Monday, April 4, 2011

Weekend Grab-bag of Stuff

For all my out of town readers (both of you), this was the scene (at left) in Lorain just a few days ago, on March 30th. Since then, the snow melted and it appears that Spring is underway again.

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It was just a week ago (on the way home from the grocery store) that I swung by the proposed site for the new Lorain High School over by the Black River. I wanted to understand where the school was going to be, as well as grab a few shots of the undeveloped site for use in a future 'then and now' photo pairing.

Here are a few of my shots.


The sign from the other photo is seen off in the distance.
However, the 'now' photo to go with this 'then' photo will never take place. On Thursday, it was announced that the riverfront site was officially dead as a location for the new high school. This is due to the fact that Lorain was unable to come with $3 million to set aside to cover any 'potential extra costs associated with the riverfront site. (You can read and watch the story here on the Morning Journal website.)

I've gotta admit, I was never of fan of the riverfront site. And after driving over there to take a look – and seeing the boat launch nearby, the railroad tracks, the power lines and the river behind behind the site  – I couldn't see it at all.
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My recent blogs on the Avon Lake power plant seemed to trigger some sort of cosmic coincidence.

After writing about the 1926 opening of the plant a few days ago, I stumbled upon some more information regarding the plant on microfilm a few days ago. (That's usually the way it happens.)

The photo (at left) appeared on the front page of the May 24, 1950 Lorain Journal and tells of a major addition. (Give it a click so you can read it.)

I received a few emails from regular readers about the power plant blog posts; Dennis Lamont sent me this neat aerial view of the plant and the surrounding area from the bing search engine. The aerial views from that site are always pretty remarkable.


It's interesting to compare the photo of the 1950 addition to the recent aerial view. It's incredible how many additions have been added in the last sixty years.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Love the early picture ....smoking like a chimney afire, almost as bad as the open hearths under full oxygen. Then there is all the fly ash that was dumped where the new stadium is ...at the time it was predicted to be the end of the world. Today (you can see them in the photo) are the great huge precipitators on the west end of the plant that take care of most of that stuff. Makes you glad there is such a thing as the clean air act!
Dennis

Anonymous said...

I spent a summer working part time at the Avon Lake CEI plant helping the crew with their efficiency readings. When the plant was working at a particular load, a dozen of us would walk through the plant to various locations and take readings for 12 minutes. A teacher and I were the only 2 man crew - we went to a meter set up in the basement and had to read 87 different temperature readings in those 12 minutes. The last reading was the temperature in the immediate area and was rarely below 80 degrees. One of the crew was a recently fired air traffic controller, so it must have been the summer of 1981. Sometimes it took hours for the plant to get to a certain load, so we had to bring newspapers and books to spend our time between readings. We also had to wear long pants, long sleeve shirts, safety glasses and goggles, a hard hat, and ear plugs for this summer job. I was paid $4.50 an hour for that part time job.

John Kovacs