Driving through Time features roughly 2700 photographs and 76 interactive maps of the Blue Ridge Parkway. The website allows students, researchers, and digital tourists to uncover hidden stories, hear forgotten voices, and understand the often wrenching choices that the construction and preservation of a scenic parkway in a populated region have necessarily entailed.
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posted by netbros
on Jan 22, 2012 -
4 comments
New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has just finished the initial drilling phase of the
East Side Access project to bring the Long Island Railroad to Grand Central Terminal. What are they doing with the
tunnel boring machine?
Giving it a funeral. (NYTimes link, use this if you need to get past the paywall) Instead of removing the $8 million machine, the contractor responsible for this portion of the project has decided it will be cheaper to leave it in place at the end of the tunnel. This is not without precedent; some of the TBMs used for the
Channel Tunnel were turned off the tunnel mainline and left buried.
posted by spitefulcrow
on Jul 25, 2011 -
45 comments
"Day by day we pass by vacant lots downtown ... Neighbourhoods that, although having a huge potential, have more and more unused spaces ... Sometimes, the tourists are the ones who open our eyes by mentioning or questioning whether this situation is normal. On other occasions, we pay attention to it for a moment only because the secondary problems that those spaces imply affect us directly. But in most of the cases, they are only a part of our way."
Habit Makes Us Blind is a series of colorful images by Spanish studio
Espai MGR that seeks to draw attention to the problem of wasted space in urban environments (specifically, in the city of Valencia) -- by building conceptual LEGO structures in them. [
via]
posted by bayani
on May 9, 2011 -
8 comments
Scaffoldage. If you like construction, with particular reference to terrifyingly lashed-together metal or bamboo rods reaching dizzyingly up into the sky, then you've come to the right thread.
posted by The Discredited Ape
on Apr 5, 2011 -
23 comments
"I never was one to like to be intimidated. So I just take it off the table. If it's not on the table they can't use it."
Charlie, not a man for small gestures, took his secret off the table and put it on the front page of the Houston Post, whose October 7, 1988, edition carried the headline
"Transvestite Now Claims Probe Linked to Lifestyle" and a color photograph of McGuire in full drag.
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posted by rtha
on Feb 7, 2011 -
24 comments
Church and 30th St. San Francisco MUNI Construction is a 12 minute time lapse film showing 3.5 days of construction crews replacing MUNI tracks in San Francisco. "This is a time-lapse video showing the replacement of the MUNI tracks in front of my house. Demolition began on the evening of Friday, October 8, and work continued around the clock until early in the morning of Tuesday, October 12. The MUNI folks were nice enough to distribute earplugs to those of us in the immediate vicinity."
posted by hippybear
on Oct 14, 2010 -
27 comments
"What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street" - "
Looting Main Street" Matt Taibbi takes an in-depth look into how finance, deregulation, corruption, synthetic rate swaps, and greed decimated Birmingham, AL.
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posted by The Whelk
on Apr 12, 2010 -
42 comments
The New Road. A photo essay by Rob Amberg on the building of I-26 through Madison County in the mountains of North Carolina.
via
posted by 1f2frfbf
on Feb 3, 2009 -
10 comments
A glance will show / Why Phoebe Snow / Prefers this route / To Buffalo.
And Phoebe's right / No route is quite / As short as Road / of Anthracite.
In 1908 the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad began work on the
New Jersey Cut-Off to make its New York to Buffalo mainline (the Road of Anthracite
so liked by
Phoebe Snow) even shorter and faster. It was to have no grade crossings, and was to be as straight and level as possible — through hilly terrain. The 28-mile
Lackawanna Cut-Off, as it is now known, was built over three years, cost $11 million, and was an
engineering marvel of massive reinforced concrete bridges, enormous cuts, and the largest railroad embankment in the world. All of this has been
abandoned for years, though there are plans afoot to restore the Cut-Off for
commuter rail.
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posted by parudox
on Dec 24, 2008 -
17 comments
"This is
a major innovation...and in places that are affected by high winds and earthquakes, it looks like it's going to make a big difference." And it only adds about $15 to the cost of an average 2000 sq. ft. house - the Bostich
HurriQuake nail.
posted by jaimev
on Nov 28, 2006 -
42 comments
