Spent the week in sunny California - Anaheim area. One highlight of the trip was getting to visit the Queen Mary.
Interestingly, the city of Long Beach owns the Queen Mary, and purchased it for $3.45 million - considerably more than it’s scrap value in 1967. It now leases it out to various entities, [...]

Apparently, there is no shortage of Skyway reuse ideas out there today. BuffaloGeek sets us up for an interview on this next week:

While it’s a much better concept than Tielman Park, again, what problems does it solve? It’s an incredibly inefficient way to get to the outer harbor by foot, and it doesn’t [...]

Kids, you can’t write comedy better than this. Tim Tielman has come up with a plan to turn the Skyway into a park. Here’s the image and story posted over on Buffalo Rising.

Now, let’s think back to all the reasons that people bellow forth as to why the Skyway “needs” to come down:

It’s [...]

The second stop on our recent vacation was to Pennsylvania Dutch/Amish Country. We stayed at a wonderful Bed & Breakfast called the Silverstone Inn run by two outstanding hosts, Toni and Lorin Wortel. The Inn is a restored 1750s farmhouse, and features over 10 acres of farmland, an active fresh water spring, sheep, [...]

Fix Buffalo has an interesting idea for a reuse of Transfiguration Church - tearing down the broken parts and leaving the shell surrounding an interesting urban park. I think that’s the best idea I’ve heard for Transfiguration so far. The building is in very rough shape, and frankly it’s just not likely that [...]

Since RandomThoughts101 asked, yes, we did make it down to the Wing Festival. The wings were, as always, excellent. What Amanda and I like best about the Wing Festival is that it gives us an opportunity to see some creativity in wing coatings and sauces. We are both fierce Duff’s supporters when [...]

I decided to take my interest in the newly found Marine Star project a step further and contact the project to see if I could get an update on their status. I also extended an olive branch on behalf of the CTRC, since us large-scale preservation projects need each other’s support as much as [...]

While out geocaching on Monday, we happened to be near the Marine Star/Aquarama - that big rusting hulk of a ship, moored up next to the grain silos along Route 5. Since I had my camera with me, it seemed like a good chance to try and get up close to the ship. [...]

Another great article on Buffalo Rising, this time showing just how little of the core of downtown has actually been preserved since circa 1960.
The fact is, one of the few bright spots in Buffalo’s economy has been the power of the city’s high quality historic architecture and a recent wave of restorations to stimulate growth. [...]

Back in December, I had the opportunity to travel to San Antonio, TX for work. While there I made it a point to see not only the Alamo and the Riverwalk, but an excellent example of adaptive reuse.
Quarry Market is a beautiful new shopping center built on the former site of the [...]