Mid-November picture dump

It's time for another meandering post that uses a bunch of pictures I have taken recently.

A few weeks ago the city was digging near the lift station east of Weston Cemetery. They were digging last winter, as well. I have not heard what the purpose of any of this digging is. (Not the best way to start a post, is it?)

This morning I noticed that iron fencing had been installed in tiny Hanley Park. It was not there a few days ago.

I also noticed a sign I had not seen before at the Medical Arts building where Washington meets McKinley. Many changes are happening in the medical community. I do not know if this--the Pinnacle association--is one of those changes or not.

I visited the Community Health Fair at SJC on Tuesday. The ballroom was arranged differently this year; blood donations were on one side, and the health fair on the other. The blood collector for this event is the Indiana Blood Center. Some of the other blood drives in Rensselaer are done by the Red Cross. There probably is an interesting story as to why there are two groups that do blood drives here, but I do not know it.

I took all the tests were available and found no real surprises. I was happy that I have the bone density of a healthy young female.

I talked a bit to the people from the KV Fitness Center from Demotte, which I was surprised to learn is part of Jasper County Hospital. The people at Fairmeadows Home Health Care seemed to remember me and said that they were dong well at their new location.

Still in the health area, the office of Randall Dermatology on North McKinley is being remodeled, probably to make it look less like an old gas station. The big windows are being replaced with much smaller windows.

Also being remodeled is the old Perkins Chiropractic office on N Cullen. Someone told me about this at the bridge dedication, and said it would be reopening in 2012. Someone else told me that the Rensselaer Republican had had a story on this, but I missed it.

Various construction projects continue. I liked this picture of the concrete pipes that will become part of the storm sewer system. They were next to the basketball court in Columbia Park last weekend. The pipes are made in Lowell, and the contractor is Gatlin from Griffin.

The storage shed on North Melville had six doors hung and four to go a few days ago. They are all in place now.

A "No Trespassing" sign greets visitors at the school construction site on North McKinley, which means that I cannot go places I was going before. The workers were building up the roads and parking areas with limestone.

SJC enclosed their new emergency generator and fuel tank. I thought it was an eyesore until I noticed the decorative finials on the left one (they have now also been added to the right fence), and that changes everything. (You may have to look hard to see them.)

Occasionally I take pictures of the quarry intending to do a post showing how it changes over time. Unfortunately, I can never find the older pictures to make the comparison. The quarrymen keep taking a lot of stone out, and I think the lowest level was not there a year or two ago. If you look carefully, you maybe see where a vehicle is drilling blast holes to move the cliff face back a bit further.

I mentioned the new tattoo place a few weeks ago. It had its grand opening on Halloween night and now has much better signage. It also has a name, Oddities, that might have served as the title to this post.

Bridge dedication

The Bicentennial Park Bridge, which I have referred to in many posts as the Talbert Bridge, is now officially open. The dedication ceremony was held on Tuesday.

The people started gathering twenty minutes before the ceremony.

As more people gathered, they moved to the north end of the bridge. Shortly before eleven, the mayor arrived.

Then everyone walked over the bridge to the south side, where the official ribbon cutting took place. I was not positioned well to get a picture of that--I was in the back of the crowd, so I could not see it.

The dedication ends an ongoing stream of posts that began even before this blog came into existence. I never expected when I did my first post on this subject that it would take over three years to come to a conclusion. The bridge is meant as a part of a trails system, so perhaps the development of trails will provide new subjects for this blog.

Many of the people who attended parked in the new parking lot for Bicentennial Park. Last week park workers were using the broken asphalt from the recent street repairs to surface it. The new shelter now has a name, the Ervin L.Marlin Sr Picnic Shelter. It was made possible by donations from a member of the Marlin family.

The dedication was the first publicly scheduled use of the new shelter. Donut holes and hot chocolate were on the menu.

A press release for the dedication can be found here. (It is a pdf). There were about fifty people at the event, and almost all of them were on the bridge at the same time, which gave it a really nice bounce and showed that it is safe. There were many people who contributed money or time or expertise to making this bridge possible, and only some of them attended.

Evening

Yesterday afternoon workers in the 69K line were trying to finish up work on a pole as the sun was setting. Evening comes early in November.

The line of poles has reached US 231.

(So far this week I do not have much to write about, and I liked this picture.)

On the Court House Square

Here is what was happening on the Court House Square at 8:50 in the morning on Saturday.

It is time to put away the sign.

Downtown Fowler

A few days ago I had some pictures of the Fowler town park. While I was in Fowler taking those pictures, I also took pictures of their downtown, which is mostly along a three block stretch of Fifth Street. The downtown is not in the center of the town--most of the residential area is to the north and east. The downtown still has a lot in it, though some of the retail business has moved to an area to the southeast.

One of the highlights of the downtown, at least according to the Benton County: Indiana Historic Sites and Structures Inventory, is the Fowler Theater, which is one of five Benton County structures on the National Register of Historic Places. It was built in 1940 in the Art Moderne style and is still in use.

Continuing to the east along the north side of Fifth Street, the buildings are mostly from the 1890 to 1900 period and are mostly listed as in the Italianate style. Fowler itself owes its existence to the arrival of the railroad in the 1870s. The town got a major boost when the county seat was moved from Oxford to Fowler. It is named after Moses Fowler, a man who lived and made his fortune in Lafayette, but who owned a great deal of land in Benton County and was active in its affairs.

The only one of these buildings that gets special notice in the Benton County: Indiana Historic Sites and Structures Inventory is Neoclassical commercial building built in 1910, which I believe is this three-story structure.

The Benton County: Indiana Historic Sites and Structures Inventory also likes the Carnegie library, which has has a modern extension. The various county inventories always seem to like the old Carnegie libraries.

On the south side of Fifth Street, the business district begins on the east with a small but bizarre building that one cannot miss. It Fraser and Isham Law Office building, built in 1896. The windows in the front have curved panes of glass.

This is the other building in the downtown that is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Next to it is the Fowler State Bank building, constructed in 1900 and still in use as the Fowler State Bank. It is in the Romanesque Revival Style.

There is nothing else too exciting on the south side of the street. I thought the Swope Building, Queen Anne style from 1895, was interesting, but the Benton County: Indiana Historic Sites and Structures Inventory lists it as non contributing, which probably means that it has had too many changes and no longer meets their criteria for a historic structure.

Below you see more of the south side of Fifth Street.

The railroad that gave Fowler its start is now part of a small feeder line, the Kankakee, Beaverville & Southern Railroad. Unlike Rensselaer, which has a rail line on which most of the rail traffic is through traffic, all the traffic on this small railroad is local, picking up or dropping off cars at businesses or elevators.

There is a lot more to Fowler and Benton County, but I had to get to an event and did not have time to explore more. Maybe I will get back some day and find out more.