Northern House of Prayer at the Ritz

It has been a while since I have had a Sunday post on a church, but a week or two ago I noticed what seems to be a new church in Rensselaer, the Northern House of Prayer. It has its Sunday services at the Ritz Theater in downtown Rensselaer.

The Northern House of Prayer is not listed yet in the weekly church directory of the Rensselaer Republican and I could not find an Internet presence. The small sign that is hard to read in the picture above says that the pastor is Mac Howard and services are at 10:00 am on Sunday.

A record for the day

We got two or three inches of rain yesterday and today the river is at a record high for the date. The USGS gaging station says that the flow this evening is1260 cubic feet a second; the previous high was 879 back in 2008. The average for the day will be less than the 1260, but still should exceed the 879.

Below you can see that the little Iroquois looked like a real river today, not a creek. The picture was taken from the Talbert Bridge in mid afternoon.

Update Friday evening: The river has peaked and is starting to go down, but 2011 will certainly have the record flow for the date. The old high was only 796 cfs in 1972.

Odds and Ends--Dec 2011

McDonald's on South College has been undergoing renovations for several weeks. I noticed the dumpsters in the parking lot, but did not immediately figure out that they were for McDonald's. The picture below was taken on December 7.

The picture below was from the next day.

A final picture, from this morning. It seems to be a rather extensive remodeling.

I keep checking out progress at the new school on North Melville, but I cannot really tell what is going on and it is hard to get a picture that shows anything interesting. This morning I got a picture of the men working on the west side of the building. It appears that they have begun to lay the bricks and stone blocks for the outer shell. The pink stuff is insulation.

Yesterday I had pictures of a large electrical pole that was erected at Cullen and Clark. It will be part of an electrical line that will run from the substation on North Melville along Merritt Street, and then down Cullen to the power plant. The poles along Merritt are now all in place and wires are strung, though I suspect the wires are guide wires, not electrical wires. The missing part of the project should start soon, the installation of poles along Cullen.

About three weeks ago I noted renovation of the old Perkins Chiropractic office on Cullen. The sign for the new tenant is now up, and if you follow the url on the sign, you can read all about it.

Finally, the Santa house is back in town, this year on the Court House Square. Santa will make a final appearance on Saturday.

The pole arrives

Last week I had some pictures of workers drilling a hole for a large electrical pole. This morning the pole arrived and was set into place. It came on a very long truck, and was lifted from the truck by a large crane.

The pole was made of laminated wood and was much wider at the bottom than at the top. It creaked and groaned as it bent during lifting. After the pole was off the truck, the truck shortened itself--the trailer could telescope in and out to change length. In the picture below, you can see red and black markings on the side of the trailer. When the retraction was done, everything in front of those markings had been pulled into the back of the trailer.

It took a few attempts to get the belts on the top of the pole, and then the crane lifted the whole pole up and workers maneuvered the bottom of the pole into the hole that was prepared last week.

Notice how high up on the pole the metal fins are.

When the pole was finally set, only a few inches of the top fin were above ground.

Through the whole process, traffic continued to move on the street, though only one lane at a time.

The building in the background below has an interesting history, most of which I do not know. It was originally, I believe, built as a gas station. Have you ever noticed that there were almost no gas stations on SR 114? This one and the building that now houses Rick's Pizza seemed to have been the only ones. On the other hand, there are about a dozen former gas stations that line US 231. More recently, the building was a laundry, and most recently a residence.

A final step was to twist the pole around to make sure it was firmly on the bottom. The plan was to fill the culvert in which it is standing with crushed stone. Another observer could not quite believe that the stone would hold it, but he many not have noticed just how deeply set the pole is.

One of the workers said that the reason for this special pole is that it will have no guy wires.

Updated: I posted too early. When I went back at 2:00 to see if they had finished, the pole was back up out of the hole and resting on the ground, with the crane keeping it upright. I asked what had happened and was told that mud had accumulated in the hole since it was drilled, and they had not been able to get it deep enough. the top of the fin has to be at ground level or below, and you can see in the above picture that it was not. They had had the city sucker truck come and remove the mud, and the hole was now back to 17 feet deep.

This project is just like my home projects--nothing ever goes right the first time.

Update 2: A bit before 4:00 I checked again and the pole had been set back in the hole and workers were dumping gravel around it. The dump truck on the other side of the pole and the loader on this side both were carrying gravel from the pile in the lot that the project has used for storage on the corner of Vine and Cullen. The workers had a vibrator to compact the gravel and seemed to be having some kind of problem. The sun was getting very low and there was still a lot of space to fill.

This was the view from Clark that shows how high the pole is. It will soon be a familiar sight, something we expect to see.

Still another update: I got some addition information about the building in the pictures. It was originally a Shell station run by a man named Alva Page. In addition to the Shell station, he also had the Coca Cola distributorship for Jasper County and much of the building was used for bottle storage. The Pages lived in the house behind the Methodist Church that was demolished in early 2010.

Its next stage of use was as a restaurant, but this was a very short use. Then it became the home of the Rensselaer Bottling Company, which was originally behind the Horton Building (now The Spaw). You can see from the foundation that is still there that it was a very small building. After the Bottling Company closed, it was empty for a few years and then was purchased by the Tonners and became Superior Cleaners. When the Tonners moved in, the place was full of broken bottles and bottles in cases. They hired a man to take the bottles to the Rensselaer dump (which now lies below Bicenntennial Park.) The man took three truckloads of bottles and dumped them. So if you have ever wondered what happened to all the bottles of the Rensselaer Bottling Company and why they are so rare, they lie buried and probably smashed somewhere under Bicentennial Park.

The gas station that is now Rick's Pizza was originally a Sinclair station owned by a man named Bunker Hill who lived in the house behind the station. Between its life as a gas station and as a pizza parlor, it was a restaurant for a while.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a history of all the buildings in Rensselaer?

Getting ready for spring

On Thursday I noticed a hill in Brookside Park. It was not the much needed sledding hill, which would be a nice addition for the winter. Rather it was a pile of wood chips, part of preparation for next spring.

The main playground area has lost most of its mulching and needed a new load of chips. The first pile was joined by a second, and on both Thursday and Friday workers were placing the chips around the equipment.

 They were still not finished on Saturday. If the mulch was from the city's collection of downed trees and branches, I contributed to the these piles.

As the cold and short days of winter keep us inside, it is nice to have reminders that in a few months the weather will be warmer and kids will again be playing on this equipment.

There is still some activity in the park. This morning I saw the runners of the Rudolph 5K Run (formerly called the Santa Shuffle) go past my house. The race started and ended at Brookside Park. The runners looked cold. I had no desire to go out and take a picture. (Here are some photos from last year, from 2009, and from 2008.)

It took a couple of extra trips, but I finally found the geocache in Brookside Park (as well as one along Owen Street). It required a bit of thinking outside the box. If you cannot find what you are looking for, maybe you are looking for the wrong thing.

Speaking of geocaching, Brian Capouch mentioned it last week when he introduced the presentations of his software engineering class at Saint Joe. I think his class set out the geocache at that can be found at SJC. However, the class ultimately decided not to do much with geocaching--the company that runs the geocaching website is interested in making money from the activity, and Brian is an open-source guy. His class investigated Independence Cemetery in Barkley Gillam Township, and as a result, it may now be the best documented pioneer cemetery in the state. I was hoping the www.pastfinder.com website would have information on the applications the class developed to bring the cemetery on-line, but it was not there when I checked.