Eureka! A sign that makes sense!

Okay, I just figured it out! Thanks to this MHS Visual Resource Database Image, which I had originally overlooked.

The symbol on the "Coming Soon..." billboard is the same one that was on the sign! You can see it by looking at the other photos.

So? Well, if you look closely, that symbol represents the Mississippi River as it winds between Minneapolis and St. Paul. The horizontal curving line probably represents the coming I-94, and the vertical line represents Snelling Avenue (which was, and still is, a major artery).

Wow! All these years, and I never understood it! It all makes sense now!

Comments

Citizen O said…
I LOVE that database! About a year ago, I went to a number of locations in Edina, St Louis Park, and Minneapolis, and found where the photos were taken. I took an identical photo, and used photoshop to paste them side-by side in a single image. (There was a book based on this concept a few years ago).

After that, when I heard a particular building was marked for demolition or renovation, I would snap photos of the place. I have a whole lot of photos of the demolition of the old Edina City Hall... some photos even taken while crews were knocking it down (one week shy of the building's 50th anniversary).

But last summer, it seems like they stopped scanning in new photos, so I lost interest.

Oh, and you'd better watch your back, E.M. I think the MHS wants money when you publish their photos.

JL
July 31, 2005 at 12:32 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Commercial comments (Blogging from Word!)

Ironically, I’ve got two commercial-related things going on in my mind right now. On the Ericast, I’ve been discussing how commercials are going to get more and more imbedded into content; I think we’re going to drift away from “spot radio” or “spot television”, and even drift away from traditional “product placement”, and move toward a picture-in-picture or screen crawl or other “embedded advertising”.  That way, you’ll be unable to avoid the advertisement… and you’ll want to see it, because skipping it would mean that you’d miss out on the content.  (Imagine, for example, a HGTV demo on sponge-painting that takes up the top 2/3rds of the screen, with the bottom 1/3rd showing things like “BEHR Paint on sale at Home Depot!  20% off!”.) I might hate living in a world filled with television that looks like that… but it probably would be effective. But, speaking of, I’ve found a program that removes commercials from MPG files!  And it really works!  I’ll blog it next, from the site. Why n
Read more

Passing on Panel Discussions?

In his latest podcast ( Blogarithms IT Conversations News: August 14, 2005 ), Doug Kaye mentioned an interesting anecdotal tidbit: People seem less interested in panel discussions at conferences than they do in single speakers. The panel discussions get lower ratings at ITConversations.com, and... there was some other reason he mentioned it, too. (Okay, so I don't remember. Sorry!) As I was listening to one of their panel discussions this morning, I had a thought: It was really hard to follow. It takes a lot of mental energy to keep up with who's-saying-what. And I don't even particular care about the who's-who; it would be even worse if I really need to know which person was making a particular point. Could that be what people are reacting to when they rate panel discussions lower than single-speaker talks?
Read more