WEBSITE SUNDAY Additions

Yesterday, I invited over Doug Kerr, CC Slater, and Chris Jordan for the first WEBSITE SUNDAY. basically, yesterday was all of us in my computer room/office working on websties, doing research, and having a good time. We spent about 10 hours on different things.

Website Sunday or weekend has been something Doug and I had been talking about since I moved to New York in February. And with the slow and dead witner months, what a better way to be productive. Doug was able to work on Connecticut Ends, Complete the debut of Massachusetts Ends, and do some Rhode Island page work. Slater worked on another page of his and Doug's trip to Philadelphia last month, and I, while in the midst of doing laundry and making lunch and dinner for everyone, started on South Carolina but suffered writers block and decided to do some adds to the Georgia, Missouri, and Tennessee galleries . CJ left early since he was feeling ill.

It was definitely a productive day (more after the update info) as we talked about new ideas and possibilties for our sites, Slater will be scanning a 1951 NC Drivers manual for me in the future, and we paln on doing more over the winter.

Now here's the goods on the updates:

Georgia:

Six shield photos. Five from Waycross from JP Natisiatka and one from Rabun County Georgia from Howard S. I have enough Waycross photos that I may in fact develop a feature just based on all the photos, or at least we all joked about it.

Three Road Scenes: Three great bridge shots from Howard. Two are of covered bridges near Atlanta including one in Smyrna not that far from I-285. Both covered bridges are great ideas for feature pages. The other photo is of a wood decked bridge on Old GA 180.

Missouri:

12 photos from David Backlin. It would have been 15 but three great button copy shots are on Slater's site and I decided not to include them at this time. Some great button copy all over the place and a very interesting backplate on a speed limit 65 sign.

Tennessee:

Two photos. One from Howard S. of a very unique town called Gruetli-Laager. I'd love to know the history about the town. I did a search for information but nothing at all about it. If it is like Fuquay-Varina in North Carolina. It would be the result of a merger of two towns, which is probably the case. The other photo from David, is a unique set of street signs for US 78 outside of Memphis.

Next is South Carolina, I started on most of it. But hit a wall in trying to put together the amount of news on both I-73 and the Carolina Bays Parkway that have occurred in the state over the past six months. I think after coming back for Christmas I should be recharged to finish South Carolina. I am also going to try and flush out some information on some of the Auto Trails that were in South Carolina, that I have yet to list, based on scans from Mike Roberson.

But overall, WEBSITE SUNDAY was a great success. We will be having more here in New York over the winter. Enough so that doug has left a spare computer here so he can easily work on stuff for these occassions. CJ and Slater both brought laptops. It reminded me al ot of group projects I did in college where the group would spend a day doing various tasks. Specifically the Media Management class my senior year that got the best grade Dr. Jabro had give in two years. It was groups that functioned as we did yesterday, that I got the best grades in.

Paper Highways: The Unbuilt New Orleans Bypass (Proposed I-410)

There are many examples around the United States of proposed freeway corridors in urban areas that never saw the light of day for one reason or another. They all fall somewhere in between the little-known and the infamous and from the mundane to the spectacular. One of the more obscure and interesting examples of such a project is the short-lived idea to construct a southern beltway for the New Orleans metropolitan area in the 1960s and 70s. Greater New Orleans and its surrounding area grew rapidly in the years after World War II, as suburban sprawl encroached on the historically rural downriver parishes around the city. In response to the development of the region’s Westbank and the emergence of communities in St. Charles and St. John the Baptist Parishes as viable suburban communities during this period, regional planners began to consider concepts for new infrastructure projects to serve this growing population. The idea for a circular freeway around the southern perimeter of t

Hernando de Soto Bridge (Memphis, TN)

The newest of the bridges that span the lower Mississippi River at Memphis, the Hernando de Soto Bridge was completed in 1973 and carries Interstate 40 between downtown Memphis and West Memphis, AR. The bridge’s signature M-shaped superstructure makes it an instantly recognizable landmark in the city and one of the most visually unique bridges on the Mississippi River. As early as 1953, Memphis city planners recommended the construction of a second highway bridge across the Mississippi River to connect the city with West Memphis, AR. The Memphis & Arkansas Bridge had been completed only four years earlier a couple miles downriver from downtown, however it was expected that long-term growth in the metro area would warrant the construction of an additional bridge, the fourth crossing of the Mississippi River to be built at Memphis, in the not-too-distant future. Unlike the previous three Mississippi River bridges to be built the city, the location chosen for this bridge was about two

Memphis & Arkansas Bridge (Memphis, TN)

Like the expansion of the railroads the previous century, the modernization of the country’s highway infrastructure in the early and mid 20th Century required the construction of new landmark bridges along the lower Mississippi River (and nation-wide for that matter) that would facilitate the expected growth in overall traffic demand in ensuing decades. While this new movement had been anticipated to some extent in the Memphis area with the design of the Harahan Bridge, neither it nor its neighbor the older Frisco Bridge were capable of accommodating the sharp rise in the popularity and demand of the automobile as a mode of cross-river transportation during the Great Depression. As was the case 30 years prior, the solution in the 1940s was to construct a new bridge in the same general location as its predecessors, only this time the bridge would be the first built exclusively for vehicle traffic. This bridge, the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, was completed in 1949 and was the third

Anonymous said…

The website weekend (or in this case Sunday) worked out very well. I am looking forward to more of that this winter as it allows me to be very productive.

For more completeness, here's the updates I worked on over the weekend...

Massachusetts Route Ends - Fifteen new ends introduced from around the
Commonwealth, in this, the premier offering of Massachusetts Route Ends.
http://www.state-ends.com/massachusetts/

Connecticut State Route Ends - Some additional ends from around the state
added, or updated.
http://www.gribblenation.net/ctends/

Rhode Island Roadtrips - Added various photos from 2004 and 2005 to my Ocean
State collection.
http://www.gribblenation.net/nepics/ri/

Cornish-Windsor Bridge - Take a trip to the longest historic covered bridge
in the United States, which crosses the Connecticut River between New
Hampshire and Vermont.
http://www.gribblenation.net/nepics/cornish/

Enjoy!

-Doug Kerr

6:52 AM

Georgia Road Geek said…

Great work on your websites, y'all.

Long live the "Gribble Nation". :)

7:42 AM

I put up another Philly trip page(second in what looks to be a series of 5), added some snaps I took w/my new camera on an UPDATE! page, drunk an amount of coffee that astounded Adam(but not Doug, he's seen that bit already).

Look for that 1951 NC Drivers manual in PDF after the Philly Pages are done. Adam also gave(!) me a 1954 NC Motor Traffic Law book that's a great deal more comprehensive, not to mention screamingly funny in spots. Not only that, but I copped to a bunch of road maps from my Youth, which I've been enjoying, and highway snaps from which may wander onto a page in future.

I'd be remiss in not mentioning that Adam is a good host. He fixed Count of Monty Cristo sandwiches for lunch and Corporate America steaks for dinner. They were good. mmmmmmmm! Doug brought snax. I brought my freeloading chain smokin' arse and sucked down mass quantities. I said funny stuff, but then I always do.

8:12 PM