Tag: New York
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Waterfalls of the Finger Lakes
New York (September 2006) Taughannock Falls The Taughannock Falls Cascade from High Above Taughannock Falls State Park lies on both sides of Route 89, eight miles north of Ithaca (map). The eastern side of the park flanks Cayuga Lake, and includes a boat launch, a playground and a sports field. The lake serves as a…
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Ithaca, Part 2 (Waterfalls)
Some sources claimed the presence of “over 150 waterfalls within 10 miles” of Ithaca, New York. I guess it depends on how they’re defined. Even so, waterfalls seemed to pop into view just about anywhere we looked. As numerous T-shirts and bumper stickers around town reminded us, “Ithaca is Gorges.” We squeezed a lot of…
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Ithaca, Part 1 (Four Busy Days)
We can drive from our home outside of Washington, DC to Ithaca, New York surprisingly easily. All it takes is about six hours in the car over some pretty scenic roads. I’ve loved New York’s Finger Lake Region for many years, one of the few places I’ve ever returned to for repeated vacations. We didn’t…
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Highest Numbered Street
Newer cities created on grid patterns often used street naming systems based on numbers. The closest street to an important urban feature became 1st Street. Numbers increased from there. Distinct patterns emerged in different cities, of course. Maybe numbered streets increased outward in two directions, north and south or east and west. Plenty of other…
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Body Parts
The more I thought about it, apparently body parts influenced an awful lot of geographic names. It seemed natural though. People liked to name things after familiar objects. What could be more familiar than the flesh right there in front of them? From head to feet and practically everywhere in between, I found spots on…
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Even More Spooky
It served me right for trying to guess what might please the Twelve Mile Circle audience. Longtime readers know that I’ve never been able to do that in the past even after all these years of trying. I probably should have waited until closer to Halloween. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this series — the exact locations…
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Spooky
A lot of tangential articles began to appear on social media recently, tying-in with the hype around the latest film adaption of Stephen King’s “It.” One article I noticed included a list of his major works, from the early days of his writing career to the present. It included “The Shining,” and rightly so; a…
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Where the Stadium Once Stood
I guess the recent Ghost Signs got me thinking about the way things used to be in an earlier age. My memory circled back to a time when professional baseball didn’t exist in Washington, DC and we used to travel to Baltimore to see the Orioles play. This happened a lot when I was a…
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Misplaced Romans
The Geographic Names Information System listed 94 populated places in the United States called Rome. I figured maybe some should exist in other nations that created a bunch of new places around that same time period. Alas, I didn’t find any such places in Canada, South Africa, Australia or New Zealand. Why Rome seemed so…
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High-Flying Counties
With all my discussions of Chicago’s Midway and O’Hare airports recently, it dawned on me that both of them fell within Cook County, Illinois. Well, technically a corner of O’Hare extended into neighboring DuPage County. But the important stuff like the terminals and most of the runways remained within Cook so I called it close…