Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Tag: Milwaukee

  • Milwaukee Breakwater Light

    Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA (2008) A four mile concrete breakwater protects Milwaukee harbor and the mouth of its river from cruel and punishing storms that form on Lake Michigan and slam against the shoreline. Ships accessing the protective waters of the harbor sail through a small aperture.  The Milwaukee Breakwater Light marks the approach (map). The…

  • Where the Stadium Once Stood

    I guess the recent Ghost Signs got me thinking about the way things used to be in an earlier age. My memory circled back to a time when professional baseball didn’t exist in Washington, DC and we used to travel to Baltimore to see the Orioles play. This happened a lot when I was a…

  • Moorish Revival

    Occasionally Twelve Mile Circle likes to feature lesser known architectural styles. For example Rock Cut, Pueblo Deco, Egyptian Rivival and Octagons all appeared in these pages. I came across another one I found both fascinating and rare that I wanted to share. I’d never heard of Moorish Revival before. This design became modestly popular during…

  • Mike

    Twelve Mile Circle highlighted Mundane First Name Places in the previous article. However, I left out the most prolific mundane name I’d discovered to date. That one, I really wanted to feature it in its own stand-alone spotlight. It didn’t make sense to combine it with all of the others because of its sheer popularity…

  • Highway to Park

    A park near my home sits above an interstate highway leading into Washington, DC. Here, builders tucked the roadway into a little valley leading downhill towards the Potomac River and put a concrete lid above it. Drivers on Interstate 66 enter a tunnel briefly before returning to daylight and crossing the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge into…

  • I Before E Like in Milwaukie

    “I Before E Like in Milwaukie.” If that phrase doesn’t grate on one’s nerves or otherwise sound completely wrong, it probably means the reader came from a location outside of the United States. Or came from Oregon. Because Milwaukie does exist in Oregon. I discovered that recently while examining 12MC reader statistics. Someone visited the…

  • 81 on 81

    I’m planning a quick trip down to southwestern Virginia and neighboring West Virginia. Naturally I intend to count some new counties along the way although with other purposes too. I wish I could say it was entirely about the counties so I could finally finish Virginia. But that will have to wait for another day.…

  • Plank Roads

    I used to drive between Washington, DC and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, nearly every weekend for about eighteen months a number of years ago. I became very familiar with the route and every landmark placed upon it as one might imagine. One of those included an exit for Boydton Plank Road along Interstate 85 near…