and rooftop bleachers across the street), the Hollywood film industry and Boeing/Microsoft/Nintendo.
Go Cubs Go! Go Cubs Go! Hey Chicago, what do you say? The Cubs are gonna win today!

jon daly

Quote from: KEVIN_224 on July 25, 2018, 03:54:41 PM
New Britain, CT is (was?) the home base of The Stanley Works, a.k.a the tool people. Roger Clemens won his first pro ball championship here with the 1983 New Britain Red Sox. 2017 World Series MVP, #4 George Springer, is from here. However...so is Paul Manafort. (His father was mayor when I was born in 1971.) We can also claim speed pitch record holder Steve Dalkowski and Pepperidge Farms' old man who remembers...Charlie Welsh.

Dalkowski: The original Nuke LaLoosh.

I was so disappointed when NB lost their affiliation with the Red Sox.

KEVIN_224

That went to Trenton in 1995. In 2018, the Red Sox affiliation is with the Portland Seadogs of Maine. Trenton today? The Yankees, of course!

The Twins left New Britain. That affiliation went south to Chattanooga.


jon daly

And NB is now an independent team while Hartford has the Yard Goats.

Desert Man

5 things about Indio, California I like to share with you all:
1. In a climatic desert, below sea level (from here to the Mexican border) and inland about 120-140 miles from L.A., we will be an awfully warm place: summer high temps can reach as high as 122f/50c and it has a few times in the past month.

2. The Coachella! Since 1999, the annual music and arts festival grew to become one of the world's largest, held in the Indio or Eldorado Polo ground. Nearby are the towns of La Quinta - it didn't really exist when I was born in 1980 - now has 50,000 (half of Indio's size), Indian Wells (an affluent place of 5,000 with an annual tennis tournament), and Coachella down the former US route 99, now one of 5 out of 9 cities to have more year-round residents than the famous center, Palm Springs.

3. US route 99 (Indio Boulevard) was where the first yellow divider stripe was painted - over a century ago in 1915, an idea suggested by local physician Dr. June McCarroll, she wrote to the state dept. of transportation and it became a common road feature worldwide.

4. Celebrities come here for a visit or to buy a second home, but a very few celebrities are from Indio Cal: I can name Alan O'Day, Audrey O' Day of Danity Kane (no relation), director Cameron Crowe, Oscar Lua in the NFL, and Vanessa Marcil.

and 5. Dates! The fruit that grows on palm trees is raised in the Indio area, a perfect place for date palms. We host an annual date festival/county fair in mid-Feb. (around my birthday) and it long had an Arabian Nights/middle-eastern theme.
Get your kicks...on Route 99! Like to turn 66 upside down. The other historic Main street of America.

jakeroot

Quote from: Desert Man on July 28, 2018, 11:59:00 AM
3. US route 99 (Indio Boulevard) was where the first yellow divider stripe was painted - over a century ago in 1915, an idea suggested by local physician Dr. June McCarroll, she wrote to the state dept. of transportation and it became a common road feature worldwide.

I thought the first center line was in Michigan?



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