Tag: Detroit
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Thumb Drive, Day 1
My older son had to get back to Michigan State University for the start of the new semester and it was my turn to drive. It takes about nine hours to get there under ordinary circumstances so it involves an overnight stay in East Lansing. Then, I figured, I might as well stay a little…
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Pre-Nazi Swastika Architectural Details
I traveled into the Twelve Mile Circle — the Delaware geo-oddity that inspired the name for this site — while visiting with some dear friends last weekend. In Wilmington, at Rodney Square specifically, I happened to glance up. There I noticed the wonderful Egyptian Revival architectural details on the Wilmington Public Library. My earlier Egyptian…
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Named Like a Whole Other Country
What if I said that I could drive from Atlanta to Detroit, or Cleveland to Santa Fe, or Miami to Memphis in an hour and a half? So how about driving from Jacksonville to Buffalo in an hour? No, I didn’t say fly, I said drive. My apologies in advance to the international audience that…
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Infrequent Crossings, US-Canada
Twelve Mile Circle loves its borders, and probably none more than the border between Canada and the United States (for instance). The statistics are impressive: 119 border crossings; 39,254,000 trips by Canadians into the United States in 2009; and nearly $500 million in international trade passing every day on the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor, Ontario…
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Biggest Losers
I’ve been playing around with the 2010 United States Census results by county again. This time I compared them to the previous decennial census conducted in 2000. This allows one to observe population shifts taking place over the prior decade. I tend to find more interest in the larger shifts, which is true I suppose…
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Gargantuan Garages
Were is the world’s largest parking garage? I’m not sure why that came to mind, as if I can ever figure out why I fixate on such oddities. It’s a tougher question than I imagined. I wanted to ponder this from the perspective of a single stand-alone structure. Lots of the sources I consulted happened…
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Wandering through Real Estate
[EDITOR’S NOTE: 12MC ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED THIS ARTICLE IN 2009. THIS FEATURE NO LONGER EXISTS IN GOOGLE MAPS] There’s been a capability in Google Maps that allows users to check real estate prices for quite awhile now. However a couple of weeks ago they added this feature to the “more” button on the top right of…
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South of Detroit
Here’s an old one that most people probably already know, but I still enjoy it. What is the first foreign country you would reach if you traveled due south from Detroit, Michigan? Canada! A curve in the Detroit River, the narrow ribbon of water that joins Lake St. Clair to Lake Erie, creates a situation…
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Thoughts on Buffalo
Perception often trumps reality when people consider geographic relationships. Twelve Mile Circle enjoys exploring these disconnects — the remote corner of southwestern Virginia comes to mind — so along those same lines let’s explore the placement of Buffalo, New York. Here’s a trick question made somewhat more obvious by the fact that I’ve chosen to…