More PA Keystone Town Markers news

More great news in Pennsylvania on the preservation of historic signs.

First, Nathaniel Guest and the PA Keystone Marker Trust will soon be unveiling a website that will assist communities throughout the Commonwealth in restoring and also recreating the iron cast markers that have graced Pennsylvania highways for over 80 years.

Next month, Guest will be presenting at the 2010 Statewide Conference on Heritage. His presentation will focus on how to achieve a balance between the preservation of historic signs and the transportation guidelines, Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD). The conference runs May 18-20. Guest presents on Wednesday, May 19th.

And finally, Jim Carn is out again restoring existing keystones in North Central Pennsylvania. This time he's restored three keystones in the Williamsport area.

First, South Williamsport

The rusted old sign now looks like this:

Montoursville:

Jim repainted two Mountoursville signs - the first being at PA 87 at Interstate 180.

If you look closely at the photo above, you'll see rust sports around the 'Founded 1768' print. Here's the repainted version:

The second Mountoursville keystone that Jim restored is located on Broad Street (Old US 220). The rust was more prevalent on this sign.

And now the repainted sign - a great improvement.

A job well done my Jim and also best wishes to Nathaniel on his presentation next month.

Comments

Paper Highways: The Unbuilt New Orleans Bypass (Proposed I-410)

There are many examples around the United States of proposed freeway corridors in urban areas that never saw the light of day for one reason or another. They all fall somewhere in between the little-known and the infamous and from the mundane to the spectacular. One of the more obscure and interesting examples of such a project is the short-lived idea to construct a southern beltway for the New Orleans metropolitan area in the 1960s and 70s. Greater New Orleans and its surrounding area grew rapidly in the years after World War II, as suburban sprawl encroached on the historically rural downriver parishes around the city. In response to the development of the region’s Westbank and the emergence of communities in St. Charles and St. John the Baptist Parishes as viable suburban communities during this period, regional planners began to consider concepts for new infrastructure projects to serve this growing population. The idea for a circular freeway around the southern perimeter of t

Hernando de Soto Bridge (Memphis, TN)

The newest of the bridges that span the lower Mississippi River at Memphis, the Hernando de Soto Bridge was completed in 1973 and carries Interstate 40 between downtown Memphis and West Memphis, AR. The bridge’s signature M-shaped superstructure makes it an instantly recognizable landmark in the city and one of the most visually unique bridges on the Mississippi River. As early as 1953, Memphis city planners recommended the construction of a second highway bridge across the Mississippi River to connect the city with West Memphis, AR. The Memphis & Arkansas Bridge had been completed only four years earlier a couple miles downriver from downtown, however it was expected that long-term growth in the metro area would warrant the construction of an additional bridge, the fourth crossing of the Mississippi River to be built at Memphis, in the not-too-distant future. Unlike the previous three Mississippi River bridges to be built the city, the location chosen for this bridge was about two

Memphis & Arkansas Bridge (Memphis, TN)

Like the expansion of the railroads the previous century, the modernization of the country’s highway infrastructure in the early and mid 20th Century required the construction of new landmark bridges along the lower Mississippi River (and nation-wide for that matter) that would facilitate the expected growth in overall traffic demand in ensuing decades. While this new movement had been anticipated to some extent in the Memphis area with the design of the Harahan Bridge, neither it nor its neighbor the older Frisco Bridge were capable of accommodating the sharp rise in the popularity and demand of the automobile as a mode of cross-river transportation during the Great Depression. As was the case 30 years prior, the solution in the 1940s was to construct a new bridge in the same general location as its predecessors, only this time the bridge would be the first built exclusively for vehicle traffic. This bridge, the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, was completed in 1949 and was the third

Gribblenation

Search This Blog