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  #41  
Old Posted Apr 26, 2019, 1:12 PM
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Originally Posted by Markitect View Post
Milwaukee's first two courthouses were on the east side along with city hall. The current courthouse was built on the west side, only after significant east vs. west bickering among the community...and that was a good 7-8 decades after the rivalries of pioneer times!
It's interesting though because of the way it reminded me of how, in a lot of places, there is significant rivalry between cities and their counties. In my own city in 1927, the new city hall and the county courthouse were supposed to be art deco masterpieces of unified style, material, and color. The county has always been significantly more conservative and staid than the city, there was a fight, and what we ended up with was a giant pink art deco wedding cake of a city hall, smack next door to the big neoclassical courthouse box it came in. Our city/county rivalry is right there for everyone to observe and admire to this day. In Milwaukee's case it was interesting to see how the original three competing settlements were at each other's throats, and the legacy translated down through the decades to a unified government with one government body in one original cutthroat town and another government body in the other.

Nobody's said much about how the third town behaved while the other two were actively trying to undermine the other, though... Any insight?
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  #42  
Old Posted Apr 26, 2019, 2:42 PM
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Originally Posted by hauntedheadnc View Post
Nobody's said much about how the third town behaved while the other two were actively trying to undermine the other, though... Any insight?

none of the accounts I've read mention much about walker's point and its role. sounds like it was mostly a fight between the east side and west side, and Kilbourn is typically blamed for the fracas.

guess the good folks of walker's point just sat back, brewed beer, ate popcorn, and watched the fun.
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  #43  
Old Posted Apr 27, 2019, 2:25 AM
Markitect Markitect is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by hauntedheadnc
Nobody's said much about how the third town behaved while the other two were actively trying to undermine the other, though... Any insight?
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Originally Posted by Boisebro View Post
none of the accounts I've read mention much about walker's point and its role. sounds like it was mostly a fight between the east side and west side, and Kilbourn is typically blamed for the fracas.
Ironically, George Walker (founder of the third town, Walker's Point) probably had the best-positioned site out of the three. In those early days when everything moved by water, he was closer to the lake (unlike Kilbourntown); he had a relatively flat shoreline (unlike the step bluffs of Juneautown); and had potential to build safe harbors for schooners and steamers to dock along three different rivers (only 1 for Juneau, and 2 for Kilbourn).

Unfortunately, relatively young George Walker was a rather inexperienced businessman, lacking a partner or high profile connections and such. He also suffered some legal issues with his land...first with some claim jumpers, and later because the federal government sold him some other land that by treaty belonged to Native Americans. So while Walker was sorting out those things, Juneau and Kilbourn were able to establish their own settlements.
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  #44  
Old Posted Dec 16, 2019, 3:43 PM
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So, who here remembers this classic:

Video Link


I ask because I spent some time with some relatives over the weekend down in Anderson, SC, and when tooling around a map of same today, I came across this...

A doughnut block in the wild! Now of course by SimCity standards it's not a true doughnut block, but it's about as close as you'll come out here in the real world.

Who knew? Did you know? I didn't know.
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  #45  
Old Posted Dec 16, 2019, 7:40 PM
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Originally Posted by hauntedheadnc View Post
Note that Aiken appears to have been designed, in 1835 no less, by a time-traveling SimCity aficionado. All the streets in the original part of town are less streets than they are boulevards with wide, planted medians. Where these boulevards cross it leaves a small square of land that in two places downtown has been given over to fountains, and in the rest of town has been given over to plantings, just like the medians themselves. Likely, this plan was the result of the prevailing belief at the time that mosquitoes could only fly so far before dying, and this was an attempt to build some malaria and yellow fever protection into the city plan. Columbia, SC's wide downtown streets were made so broad for that exact reason as well.
Columbia is fortunate to have such an expansive grid system to accommodate future growth and development, but exactly how it was laid out and located resulted in a less visually appealing setting. The city couldn't be built right on the banks of the Congaree River due to flooding concerns and today much of that land is owned privately which means that the city's greatest recreational asset isn't as easily accessible as it could be. There has been some movement on that front with the continued development of the greenway and USC has plans to extend its campus to the river but that's a long-term project. There was actually a plan released prior to the recession to develop a downtown research campus between USC's campus and the river to include a grand new riverfront park, but the economic downturn coupled with poor oversight and leadership essentially shelved the entire plan, although some elements have been developed and the park is supposed to be a long-term project.

Secondly, unlike Georgia's planned cities, Columbia's original city plan didn't include landscaped medians, squares, or a central common; gathering spaces don't seem to have even figured into the plans. The state capital grounds are full of statues and monuments and it essentially operates as a park with the statehouse itself and its grand features making it a popular photography hotspot in the city which compensates a little bit for that deficiency, but Savannah beautifully illustrates the aesthetic that landscaped areas and well-maintained civic spaces can give to a planned city.

And as for the wide streets, they present a bit more of a challenge today than anything. Assembly Street serves as the best example here, being six-eight lanes wide and serving as a psychological barrier between the Congaree Vista district (a revitalized commercial area of historic commercial buildings, train stations, etc) and the Main Street corridor north of the statehouse. The street was beautified on the stretch south of the statehouse a few years ago, but it wasn't narrowed and I think something more interesting could have been done with the median besides brick pavers and iron fencing to prevent jaywalking, but that stretch of Assembly is flanked by USC on both sides so it already has a bit more natural synergy. Ideally the entire length of Assembly Street downtown could be a showcase Complete Street overhaul, but Columbia is surprisingly hilly in several spots downtown (I'm pretty sure that's due to the the city being in the Sandhill region of the Carolinas/Georgia which roughly tracks with the Fall Line) which makes bicycling and even some walking longer distances challenging. Even so, a standard road diet to eliminate some lanes on key thoroughfares like Assembly would be an improvement but I think there are fears about traffic being negatively impacted, during the workweek as well as on game day Saturdays. I think such fears are unfounded, but alas...

Finally, there is the issue of just how expansive the grid system is and consequently how much of downtown is undeveloped and disconnected. There are a ton of surface lots that need to be developed to give downtown more cohesiveness, including some along Assembly Street whose width already serves as a detriment to creating synergy. Then within the past 25 years or so, you have state government unloading large tracts of land downtown that formerly housed a state prison complex (25 acres) and the state mental health complex (181 acres)--on opposite sides of downtown at that. That's definitely a good thing as it presents an opportunity to get them developed and added to the tax rolls, but such developments have to occur in phases over several years to become fully built-out and there are obstacles to overcome so that they become fully ingrained in the urban fabric of the city. The city bought the state prison complex property in 1994 and the final phase of the residential development that was built there was completed last year--a total of 24 years. The redevelopment of the former state mental health complex is said to be the largest urban revitalization project in a downtown city east of the Mississippi; the state sold it to a master developer in 2010 and who knows when full build-out will be. Because the complex was self-contained and many historic buildings on the campus will be redeveloped, the grid system will not be extended; hopefully it won't wind up feeling like a huge upscale mixed-use neighborhood separate from the rest of downtown when it should be properly integrated into the rest of the city and hopefully facilitate more development to connect it to other commercial districts in the urban core. In a city Columbia's size, that's a real challenge and I'm unaware of a huge segregated parcel of land in a planned/gridded city that was retrofitted to seamlessly integrate into the urban fabric. I'd love to see such an example if it exists but I'm aware of some smaller developments that are doing that or something similar like Eastern Wharf in Savannah.
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  #46  
Old Posted Dec 16, 2019, 8:25 PM
Citylover94 Citylover94 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by hauntedheadnc View Post
So, who here remembers this classic:

Video Link


I ask because I spent some time with some relatives over the weekend down in Anderson, SC, and when tooling around a map of same today, I came across this...

A doughnut block in the wild! Now of course by SimCity standards it's not a true doughnut block, but it's about as close as you'll come out here in the real world.

Who knew? Did you know? I didn't know.
Rutland, VT has one of these although it is hard to tell in the google maps satellite image that it is a park. I am not sure how that happened, but it is kind of funny because it is essentially exactly what the Simcity donut block parks are like with no direct road access.
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  #47  
Old Posted Dec 16, 2019, 8:30 PM
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hauntedheadnc hauntedheadnc is offline
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Originally Posted by Citylover94 View Post
Rutland, VT has one of these although it is hard to tell in the google maps satellite image that it is a park. I am not sure how that happened, but it is kind of funny because it is essentially exactly what the Simcity donut block parks are like with no direct road access.
If you look at the streetview from 55 Washington Street, you can get a glimpse of the park up the alley.
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"To sustain the life of a large, modern city in this cloying, clinging heat is an amazing achievement. It is no wonder that the white men and women in Greenville walk with a slow, dragging pride, as if they had taken up a challenge and intended to defy it without end." -- Rebecca West for The New Yorker, 1947
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  #48  
Old Posted Dec 16, 2019, 10:09 PM
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Originally Posted by Boisebro View Post
New Plymouth, Idaho (just outside of Boise) was designed in the 1890's by the Plymouth Society of Chicago.




it hasn't grown much since its founding, though being part of the Boise metro, it could become a bedroom community at some point:

I don't think it'll ever be a "bedroom community" for Boise unless Boise gets some sort of regular rail service that just happens to go through it. It takes an hour to get there now, and there's dozens of miles of farmland between Boise and it. Even Middleton is kind of pushing things. I think anything that far northwest of Boise is unlikely to develop anytime soon. West of Boise, even though prices have been creeping up, there's still a ton of room for development between Meridian and Nampa, and double the ton of developable land due west from Caldwell and Nampa, and south of Meridian toward Kuna. And as all that land gets filled in, traffic is going to put a lot of pressure of distance, maybe even pushing things back toward Mountain Home before development gets as far as New Plymouth or Ontario.
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  #49  
Old Posted Feb 5, 2021, 1:12 PM
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Behold! Diligent research has unearthed another donut block, this time in Camden, South Carolina.
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"To sustain the life of a large, modern city in this cloying, clinging heat is an amazing achievement. It is no wonder that the white men and women in Greenville walk with a slow, dragging pride, as if they had taken up a challenge and intended to defy it without end." -- Rebecca West for The New Yorker, 1947
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  #50  
Old Posted Feb 6, 2021, 5:01 PM
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Originally Posted by Pedestrian View Post
But everybody was in a hurry to rebuild and started right away replacing structures as and where they had been. Ultimately the plan was ignored.
That would've been dope
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