Florida Friday; Lake Eola Park

From 2014 through to early 2016 one of my running routes took through downtown Orlando via Lake Eola Park.

Lake Eola is a 23 acre lake in downtown Orlando bounded by Robinson Street (Florida State Road 526) to the north, Eola Drive to the east, Central Avenue to the south, and Rosalind Avenue (Northbound FL 527) to the west. The photo above was taken on a morning run sometime in the fall of 2014 looking west towards downtown. The land that Lake Eola Park sits one was donated in 1883 but didn't become a Orlando City Park until 1892. Lake Eola Park is generally considered to be the heart of downtown Orlando and is the site of many of the local events. Just west of Lake Eola US 17/92 once ran on Orange Avenue through downtown Orlando on what is now southbound FL 527.

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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

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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

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