JCC My hometown (image heavy)

I was eight years old and running with a dime in my hand
Into the bus stop to pick up a paper for my old man
I'd sit on his lap in that big old Buick and steer as we drove through town
He'd tousle my hair and say, son take a good look around
This is your hometown

ITT I show you my hometown, you show me yours.

I live in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Today, I took a ride on the bike along the Amstel river. I started at the southernmost spot that had anything to do with Amsterdam: the ban pole.



This pole, along with five others, marked the area of the city's jurisdiction up to about 200 years ago. If you were banned from the city, it meant you were thrown beyond the ban pole.




The Amstel river, right next to the ban pole.


A house along the river.


A windmill along the river.


Just another house. I'm not jealous or anything.


A house on the East bank.


Those buildings in the back actually stand on the bank of the same river you see in front of you.


The city limits. Warning! If your car is over eight years old means you suck.


My bike and the ring road. Still doesn't look very urban, but that's also because I waited a long time to make the photo without any other people walking into it.


And we're in the city. The thing on the left is pompously called the Rembrandt Tower.


Coming up on the place of the old city gates. To the left and right used to be bulwarks. Now it's day tripping around the clock. Amstel Hotel to the right, where Lennon had his bed-in.

This is my trip (follow the yellow line from south to north):



I stopped at where the old city wall used to be. I might do the last bit - from city wall to actual dam in the Amstel (Amsterdam) the next time the weather's nice. For now... that's my hometown!

 

Pawtucket, Rhode Island
Birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution
Global HQ of Hasbro Toys & Games
Home of the Longest Baseball Game (32 Innings at McCoy Stadium)

 

<3 Nederlands. I need to get back there, and catch up over another meal Watto. Probably next year, and will have to get lots of oranje clothes for the baby.

 

Staten Island, NY
AKA New York City's forgotten borough
AKA Staten Italy
AKA Trash Town
AKA Shaolin...Wu tang!

 

Ypsilanti, Michigan
Boyhood home of Iggy Pop
Location of Eastern Michigan University
Contains a famously phallic water tower


They call this "the brick dick." I have no idea why.


A convenience store with a big old cow on it. I think the cow is meant to imply that they have fresh dairy products there. You can tell from the sign that most people just go there to buy beer, though.


Tattoo place, right near the bus depot and the strip joint where they have amateur night. Miley Cyrus once got a tattoo here to signify her support of gay rights. I once got a tattoo here, too, but it wasn't to signify anything. My tattoo is just about itself. My artist was Carl--he's really good.


Bar and restaurant where my friend Michael and his husband perform with their drag troupe. In addition to traditional drag stuff, they have bingo games to raise money for different charities. Just yesterday they were raising money for the Human Rights Campaign. I was too broke to buy my way into the game, or I would have gone.


It's like a small town ghetto. It's a smhetto.

 

Cool, I have a famously phallic tower coming up too.

 

My favorite opening post of 2018!

I'll do more, but this is a photo from my Saturday dog walk. Sign of the times, literally.

 

Current city: Philadelphia, PA
Technically - Malvern, about 15 minutes east of West Chester, but you say Philadelphia to people you meet because most people haven't heard of the other two unless you're familiar with West Chester University which personally I've heard of, but never visited. Philly is a nice place to visit, but traffic and such makes it a city I'm glad I don't live in. Malvern's claim to fame appears to be the site of some Civil War battles. As for semi-currently, Kevin Smith was going to film the Mallrats sequel at the Exton Square Mall (15 minutes away from Malvern), but that project has been put on hold and probably will never happen.

Previous residence: Bloomsburg, PA
Again, no one has ever heard of it. It's in the middle of the state and about 2.5 hours away from Penn State Main campus traveling west and 1.5 hours away from the Pocono Mountains / New Jersey border travel east on Route 80. Bloomsburg is famous for the Bloomsburg Fair which is celebrating its 163rd year this year. Last year's attendance was approximately 405,000 people. Bloomsburg is about 15 minutes away from Danville which is the site of Geisinger Health System. Obama mentioned and praised Geisinger in one of his speeches on health care.

Previous residence Honorable Mentions:
Old Forge, PA: aka "The Pizza Capital of the World"
Stroudsburg, PA: aka "The Poconos"
Scranton, PA: aka "The Electric City" see The Office (US version)
Long Island, NY: lived there for a year at the age of 4, no memory of it
Shawnee Mission, KS: birthplace, no memory of it

I've never really been sure what my "Hometown" is when people ask since my dad's job moved him around a lot. Since I grew up in Scranton I guess I consider that my hometown.

 

I've lived in Oak Park, Illinois, for a quarter century. We're famous for being the early homes of Ernest Hemingway and Frank Lloyd Wright. We have more Frank Lloyd Wright homes here than any other place in the world, as well as his unity temple. Oak Park famously held the line in the late 60s, early 70s against white flight, with the result that the town has been symbolic of both the possibilities of racial diversity and the ongoing stark racial segregation of Chicago, which looks like this visually:



The red parts are majority white population, the blue parts majority African American. The yellow parts, majority Hispanic, the green parts majority Asian. Segregation of the African-American communities of Chicago has remained largely unchanged in the 25 years I've lived in the area. What's changed is the growing Hispanic communities. When I arrived here there was a rapidly growing Mexican immigrant population which has been somewhat supplanted more recently by a rapidly growing Central American immigrant population.

My youngest son starts high school at Oak Park River Forest High school this fall. It's the subject of a new documentary about to air on the Starz channel: America to Me. OPRF has one of the best honors/AP/prep tracks in the state, and it is more or less completely dominated by OPRF's white and Asian american students. OPRF is a large suburban high school racially segregated inside itself.

Here's the new trailer for the documentary:

 

Ken, "the uploader has not made the video available in your hometown".
Is your son in the documentary?

Oak. Park. River. Forest.
The lack of presumptuousness is striking.


Tony, we need pics.

 

i live in a small farming town in the geographical center of washington state called ellensburg. there happens to be a medium sized college of about 10,000 students here that thankfully injects some diversity into the community, and also employs me. it's a pretty neat place to live because all sorts of ecosystems and natural beauty are only a short drive away. you can also pretty easily drive to seattle or portland, which are bigger cities but imo they don't really qualify as *big* cities. some day maybe i'll walk around and take pictures of all the places i threw up when i was in high school, but for now here's a picture of the street in front of my house on a particularly beautiful evening.

 

Tom High School Throwup Thread
Sign up
1. Vin
2.
3.
4.
5.

 

Tom High School Throwup Locations
1. The alley next to your favorite pizza shop at 2 AM
2.
3.
4.
5.

 

Here's one I took last year:

 

For mostly all my life, and as long as I could remember, I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. First, my family lived in the middle of San Francisco Bay on Treasure Island, and then moved to Alameda (which is next to Oakland) and then San Jose for around 30 years.

I currently live in Hayward, CA because of it's relative affordability.






Hayward started out as an industrial city with many large warehouses and manufacturing facilities (as it was perfectly located near the Port of Oakland), which are now mostly defunct and/or condemned buildings. Most of the homes were built in the 1960's and aren't aging well. The city is near two main freeways commuting junctions so it's a nightmare at times with the gridlock traffic surround the city.






In the photo below, you can see all the large warehouse and manufacturing facilities. There's a runway strip for small private jets, which many of the rich and famous used when arriving in the Bay Area for Super Bowl 50.



There aren't any really good eateries in Hayward, so we have to travel outside the city for some good food. However, I think we have one of the best taquerias (Mexican restaurants) in the area.

Of the positives of Hayward, we're near the SF Bay and therefore get the bay breeze, so the summer days are typically nice at around 72 - 74 degrees (22C - 23C) and winter days are typically, 58 degress (14C). There's access to the main train system to San Francisco, so I don't need to drive to work. Additionally, in really close to three international airports, SFO, San Jose and Oakland.

Hayward, like alot of cities on the east side of the SF Bay, Whites are in the minority in terms of population.



I could see my house in the photo below.




Since I live in the foothill of the Hayward hills, I often walk up the hills with my dogs where I get a good view of the Bay Area on the compass of Cal State East Bay.








And there's a trail along the SF Bay that some people take advantage of. On clear days, you can see the city of San Francisco across the way.

 

Hi guys, I've done part two of my trek along the Amstel river!

The first one was from the old ban post to where the old city wall used to be.
This one picks up from there and takes us right to the city center. Look



Want a close-up? Here



You can really see the history of the city in the above photo.
You can see where the old fifteenth century city wall was, and you can see the seventeenth century wall, from when the city expanded radically, during its golden age.
Those walls always had moats (canals) in front of them, which makes them easy to pin down. Here's the fourteenth century wall (in blue):



And here's the seventeenth century wall (in red):



Of course, that's not exactly how it was, because stuff has been re-dug. It used to look like this:



When this map was made, Amsterdam called itself the safest city in the world. 26 bulwarks, over 200 cannons.

At the point where I enter the old city - along the river - there was a high bridge with a bulwark on the west bank and one on the east bank, which is pictured here:



Here you can see the river, the bridge, and the end of the bulwark. Where the dudes are fishing now stands this hotel:



And the bridge now looks like this:



This is the view from that bridge, facing the city (north) and our path ahead:



The Dutch pride themselves in being the masters over water, but the thing here in the middle is proof of how badly we used to suck at it.
Such a beautiful canal system had been devised for the big expansion of the city in the seventeenth century, but the water didn't really flow. Place stank like hell. It's why they invented parks outside the city. And also this bugger here: the Amstel sleuce, designed to control the flow of the river. Here's a closer look.



It failed miserably at its task. I haven't yet found out if it's still there because it still performs a function, or just because it's quaint.

It gives you situations like this:



On the east bank you see the ROYAL THEATRE. Carré. I capitalized it and bolded it so you can spot it again in the final picture of this post.

The tourist photo opportunities are picking up. I keep taking pictures. I only need to turn 90 degrees from the above picture and



They call this the SKINNY BRIDGE. A relic from the seventeenth century. Done up with red ribbons because there's an AIDS conference taking place here this week (I just found out on Google).



And it's rows of three ribbons because it's Amsterdam, which has the row of three crosses.
I'm reading that this was devised by the marketing director of Amsterdam Marketing.

Moving on, right next to the Skinny Bridge is the Amsterdam Hermitage.



Boring old building. Also seventeenth century, built as a home for the elderly and used as such right up until this century. Then they did some work, hung up some stuff and invited Putin over for its rebirth as an annexe for the Russian museum.
Amsterdam and Russia, we go way back.

Next landmark:



Yyyyeaaahhh

On the left you see our OPERA / CITY HALL. That thing is huge, Here it is during construction, in the 1980s:



And it's huge because they had the space. Look at the space they had:



And they had that space because there used to be a whole quarter there:



But it was the Jewish quarter and 80% of all the Jews had been deported.

Moving on...

 

Next to the opera/city hall is a nice terrace (in the middle of the picture) where I had a beer with @Darth Punk.

Here's your photographer:



Here's a pretty hotel on the east bank:



And the view from that hotel:



Coming up on the FIRST CITY WALL. The one from the 14th century. The bottom of the tower you see here was one of its city gates; it's where masses huddled to escape when the Alteration of Amsterdam happened (1578): the city became Protestant.



The bend is small. The river's not very wide. This is a perfect place for protection. So in the place of the lovely terrace you see on the east bank used to be a fortress, called "Silence Utrecht! (= the next big town)".

There's a bridge next to the terrace. Here's a view north from that bridge:



And that's really it. The river stops there. It used to go on longer, but they built a dam and that's why the city along the Amstel is called Amsterdam.

At the spot where the river stops, for some reason, there's a statue of our first queen on horseback. Wilhelmina.



There's a street where the river used to be, for about 500 meters towards Dam Square. It's called Rokin.
Interestingly enough, right where the river stops is also the spot where the Miracle Of Amsterdam happened. Without it, you'd probably never have heard of the city. More on that in some next post.



It happened right here.

And then: super weird! I turned around, towards where the river used to continue, and all I remembered was street. But suddenly there was a hole in the ground!



A new subway line that took fifteen years to build has just been opened this week.
And right where the Amstel river used to meet the dam is this station.

Alright, alright, I'll check in quickly on Dam square, even though it's no longer connected to the river. Here you go. Phallic landmark (WWII memorial):



Royal Palace and New Church (both sixteenth/seventeenth century):



I had a drink with @Rylo Ken on the other side of that palace.

But... wait a minute. Let me see that monument again



Yeah. That's your photographer again.

You could continue the walk, to where I had dinner with @Ender Sai. But we'll save that for another time, like the Miracle of Amsterdam. Gotta keep this thread alive some way or other.

Here's the trip again, with the landmarks, and the walls:

 

Terrific posts. @SuperWatto! Love the comprehensive "you are there" approach and all the aerial view orientation!

Really hope to make it to Amsterdam myself someday...

 

I'm from Chicago. The Second City. The Windy City. The City of Big Shoulders. Imma Chi-town legend. I refuse to call it Chi-raq.

 

Harrison, Maine.

Here's a selfie I took in the front yard, better known as Long Lake.



A passerby. (Common loon.)


Where I sit to watch the passersby:


Traffic:


A local attraction is known as Gull Point. Imaginative, yes?


A less common passerby, great blue heron:


The small mouth bass blend in with the rocks:


A local dining establishment:


Typical local dwelling:


Family and friends gather for Thanksgiving:


View from the deck:


View from inside:


Typical evening weather:


They say you should never end a slideshow with a sunset, so here's a sunset:

 

You're a lucky man, Sarge.

 

@Sarge re: the Common Loon. Sometimes, I feel like I'm an Uncommon Loon.

Seriously, great pictures.

 

@Sarge, I'm speechless...and intensely jealous. Amazing pics; thanks for sharing them!

I've wanted to see loons on a New England lake since I saw the film On Golden Pond when I was eleven years old!



(Thinking of that made me curious where it was actually filmed...according to the Wik: "Screenwriter Thompson spent his summers along the shores of Great Pond, located in Belgrade, Maine, but the film was made on Squam Lake in Holderness, New Hampshire.")