Finding the unexpected in the everyday.
September 28, 1969 Operations began for an extension of the Chicago “L” rapid transit system serving the Windy City and a few of its surrounding suburbs within Cook County, Illinois. (The “L” stands for “elevated.”) The newly completed extension was named after Dan Ryan (1894-1961), who served as a member of the Cook County Board... Continue Reading →
September 25, 2009 After three months of construction, a train station in the central part of Washington State was officially opened. Icicle Station is located just one mile (1.6 kilometers) northeast of the downtown area of the city of Leavenworth. This station is served by the Amtrak-operated Empire Builder, a daily long-distance passenger train that... Continue Reading →
In the years since it became one of the original routes of the U.S. Numbered Highway System, U.S. Route 66 (US 66) has left an enduring and unrivaled cultural imprint. Journalist and historian Michael Wallis (born in 1945) summarized this legacy in his 1990 best-selling book Route 66: The Mother Road. “Route 66,” Wallis noted... Continue Reading →
On June 18, 1925, the sixth of the regional meetings of the Joint Board on Interstate Highways was held in Boston for the New England states. The specific location for this gathering was the boardroom of the Massachusetts Department of Public Works in the Massachusetts State House. This building, which was constructed during the 1790s,... Continue Reading →
September 14, 2009 Fair Park station became one of the four original stops of the Green Line of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART), an agency serving the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex of Texas, to be opened to the public. Fair Park station is in the South Dallas neighborhood of the Lone Star State city famously... Continue Reading →
The terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 individuals in the vicinity of the World Trade Center in the southernmost part of New York City’s borough of Manhattan; the Pentagon in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area; and – where a hijacked airplane went down after... Continue Reading →
September 10, 2010 A major milestone for bicycling in the Washington, DC., area took place when Capital Bikeshare (abbreviated as CaBi) made its formal debut. At the time, this system had a grand total of 400 bicycles at 49 stations. Ashley Halsey III vividly described the launch of CaBi in the next day’s edition of... Continue Reading →
A major milestone for the portion of U.S. 10 (US 10) in North Dakota took place when the segment of that east-west route between the cities of Fargo and Mapleton in Cass County was fully paved. This paving project brought about the Flickertail State’s first hard-surfaced, all-weather section of US 10, which had been one... Continue Reading →
September 8, 2008 A large-scale parking garage in Anchorage, Alaska, was officially opened for use. Construction on this 10-story building, which encompasses a total of 368,830 square feet (34,265 square meters), began on February 1 of the previous year. The upper nine stories of this structure are used for parking, while the first story contains... Continue Reading →
A week after the fourth regional meeting of the Joint Board on Interstate Highways had taken place in Atlanta, the fifth of these meetings -- likewise focused on potential U.S. Highway Numbered System routes -- was held in New York City on June 15, 1925. The previous day’s edition of the New York Times reported,... Continue Reading →
