Falling Down

[rejectomorph]

The larval stage of a bridge fell down just a few miles from here the other day, but I didn't get to see it. There's no word on the fate of the packages in the FedEx truck.

Then while I was writing the collapse of our larval-stage bridge, I heard about the collapse of that mature bridge in Minneapolis. Weird.

And was anybody else unaware that there is a website run by an outfit called the Disaster News Network? It's for those who just can't get enough disaster news through the regular media, I guess.


After viewing the disaster news (of which I get quite enough, thanks) I went looking for an absence of disaster and found this: The larval stage of the modern world is on display in this ca.1896 photo of Broadway in Los Angeles, looking as dry and dusty as my brain feels on this hot August day. I looked at the nine cyclists balanced on their wheels (rented, perhaps, from the establishment occupying the ground floor shop in the Delaware Hotel), and wondered where in that quiet, provincial city they were off to on that placid afternoon some 110 years ago. I guess that's one more thing I'll never know.

Comments

Re: I Would Like the Stew For Breakfast

[rejectomorph]

There is a widespread impression among younger Californians that Dobbins' cycleway was completed, but he actually managed to build only the section from downtown Pasadena to a point near that city's southern limits. It was several miles from there to downtown Los Angeles. It wasn't really competition from automobiles that killed the idea, either. Most people just preferred to use the convenient and economical interurban streetcar service which had been in operation for several years before Dobbins began his project.

The legend of the bicycle freeway has been useful in stimulating support for a modern bike path along the Arroyo though. A few years ago they the Pasadena Freeway was shut down for a day and opened to pedestrians and cyclists as a demonstration of what it might be like to have a modern bike path there.

Horace Dobbins was an interesting character from an interesting family. His niece was pioneer aviatrix Pancho Barnes,who was related on the other side of her family to Thaddeus Lowe, builder of another lost landmark of Southern California recreational transportation, the Mount Lowe Railway.