Another idea would be instead of a fictionalized city, take a real city and fictionalize (is that a word?) the history. Minneapolis is west of Chicago, has had a fairly large amount of railroading thru there (Burlington Northern - formerly Great Northern and Northern Pacific and CBQ -, Minneapolis & St. Louis, Milwaukee Road, etc.), but they didn't go light-rail until the last 8 years or so. You could rewrite the history, i.e. What if Jesse Ventura had become governor in 1984 (heaven forbid!) and pushed his version of light rail on the people there? The Minnesota Twins could have their outdoor stadium built already and you could implode the Metrodome! Wow, talk about the possibilities!
Anyhow, the point is that there is no city which exactly fits what you are trying to do, but you could go back and change the history to fit what you want to do. I think that's called "Freelancing" on this forum.
FT
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
Thanks for all the help everybody.
I got "locked out" somehow by the sytem and have been busy at work or I would have said thanks before. This has been really helpful for me
It's a bit easier to get the ring of authenticity if you are familiar with the territory. I have come up with various schemes for freelanced railroads, and I find that the more "prototype research" I do the more interesting such a line can become. Hunting for photos (online is just as easy nowadays) for what you're trying to model, even when freelancing, is a good way to steal tidbits with lots of character and use them together on a freelanced layout.
I'm still trying to dig out my moving boxes, but my photos of Chicagoland train stations are in there somewhere...as well as some photos you might like of urban industrial areas in nearby cities. Even in relatively small cities in much of the midwest (Omaha, Burlington, etc.) there are typically at least a few very scruffy neighborhoods lined with old brick factories and warehouses, and they are almost inariably near the railroad line. I try to take a few snaps every time I take the California Zephyr to Chicago (once every couple of years.)
Sure I like a challenge! Usually I stare at it till it gets away. Sometimes I dive after it into the pool without checking if there is sufficient water in it. This subject however has been brewing on the backburner for some time and now is the right time to go for it (celebrating 20 years of armchairmodelling and recently my 39th birthday, also the makeover of my house is almost done...)
In my previous post I painted the background, I will only model the approach to the terminal from the north or Omaha side. Lowest area on the outside is the river. Next up is an industrial belt line. Then up comes the double track approach to the terminal and finally the residential and commercial area on the top of the bluff acting as a scenic divide.
A double track oval is no problem to design in that space, I have problems trying to connect both ends to staging "down below" everything. I have a tunnel through the bluffs scene in mind (at one 4 ft side)that both ends of the oval will use. In between will fit what I have in mind or I will have to scale that back (looks like it sofar). No problem so long as a connection to the belt line can be made.
The idea is to watch trains pass by when I am tired yet have the possiblity of switching if I want to. The theme of course is American but the concept is very continental European: double track mainline (to show of all those expensive trains) with branchline to have some fun away from the busy mainline.
greetings,
Marc Immeker
marcimmeker wrote: Thanks people for all the information. I am in a comparable situation as Dave. My solution is to invent a reasonable sized smaller big city in Nebraska along the Missouri called Nemaha (population 220.000)(do I here a bell ringing?). There is an actual county and small village in southeast Nebraska going by that name. Marc Immeker
Thanks people for all the information. I am in a comparable situation as Dave. My solution is to invent a reasonable sized smaller big city in Nebraska along the Missouri called Nemaha (population 220.000)(do I here a bell ringing?). There is an actual county and small village in southeast Nebraska going by that name.
Phew! I'm so glad I'm not the only one trying to figure these things out!
This post by Jon Grant gives a beautiful image of an American City, primarily the old "rust belt" cities of the North, Midwest and East, which could be anytime from the 1930's to the present day. Depending on which locomotives Jon chooses to display, it takes on those eras very well.
http://www.trains.com/trccs/forums/922821/ShowPost.aspx
I particularly like the first picture, which could also be the outer portions of New York.
Now, how many of you know that Jon also lives in the UK?
marcimmeker wrote: Well, I got this far, now I am trying to get something of it in 4x6 ft in n-scale.
Well, I got this far, now I am trying to get something of it in 4x6 ft in n-scale.
Someone likes a challenge!
Jeff But it's a dry heat!
My model city has a lot in common with both KC's (Missouri and Kansas, I have been drooling over maps!). There are actually Big and Little Nemaha rivers that empty separately into the Missouri. In my Nemaha they come together in town and have a very short run to the Missouri. It will have a terminal station from the early 20's with a tower a la Cleveland / Buffalo. I will actually model a stretch of track north of the terminal with a kind of suburban stop (college or university neaby). Time period 1950-1967. Passenger trains will be mostly gaselectrics and Bud RDC's. Some services run with 2 or more RDC's running KC - Nemaha - Lincoln / Omaha and maybe beyond once a day to places like Sioux City Iowa and Sioux Falls South Dakota or beyond Lincln to GRand Island in Nebraska. Trains to places like Minneapolis / St Paul will be regulare streamliner types. North Nemaha has the new terminal (supposedly the area burned down between 1910 and WWI) and Central Business District with a college or university north of it, South Nemaha has the shopping and dense urban housing with 2 old main stations (say like Atlanta) close together. West Nemaha will get the new suburbanization. In the river bottoms is most of the old industrial area (think KC bottoms along the Kaw / Missouri).
Main freight yard is to the north of the city, plenty of bridges connecting everything including a Councill Bluffs like area on the east shore.
I suppose it depends on what your idea of a "small town" is. There are around 200 cities with populations of between 1 million and 100,000. I'd guesstimate that those 200 cities add up to roughly 50% of the population of the US, 150 million of a total population of about 300 million. So, assuming that you'd consider 100,000 people a city rather than a small town, and a city of less than 100,000 as a small town (many would not) then about half of the population of the US lives in cities.
The density of small towns varies WIDELY, as mentioned in the brief history of the US above. On the east coast, towns are close together largely because there were towns there before automobiles. As you travel farther west, small towns are more widely spread out, and there are large chunks of land that are still uninhabited because they are rather inhospitable. One interesting phenomenon I find when I travel on Amtrak is that European passengers are totally mind-boggled by the spaces involved--there are points in Utah and Nevada where you can stare out into totally uninhabited stretches of desert that are larger than some small European countries (and we're not talking about Monaco or Andorra here...) So it's not so much that Americans live in small towns as that there are large chunks of the west which literally have no people in them.
People don't "walk in to market" here, they drive to the store in all but the densest of cities. Also, one thing that might disguise the size of cities is that typically a large city is surrounded by an orbit of smaller cities (like Chicago's Chicagoland, the San Francisco Bay Area, the Los Angeles/Orange County metropolitan area, or the New York metropolitan area.) So even though cities like Berkeley, CA, are not big cities in themselves (population 100,000) they are often still considered to be part of "big cities" by their inhabitants because they are physically connected to larger urban areas, which are often directly adjacent. And of course there is the difference in the price of gas...the $3 a gallon prices (about 2 pounds, I think) are an all-time high, historically they have been about half of that, and even though most Americans drive bigger cars than most Brits, driving is considered a given and few people pay close attention to how much they pay for gas. A friend who lives in Montana (a state with less than a million people, despite being the fourth-largest state in the country) told me that he generally paid more for gas than rent, because driving to the store was generally a 2-3 hour trip by automobile (each way.)
Watching American films will mostly give you a view of Los Angeles, which is where most of the films are made. Keeping an eye out at the physical location of a film can help give a sense of place and time--popular film locations like New York and San Francisco look very physically different than Los Angeles.
The thing about the US is that generalizing almost anything doesn't work. In the northeast things are laid out a lot like Britain/Europe. The towns are pretty close together, and kind of compact, with small rural areas in between. Other than the new highways the roads are more liek the roads over there, from town to town, winding around the farms or geographic features. As you move west, say between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, I think it feels like the towns get a bit farther apart, and a bit less compact. Once you get west of the Mmississippi, things really start to get spead out. It can be 50 miles between even relatively small towns, and there is so much space that even the towns are kind of spread out. Of course, the density jumps up again along the cost, but even then the cities have a totally different feel than the east coast/European type cities.
You are probably right that there are more small/middle sized toen inhabitants than large city, but I don't have any number to back that up. I would have guessed your villages a little closer together than that, at least it felt that way in Lincolnshire, but they were little villages.
Jetrock wrote: Trying to use TV as a way to view a nation is a very, very bad guide. Take a minute and consider what the UK would look like if your only experience of it was from watching "Monty Python's Flying Circus," "The Benny Hill Show" and maybe "The Young Ones." (Quite frankly, that is most Americans' exposure to the UK!)
Trying to use TV as a way to view a nation is a very, very bad guide. Take a minute and consider what the UK would look like if your only experience of it was from watching "Monty Python's Flying Circus," "The Benny Hill Show" and maybe "The Young Ones." (Quite frankly, that is most Americans' exposure to the UK!)
You mean "Little House on the Prairie" and "The Waltons" aren't real?
Seriously; thanks again for the brief guided tours. They really do help. I am amazed by the distances, town sizes and such low populations. I'm sure we (foriegners) all think of the US as having lots of people... it's hard to connect that with all the space. Would it be fair to say that there are more "small town" Americans than city dwellers?
In my part of the West Midlands I reckon that most small towns are 12-14 miles apart... that's 6-7 miles to each halfway point... so walking in to market once a week (or less) would be about 2 1/2 o 3 hours walk each way (allowing some time for children and/or livestock).
Coming out of central London I found that I could get around faster but that my miles shot up. I had to start watching my fuel bills pretty fast.
I think that your selection of British TV just confirms my point. "Three Weddings and a Funeral", "The Remains of the Day" and "Billy Elliot" would do pretty much the same thing.
Nevertheless, ignoring the "social" content films and TV do at least give images of the physical culture (buildings and vehicles) and these can be linked to pretty specific years. I happened to flip to "Every Which Way but Loose" the other week... starts off with Clint driving an Athearn Ford C. I checked the film on the web later and in the "Goofs" lists I found nobody noted that right at the start when he turns into the truck yard part of his load falls off.
Anyway...
Thanks again for all the great help.
Hey! At least you don't have Lucille Ball any more!
Chicago has about the same population density as London, but the actual population of Chicago is only about 3 million people. The 9 million person "Chicagoland" is spread out over a vast geographic area including the remainder of Cook County (the county containing Chicago) and five neighboring counties, about 5500 square kilometers. The rest of Illinois is miles and miles and miles and miles and MILES of flat, flat farmland to the west and south, with occasional small country towns (aside from Springfield, which is less than 100,000) until you hit the Mississippi River.
A fictional city of five million people? That's quite a fiction, considering that only one city in the United States (New York) has more than 5 million people (Los Angeles is second at 4 million, Chicago at 3 million.) I suppose you could surmise a fictional "Metropolis" or "Gotham City" (the homes of Superman and Batman, respectively, both based loosely on New York) but it's kind of a stretch.
There are only nine cities in the United States with populations over 1 million (although San Jose is coming close.) The cities of this size west of Chicago are all in California (Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose) or Texas (San Antonio, Dallas) except for Phoenix, Arizona. All of those cities are VERY different from Chicago in geographic makeup: population density is one-half to one-quarter as high (western cities have LOTS of room to grow) and typically were built around the automobile, with rail service almost nonexistent. The only exception was the Los Angeles basin, where interurban commuter rail was originally common and spurred huge geographic growth, but the local electric interurbans and streetcars were all converted to bus by the 1950s/early 60s and heavy commuter rail was pretty much an afterthought.
As mentioned above, Milwaukee is north of Chicago (about a two-hour train ride) and Detroit is considerably northeatst of Chicago. Milwaukee's population is about 600,000. The other cities of comparable size to Milwaukee are a day's travel or more from Chicago: St. Louis, Minneapolis, Denver, Kansas City, Omaha--all cities with populations in the 300,000-600,000 range. Really, the next city to the west of Chicago that is of comparable size and population is Los Angeles.
by the way, "Cagney & Lacey" was set in New York. "Hill Street Blues" was shot in Los Angeles with some exterior shots in Chicago, and the producers deliberately made an effort to avoid pinpointing exactly where the show took place.
Dave-the-Train wrote: I guess that the very vague image I have in my head would relate to Hill Street Blues, Cagney and Lacey and the rest... which I realise is pretty hopeless as they subject areas were all over the place and not exactly "contiguous". (If that is the word). At least i'm not looking at Charlie's Angels for inspiration. I often think that you would all have a better understanding of how the rest of the world sees /pictures the USA if you considered the diet of TV and films from the US that we get fed. It's not exactly a real world but it is more "real" than any geography text book.
I guess that the very vague image I have in my head would relate to Hill Street Blues, Cagney and Lacey and the rest... which I realise is pretty hopeless as they subject areas were all over the place and not exactly "contiguous". (If that is the word). At least i'm not looking at Charlie's Angels for inspiration.
I often think that you would all have a better understanding of how the rest of the world sees /pictures the USA if you considered the diet of TV and films from the US that we get fed. It's not exactly a real world but it is more "real" than any geography text book.
Dave-the-Train wrote: Your point on finance is good... maybe I'll shuffle forward toward the 90s a bit. Some of my inspiration comes from the approaches to the river bridges in Kansas Cuty. I thought Milwaukee and "mo'town" were west of Chicago? Can't find my Rand Mcnalley yet again...
Your point on finance is good... maybe I'll shuffle forward toward the 90s a bit. Some of my inspiration comes from the approaches to the river bridges in Kansas Cuty.
I thought Milwaukee and "mo'town" were west of Chicago? Can't find my Rand Mcnalley yet again...
I think that Kansas City and St. Louis might be about all the choices (for "real" cities).
Detroit is well east of Chicago. Milwaukee is straight north, right along the lake, only about 90 miles. Almost a suburb. Population is around 600,000.
The thing about this country is that there is a lot of wide open space, and compared to your neck of the woods most of it is only recently developed (and huge areas are still pretty much deserted). For example, Arizona didn't become a state until 1912. The population was pretty much on the east coast and along the Gulf of Mexico for a ling time. Then the area between the coast and the Mississippi was grown into. The discovery of gold in California in the late 1840's led to a rush to the west coast, but the area between the eastern population and California was pretty much just a obstacle to be crossed. Indians, desert, mountains, lots of reasons not to stop and stay. As far as transportation, except for the Mississippi/Missouri River system, there was not much useful waterway, and the transcontinental railroad wasn't completed until 1869, so though there were raw materials in the west there wasn't really any way for industry to develop there.
Anyway, there is an incredibly abridged US history lesson. Don't know if it helps, but I hope it gives you a bit more to think about....
Good luck!
Jetrock...
Great stuff
Reminded me of that essential, ghastly word "gentrification"... we were always going on about it when I did my "Regional History of the North West" Degree Unit. (Come back John Walton, all is forgiven! [Er; i don't mean "John Boy"]. I gues that I'm familiar with the concept... updated with "Yuppeeisation or Yuppeefication with what I call "Trumpton Vernacular" "housing" with plastic neo Greco-Roman facades. YEUK! Trouble was they didn't convert to lofts but ripped everything down and built with whipwood and plastic. There's more shakes in that timber than Sheiks in the old Hollywood movies.
London is about 7 million so I guess Chicago would feel about the same - except for cultural differences... I'm not thinking of Chicagoland but the next step west... out toward (I think) Milwaukee. I've no idea how big that is.
I imagine that a fictional city of about 5 million? So Chicagoland would help.
I checked and it was the Kingsbury Branch that I was looking at... except this looks a lot more industrial and business with very little residential.
Anyway... your ideas (and all the other contributors on this thread0 are really helping me to get a better idea of what I am looking for.
THANKS!
V&SRR...
Thanks! I've never been called a UKer before...
I thought Milwaukee and "mo'town" were west of Chicago? Can't find my Rand Mcnalley yet again... I'm sure that thing goes on trips on its own...
Any more ideas will be greatly appreciated.
The "arc of cities" directly NNW/SSW of Chicago are generally known as "Chicagoland" and they are all basically suburbs of Chicago. About 9 million people live in the vicinity of Chicago, and while some of the cities are relatively self-contained, much activity is directed in towards the center. The same pattern happens in other United States urban centers: the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles Basin are similar (about 9 million in the Bay Area, around 20 million in the LA/Orange County basin) with semi-independent cities surrounding a central core. The dominant mode of transit is by car, with public transit taking a very distant second. I am somewhat familiar with Chicagoland territory (born in Skokie, much of my family lives in the Chicagoland suburbs) so I can provide a bit more detailed information about that.
For starters, the cities around Chicago don't have their own "Metra," they are served by Metra, or were served by Metra's predecessors. Amtrak stops once or twice in that neck of the woods (Aurora, I think) but that's all. Local service is provided by buses rather than independent streetcar lines. The diesel-powered Metra trains run on the same rails, for the most part, as freight trains, rather than their own track. Most of these cities are suburban rather than urban in character, predominantly single-family homes, with small downtowns of 2-4 story buildings and often "brownstone" type residences.
In some cases there are grade separations on berms, with short bridge/tunnel arrangements for cross traffic, but typically the Metra stations are at street level and most local streets that cross the tracks do so at grade crossings (the street crosses the track, rather than over or under the track.) Most of the stations that I saw on a couple of Metra trips were the older interurban stations, with a few small scruffy modern buildings similar to Amshacks. (By the way, tilt-up buildings are probably the same as sectional/panel built. The idea is that concrete is poured into forms on the ground and the walls are literally tilted up into place. Cheap, ugly, rectangular. Model them by painting a shoebox beige.) Closer to downtown there are some elevated stations, they seem fairly similar to "El" stations but the track also carries a mix of passenger and freight (saw plenty of freights going by waiting for Metra trains.)
I have some pics somewhere and will scan them as soon as they get a bit sorted out (I just moved, everything is still in boxes including my photos and most of my hobby stuff.)
As to regeneration, there was a long period of abandonment and decay between the era when people lived close to work and took the streetcar and the still-developing era of return to urban cores. The phase you might be looking for is "gentrification," a process normally started when a cheap, dangerous and run-down ethnic neighborhood is discovered by artists, punks and students looking for low rents and landlords willing to tolerate loud parties, band practices and unauthorized activities in their buildings. Eventually enough punks and students are present to draw businesses that appeal to punks and students (record stores, coffee shops, nightclubs) and before long the area has a certain "rustic charm" which appeals to professional types who don't want to live in the suburbs. These professional types move into the neighborhood, get the clubs shut down so they can get some sleep and raise property values so much that students and punks can't afford them. In trying to model this, I'd say turn up the "graffiti" and "unattended trash pile" knob, and if you can get (or modify) miniatures to look like punks and students (a few guys with mohawks and leather jackets, some skinny guys with suits and ties riding scooters for mods, etcetera) it would add considerable local charm. Most of this decay/gentrification, in the Chicagoland area, took place within Chicago proper, rather than the suburbs.
Yeah. A really big country. I lived in the UK for a few years, and the difference in scale, and perception of distance is incredible. The size and scale of the US seems to be difficult for Europeans (and UKers, some of whom have no interest in being Euopean, and I don't want to step on any toes!) to grasp.
I guess your fictional city is going to be something like St. Louis, MO, or possibly Denver. dilemma I see is that a city with the industry running down, and out, in the 80's is probably not going to have the money or incliation to have developed a commuter rail system. The cities where this did happen seem to me to be the newer, growing cities, especially along the West Coast. I could imagine something in Dallas or Houston (oil money, status symbols), or maybe Denver, while I don't see it in a St. Louis or Kansas City. I don't even know where I'm headed here. To support some of your thoughts you need a pretty dense population, in an "old" city. Once you get west of Chicago, there's not a lot of that to be found, that comes to my mind, anyway. So maybe you have a fictional twin to Chicago, but it really can't be much farther west, because there wasn't much between there and the west coast. Remember that most of the cities and towns between the Missippi River and the west coast came into existance to suppport the movement of people through them, not because there was any reason for a population center to develop. There are a lot of towns along the railroads, but that's the only reaon they were there. The big industry was agriculture, which does not lead to big cities. Maybe someone else has an idea.....
Great stuff agin! Thanks!
Sorry I live in a North-South country and never remember to re-orientate for the US. Go very far east or west here in the Uk and your feet get wet.
To be more specific I guess that I'm thinking of a fictional city about halfway between Chicago and the arc of cities actually directly "west" - from NNW to SSW - of Chicago. This could put it on a route for Amtrak links. If it's big enough (and progressive enough) it might just have its own "Metra" system.
I can't get my head round US distances... it's a bit of a big country.
I suspect that I'm trying to fit US and UK practices together... possibly a bit too much. So far I have behaved and kept my RR almost exclusively freight... but I do like some of the US passenger trains.
I especially like the bi-levels and other stuff using cab cars.
Regeneration is exactly the sort of thing that I'm looking at starting... providing a sense of change and opportunity to put old and new side by side. (i.e. I get the best of both worlds).
I don't mind little graffitti. A small amount (especially humerous or ironic) would be good. My business names mostly relate to movies and movie characters. (S & J Connors. Futures).
"Tilt up buildings"? Do you mean sectional/panel built? Is there a reasonable model of one by anyone?
Pics? Please?
I don't mean an El because they are specialist trains usually on their own tracks. i'm thinking more of a grade seperation which is largely on fills held up by retaining walls with fairly numerous bridges over the local roads. Local freight will still be at grade... using ideas from the Chicago street systems - which I think were mostly Milwaukee Road. Kingsbury Branch?
I thought that the 80s were a bit early for lofts. I'm looking for that beginning of turn around from run(ning) down apartment blocks close to industrial areas (from the days when people walked to work or caught the trolley) to the industry having changed/gone and new accomodation being developed.
Thanks all for your help. It's greatly appreciated.
mid-80s "west of Chicago"...doesn't narrow it down much. Two-thirds of the country is west of Chicago. Mid-80s creates a problem, in that there were very, very few commuter trains in the western US in the 1980s. Amtrak at its low point, aside from San Francisco and a few other places there are no streetcars, a few cities like San Diego are experimenting with "light rail" (the 1970s/80s term for a streetcar, as "trolley" was considered horribly old-fashioned) and expansion into suburbs where commuter rail never ventured is still happening furiously. Rail travel itself was at a low ebb.
Loft conversion: Generally only in big cities, and generally not in the west. Conversion to lofts has mostly been a 1990s to present day thing. Big cities in the 1980s central cities were generally not doing well, and other than a few token attempts at revitalization, most of the effort was to expand outward into suburbs which were reached by highways filled with cars. Except for the most forward-thinking communities, rail transit didn't fit into the picture at all.
Graffiti: In the west, not dreadful but bad. Again, it's a big city thing.
Horrible glass fronted 70s thing: Do you mean an Amshack? Amtrak never really bothers to build railroad stations, and they certainly didn't in the 1970s. Mostly they just used existing train stations, taken over from the private railroad companies, or they built a small, low-slung single-story tilt-up building (commonly known as an Amshack) and used it instead. In many cities, a big, grand union station would sit boarded up and dilapidated for decades, with passenger business done in the Amshack.
"on a string of bridges"--I assume you mean elevated trains? Generally, the only place where you'd see an "el" is in the biggest cities in the eastern and midwestern United States, especially in the 1980s. They weren't used in the western half of the country at all, so far as I know. In Chicago, the el is generally run above city streets, and there are businesses on the sides of those streets, but that's the only el I have direct experience with.
LongIslandTom wrote:[Safeco Field I think is an absolute must-visit place for baseball fans who also love trains... The BNSF mainline runs past the stadium directly outside the right outfield bleachers, and on average a BNSF train passes every 10 minutes or so.
Is that the stadium where the trains run through/under the gear/tracks for the opening roof to slide out/open on?
Dave-the-Train wrote:Um ... why are the columns protected with geo-blanket or boxed in if they are going to be blown up? I can understand it if the building is being gutted to be re-furbished... but???
PA&ERR
No problem! I know the feeling. Every time I cross the border into Wales I cringe at the bi-lingual signs. I'm just waiting for the government to tell the English Counties that they have to go bilingual too in order not to discriminate against the Welsh.
When the DLR extension opened to Lewisham the "Stay off the tracks" warning signs were in a huge number of languages... all with the same pictogram. Why use a pictogram at all? I think the signs had nine languages... not enough we had at least 15 major groups in Lewisham. My last neighbours were Sri Lankan Christians... got out in what they were wearing... lovely people who all worked hard every day - except Sunday. One side of my family were probably refugees about 200 years ago.
Thanks again for all the info!
Just a further thought... would there be some buildings that wouldn't be imploded? ( not half so much fun ) but would be knocked down with the good old ball-on-a-chain and jack hammers? I got the whole idea from a HUGE crane smashing a factory down in West London last time I was down there. Figured that the cut up steel skeleton would make some good gondola loads while trucks could handle the rubble... the new Athearn Macks are superb...
Um ... why are the columns protected with geo-blanket or boxed in if they are going to be blown up? I can understand it if the building is being gutted to be re-furbished... but???
Then again... if it's being imploded... they pull out the insides and then collapse the walls inward? Wouldn't this look much the same as a burnt out shell?
TIA
Referencing only the demolition site:
By your time period, implosion was the preferred demolition technique for urban areas. CDI had been in business for a quarter of a century by then. Depending on the stage of demolition, the structure would either be selectively gutted (skeletonized at ground floor and at selected floors above ground, other floors relatively untouched,) gutted and prepped (wooden boxes or geo-cloth wraps around columns, wires to a central junction point, with one leg running off to a safe location for the blasting machine) or a pile of broken building materials mounded on the ground. The transition from gutted and prepped to a junk pancake only takes a couple of seconds.
The only time walls would still be standing is if the building had burned and collapsed - and they wouldn't have been left standing long (too dangerously unstable.)
Just a thought
Chuck (who lives where casinos implode every time a certain blonde comes to town)
One thing I've noticed is that the more flamboyant graffiti didn't start appearing until the late 80s or early 90s. This not a hard and fast rule and there are certainly exceptions to be found, but I feel the further back you go the less gaudy and less noticable graffiti should be. Also not all of it should be "serious".
I remember back in the early 80s I worked in the Washington D.C. area. Every day I would pass under a railroad bridge (plate girder bridge) just before I passed the Washington D.C. LDS Temple. The Temple is a beautiful piece of architecture. It must have reminded someone of the Emerald City from the movie The Wizard of Oz because on the side of the railroad bridge I mentioned earlier, someone spary painted "Surrender Dorothy".
-George
"And the sons of Pullman porters and the sons of engineers ride their father's magic carpet made of steel..."
It depends on a lot of things. How heavy industry is used, if rents are higher it eliminates the lower class crowd, if rents low or buildings are empty it attracts homeless, druggies, crime, then people stay away from area. They want to feel safe, day and night.
A good mix would be fairly industrial, with a typical daytime shops, (lunchenettes,delis, pawnshops or thrift stores, a small druggist, a gas station/ autobody /repair shop, etc) and some low/mid price rent type housing.
Most long bridges I've seen didn't have any buildings underneath, except an occasional newstand/ hotdog vendor, but if there's enough room, I've seen cars and truck trailers parked under them. Even a ramshackle plywood/cardboard shack for the homeless.