Urban Life
Eagle Lake and West Branch Railroad – Wikipedia
Massive Railroad 1,500′ Trestle Deep In The Forest Of Maine 90 Yrs Abandoned
NPR
There is a 30-year gap in the life expectancy of Black and white Chicagoans depending on their zip code. On average, residents of the Streeterville neighborhood, which is 73% white, live to be 90 years old. Nine miles south, the residents of Englewood, which is nearly 95% Black, have a life expectancy of 60.
Journalist Linda Villarosa says the disparity of life expectancies has its roots in government-sanctioned policies that systematically extracted wealth from Black neighborhoods — and eroded the health of generations of people. She writes about her family's own story in the New York Times Magazine article, "Black Lives Are Shorter in Chicago. My Family's History Shows Why."
As schools spend millions on air purifiers, experts warn of overblown claims and harm to children | PBS NewsHour
School officials desperate to calm worried parents bought these devices and others with a flood of federal funds, installing them in more than 2,000 schools across 44 states, a KHN investigation found. They use the same technology — ionization, plasma and dry hydrogen peroxide — that the Lancet COVID-19 Commission recently deemed “often unproven” and potential sources of pollution themselves.
So Long to the Hotel Pennsylvania
The Hotel Pennsylvania is going to come down, Steven Roth has told his Vornado shareholders. That’s not a shock. It’s an old-fashioned hotel with a great many small rooms, on an extremely valuable site directly across from Pennsylvania Station, fronting on Seventh Avenue. Because it’s lost some luster over the years, the hotel probably has a rough time drawing business travelers. I stayed there as a young person around 1984, and by that time it was passable but dowdy. Judging by some of the recent reviews on TripAdvisor (e.g., “a real life episode of American Horror Story” and “there were blood stains on the pillows”), it’s slipped further since then. Eight years ago, Roth said that he was planning to renovate and turn it into something great, but we live in a different economic climate now, and the empty air above that giant site at 401 Seventh is apparently just too tempting to resist. A 1,270-foot tower, bearing the not-at-all-phallic name of PENN15, is its likely replacement.
Spiraling costs at remote industrial park – Investigative Post
The bill is coming due for putting an industrial park in the hinterlands of Genesee County and the cost to taxpayers is considerable.
The Science and Technology Advanced Manufacturing Park, being built on 1,250 acres in the rural Town of Alabama, flunked the state’s smart growth test when first proposed.
The project’s location rated so poorly that it failed to meet seven of ten smart growth criteria under the state’s own grading system, prompting one good government group to label it a “poster child for location inefficiency.”
Empire State Development Corp. nevertheless approved spending state tax dollars to develop the site, which is bigger than Central Park in New York City and equal in size to 945 football fields.