quote:

Here is an article from the Baltimore Sun, published on February 12th, 1887.

The Grant Memorial Bridge.– There has been sent to us from Washington an admirably engraved representation of the memorial bridge which it is proposed to construct across the Potomac from Washington to Arlington, in honor of Gen. U.S. Grant. A bill to carry the proposition into effect was introduced in the House of Representatives on Wednesday last by Mr. Curtin, of Pennsylvania, was read twice, and referred to the committee on public buildings and grounds. According to the pans submitted by Captain Symons, of the United States corps of engineers, and Architects Smithmeyer and Pelz, the starting point of the bridge on the Washington side would be Observatory Hill, near the foot of New York and New Hampshire avenues, and thence across the Potomac to some point near Arlington, as may ultimately be determined upon by a commission, to be composed of the Secretary of War, the chief justice [sic] of the United States, the engineer-in-chief of the United States army, and one member of the Senate and another of the House, to be chosen by the respective presiding officers of those bodies. The preamble to the bill declares it to be “the desire of the people of the United States that a monument of imperishable material should be erected in honor of its greatest soldier of a design suitable to commemorate his distinguished services;” and that the most appropriate design is a grand monumental bridge to connect Washington with the sacred grounds of Arlington, where fifteen thousand Union soldiers lie buried.” The object of the bridge appears to be to afford easy access to the thousands who go to Arlington from year to year to scatter flowers on the graves of those who lost their lives in defense of the Union. The bridge it is proposed to build for this purpose, as represented by the engraving of it, is what might be called a medieval structure of granite and steel, with square and round towers and turrets, arches of different spans, and a drawbridge over the main channel to admit the passage of vessels. Its total length, including the approach, is to be 4,650 feet, or 630 feet less than a mile. The carriage-way is to be forty feet wide and the sidewalks each ten feet wide. The main arch spans are to be 240 feet in the clear, the bascule span 160 feet and the smaller spans 120 feet each. no such elaborate and imposing structure of the bridge kind has ever been built or even contemplated before in the United States, and its resemblance to the causeway of a great fortress, approached by a series of fortified outworks, is kept up by the bold arches spanning the roadway and their supporting towers and turrets. Although the cost of such a work of the strength and elaborateness proposed is not given, it must necessarily be very great, for to simply commence the construction of the bridge the bill calls for an appropriation of half a million of dollars.


The spot where this bridge would have been built is now traversed by Arlington Memorial Bridge.

quote:

Rendering of the Proposal for the Washington Monument grounds, by the Senate Park Commission, 1901-02.The wide steps, the circular pool, and the terraced gardens were all intended to provide a more dignified base for the monument, while resolving the awkward geometry resulting from its placement off the axis from the White House.

Nckdictator posted:

91m tall pyramid for London's Trafalgar Square (1815)

quote:

Church yards were so crowded at the beginning of the 19th century that corpses were literally bursting out of the soil. Some people believed that a necropolis for the dead might be the answer. In 1829 the architect Thomas Willson came up with a proposal for the storage of millions of dead bodies in a pyramid situated in Primrose Hill, North London, one of the highest places in London. Constructed from brick with granite facings, it would have been 94 storeys high and the base would have covered 18 acres. In his prospectus, Willson claimed that the mausoleum would have made about £10,000,000 – an enormous amount in those days. He hoped that people would enjoy looking up at this splendid monument as they ate their picnics.

wikipedia posted:

After the completion of the hotel, Holmes selected mostly female victims from among his employees (many of whom were required as a condition of employment to take out life insurance policies, for which Holmes would pay the premiums but was also the beneficiary), as well as his lovers and hotel guests, whom he would later kill. Some were locked in soundproof bedrooms fitted with gas lines that let him asphyxiate them at any time. Other victims were locked in a huge soundproof bank vault near his office, where they were left to suffocate.

The victims' bodies were dropped by secret chute to the basement, where some were meticulously dissected, stripped of flesh, crafted into skeleton models, and then sold to medical schools. Holmes also cremated some of the bodies or placed them in lime pits for destruction. Holmes had two giant furnaces as well as pits of acid, bottles of various poisons, and even a stretching rack. Through the connections he had gained in medical school, he sold skeletons and organs with little difficulty.

quote:

At that time a memorial stone that was contributed by Pope Pius IX, called the Pope's Stone, was destroyed by members of the anti-Catholic, nativist American Party, better known as the "Know-Nothings", during the early morning hours of March 6, 1854 (a priest replaced it in 1982).

benito posted:

They've been added at various phases of construction and repair ever since it started, and some as recent as the 1980s:

pdf catalog of stones

quote:

Washington Post December 13th, 1925

“200-Foot Fountain Plan of Memorial Here to Roosevelt.”

A shaft of water rising 200 feet in the air from a flat island of white marble surrounded by water and flanked by two majestic white marble colonnades is the plan for the Roosevelt memorial, which was submitted to Congress yesterday by the Roosevelt Memorial association.

The memorial, the work of John Russell Pope, follows the idea of the park commission plan of 1901 and fills in about one half of the present Tidal basin. The site of the memorial is a spot on Sixteenth street northwest, projected southward to about where the old white bathing beach was situated. The site was selected by the commission largely because of President Roosevelt’s part in the creation of the park plan which the general design follows.

The island from which the fountain rises is to be 280 feet in diameter and the basin surrounding it 600 feet in diameter. The colonnades, which will be a little short of semicircles will flank the basin and be 800 feet between centers. They will be 670 feet long and 60 feet high.

The column of Potomac water that will form the fountain will be forced to the height of 200 feet by an automatic electric pump which will make it entirely independent of Washington’s water supply. The water from the basin will enter the pump from the west and pass through the ponds to the east, serving to cleanse the Washington channel through tidal gates.

quote:

There was a small fire at the New Willard Hotel and, for safety’s sake, all the guests were ordered down from their rooms. After it appeared that the danger had passed, Coolidge started up to his suite.

A fire marshall challenged him. “Who are you?”

“I’m the Vice President,” responded Coolidge.

“All right, go ahead,” he was told.

Before taking more than a few steps upstairs, Coolidge was again challenged by the marshal. “What are you vice president of?”

The answer was, “I am Vice President of the United States.”

“Come right down,” declared the fire official. “I thought you were the vice president of the hotel.”

quote:

Washington Post -July 1st, 1914

It’s a dynamite bomb all right,” one man emphatically announced.

“Does look like an infernal machine,” declared another.

Then the police were notified that an attempt to blow up the Old Masonic Temple, at Ninth and F streets northwest, last night, had been frustrated by the timely discovery of an explosive device hidden in a telephone booth adjoining the large auditorium on the second floor.

There was to be a mass meeting of citizens held in the hall, the purpose of which was to protest against the colored man enjoying franchise.

When the police arrived they found an excited group near the telephone booth, wherein reposed to the deadly machine. A detective approachel [sic] the booth stealthily, and gingerly lifted the suspected object out. The crowd backed away.

There were many conjectures as to the object of the person who planted the bomb. There appeared to be several fuses issuing from it. The thing was about the size of a shoe box, made of wood, painted black, and embellished with strange copper appliances.

The police exercised the greatest of care in handling it at the First precinct station, where “it” was taken. Lieut. J. L. Sprinkle examined the thing, but did not accept a challenge to take a kick at it. During the deliberations Frank S. Hammersley, 940 Thirteenth street southeast, an electrician, came rushing into the station, and said he had been robbed.

“Yes, robbed,” he continued. “I’ve been working on a new model for an electric battery. This afternoon I left my battery in a telephone booth up at the Old Masonic Temple, and now it’s gone.”

Lieut. Sprinkle pointed to the “infernal machine.” “Is that it?” he asked.

Hammersley’s face beamed with joy. He pounced upon his invention and hugged it in his arms.

“That’s it,” he said. “Some durn fool stole it, but I knew the police would find it for me all right.”

quote:

Senator John Stennis was shot both in the chest and the leg, after he was mugged in front of his North Cleveland Park house (3609 Cumberland St. NW). He was returning home in the evening after work on January 30th, 1973

The Washington Post reported the following on the incident:

"After driving home alone and parking in front of his house, as was his custom, he stepped out of the auto and was approached by two youths in their late teens, according to police accounts.

While he was standing in the roadway, the youths demanded money, “Get ‘em up,” one demanded. Offering no resistance, according to accounts, the senator turned over his wallet, which contained credit cards, a gold pocket watch, his Phi Beta Kappa key and a 25-cent piece.

“Now we’re going to shoot you anyway,” the youths were quoted by the senator. Or, the police reported, it might have been “We ought to shoot you anyway.”"


The ambulance was called from Adams Morgan to race up the three miles to the senator’s home. Two ambulance attendants, Pvt. William Taylor and Pvt. Robert Adams, didn’t know the gravity of the situation, nor the that the victim was a senator until they were a few blocks away.

In the meantime, Stennis had staggered into his home and sat down on the couch in his living room, bleeding profusely from his wounds and when the ambulance finally arrived, the senator was conscious, but fading.

As the ambulance made its way to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, President Nixon was notified and the FBI were informed — a 1971 law made it a federal crime to assault, kidnap or kill a member of Congress.

His condition was extremely tenuous, having serious wounds, both under his lower rib cage and in his left thigh. Senator Stennis underwent 6 1/2 hours of surgery and the press conference the following day labeled his chances as “guarded” that he would recover. The bullet had ripped through part of his stomach, pancreas and cut through a major vein that empties blood into the intestines. The bullet was not removed from the senator as they patched him up.

Two Washington teenagers were charged in the shooting, Tyrone Marshall and his brother John. Derrick Holloway was granted immunity in the case for turning state’s evidence against the brothers. Tyrone received a sentence of 10-to-30 years under the federal congressional assassination statue, armed robbery and assault with intent to kill while armed. John received a sentence of 15 years.

quote:

This is a serious case of right place, right time. The Class of ’75 at Holton-Arms had a notable classmate in Susan Ford, the daughter of President Gerald Ford.

Susan’s final years of high school lined up perfectly with her father’s rise to the Oval Office. Partly for security, but more likely for the awesome factor, she hosted the senior prom at her house … the White House. No big deal, she only lived in the most recognizable (and heavily guarded) home in America.

On May 31st, 1975, the East Room of the White House was filled with over 70 teenage girls and their dates. This had to be the best prom ever in the history of proms. Not many proms are covered by the Washington Post, or frankly any local newspaper. This one was.

Young Susan had just split with her beau, Gardner Britt (of the Ted Britt Ford clan), and invited a college junior she just met three weeks earlier. Billy Pifer was a pre-med student at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, and the two met earlier that May at the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival. That is a serious stroke of luck for Billy, given that three weeks later he was tearing it up on the dance floor in the White House.

Hijo Del Helmsley posted:

As a non-American, I seriously had no idea you could go inside the Washington Monument. I thought it was just a big obelisk and that was it.

I've learned something from this thread other than the fear of humanity in general

DumbparameciuM posted:

Yay! I get to post something which is only slightly offtopic!

H. H. Homes, creator of the "Murder Castle"




He confessed to 27 murders but the exact number is not known. One of the first documented Serial Killers.

Nckdictator posted:

Frostwerks posted:

Would love to see this thing just covered with AAA like a flak bridge.

quote:

Kuman Thong (Thai: กุมารทอง) is an effigy, or statue which is revered in Thailand by animists. They are believed to bring luck and fortune to the owner, if properly revered. Kuman, or Kumara (Pali) means "young boy" (female kumari); thong means golden. Kuman thong is not a Buddhist practice, but necromancy. Genuine Kuman Thong, which was revered and created in ancient times according to traditional method by Adept practitioners of Saiyasart, was made by surgically removing the unborn fetus from the womb of its Mother. The body of the child would then be taken to a cemetery for the conduction of the ceremony to invoke a Kuman Thong. The body is roasted until dry whilst the Mage chants incantations of magical kata. In the case of making a female spirit child, the effigy is not called Kuman Tong, rather “Hong Pray”.

Some Kuman effigies will be soaked in Nam Man Prai,[1] which has extract of a dead child or a person who died in violent circumstances or an unnatural death. This is much less common now, because this practice is now illegal if using fat from human babies for the consecrating oil. There are however still some authentically made amulets appearing. Some years ago a famous monk was thrown out of the Buddhist sangha for roasting a baby. He was convicted, but later continued to make magic as a layperson after his release.[2] The practice of creating Necromantic effigies of a Kuman Tong comes from age old tradition in Thailand. Thai folk have made Bucha to Animistic spirits and ghosts since time immemorial. The original Kuman Tong came from children who died whilst still in their mothers womb. The Magic makers would take these stillborn babies and adopt them as their children.

From what information has been gathered from ancient Thai manuscripts about how to make a Kuman Tong, it appears that the correct method is to remove the dead baby surgically from the mothers womb, and take it to undergo the proper ceremonial ritual; The baby must be roasted until dry. This must be completed before dawn, and should be performed in a cemetery. Once the rite is completed, the dry-roasted Kuman should be painted with Ya Lak (a kind of lacquer used to cover amulets and Takrut with gold leaf) and covered in gold leaf. This is the real reason why this effigy received the name of “Kuman Thong” (which means “Golden Baby Boy”).
Origins

In Thailand, the Kuman Thong is also spoken of in the legend of Khun Chang Khun Phaen, where the character Khun Phaen made one by removing the stillborn baby from the stomach of his wife, whom he had killed.[3]
Accounts

On May 18, 2012 a 28 year-old British citizen of Taiwanese origin, Chow Hok Kuen, was arrested in a Bangkok hotel room with six male fetuses that had been roasted and covered in gold. Police reported that Kuen intended to sell the fetuses in Taiwan for about 6,300 USD each.[4][5][6]

dissss posted:

None if the devices passengers are likely to be carrying would be of any use for that.

Nckdictator posted:

It's a interesting idea

Josef K. Sourdust posted:

>Nckdictator, can you dig up anything for us on a crazy rear end project? City planners decided that to provide illumination at night instead of providing individual streetlights in every street, they would build a giant lighthouse in the centre of Paris. Real plan. Kind of a shame they came to their senses in the end.

Nckdictator posted:

I'll see if i can find anything on the Paris Lighthouse though.

Edit: a quick google search isn't finding anything whatsoever.

AlbieQuirky posted:

Josef K., are you thinking about the "moonlight tower" idea that city planners were so excited about for a while?

Nckdictator posted:

Most of the info/stuff i'm finding is from here.

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/

I'll see if i can find anything on the Paris Lighthouse though.

Edit: a quick google search isn't finding anything whatsoever.

Mr. Gibbycrumbles posted:

Yeah so it turns out the airliner that just crashed in the Alps was crashed deliberately by the co-pilot, after he locked the other pilot out of the cockpit.

http://news.sky.com/story/1453092/alps-crash-co-pilot-wanted-to-destroy-plane

#FuckThisPlanet

Nckdictator posted:

Anyone mind if i make another architecture post?

AdjectiveNoun posted:

I'd just like to request if at all possible that you use [timg] tags rather than [img], because the huge number of images loading can be a bit irritating IMO - that aside, it's pretty drat fascinating.

AdjectiveNoun posted:

I'd just like to request if at all possible that you use [timg] tags rather than [img], because the huge number of images loading can be a bit irritating IMO - that aside, it's pretty drat fascinating.

Nckdictator posted:

It's a interesting idea

Mescal posted:

I am eating the architecture up. Start another thread for it so it can live on.

quote:

Hundreds of residents of Kalachi, a small town near a former Soviet Union uranium mine in Kazakhstan, have been suffering from a mysterious sleeping sickness that causes them to fall asleep for two to six days and wake up with significant memory loss.

While the eerie sickness was first reported in 2010, cases have been emerging in droves since March 2013. Other symptoms include feeling dizzy, being unable to stand up and extreme fatigue. The Russian Times reports that eight children fell asleep within an hour during the first week of school, and several months later, 60 people were hit with the disease on the same day.

Mashable’s Elif Koc reports:

Scientists and doctors have flown into Kalachi to determine the root of the illness, but after conducting several tests ranging from environmental toxicity to patient data, results have been unsubstantial. Bacterial and viral tests have come up negative, knocking out the possibility that this is a parasitic disease such as African trypanosomiasis, which has similar effects.

In an interview with the Siberian Times, Sergei Lukashenko, director of Kazakhstan’s National Nuclear Centre’s Radiation Safety and Ecology Institute, said he is “positive this is not radon,” a colorless and odorless radioactive gas, but carbon monoxide could be to blame.

“We have some suspicions as the village has a peculiar location and weather patters frequently force chimney smoke to go down instead of up,” he continued. Carbon monoxide poisoning often results in a headache, vomiting and dizziness, but that wouldn’t account for the bizarre sleeping element.

Olga Samusenko, 21, a resident of the village, is looking to relocate her husband and two young children.

“We were at the parade of schoolchildren on September 1,” she continued. “My children are small, so we just went to look at the celebration. After that [two-year-old] Stanislav played outside in the yard, then he came home at about 4 p.m. and just fell down on his face. He couldn’t sit, he couldn’t stand. I tried to put him on his feet, but he was falling. His eyes were looking in different directions, as if he was drunk. It was so scary.”

“We need to escape now, there is no future for us here,” she said to the Siberian Times. ”Everyone is leaving. Many people have sent their children to relatives in other cities and villages. It is so scary. No one can explain us anything. We still do not know what’s going on. My children have not been outside since September. I am afraid to let them out.”

Mescal posted:

I am eating the architecture up. Start another thread for it so it can live on.

Mr. Gibbycrumbles posted:

Yeah so it turns out the airliner that just crashed in the Alps was crashed deliberately by the co-pilot, after he locked the other pilot out of the cockpit.

http://news.sky.com/story/1453092/alps-crash-co-pilot-wanted-to-destroy-plane

#FuckThisPlanet

Nth Doctor posted:

This is common enough that there's a list of possible Suicides by pilot

quote:

Phillips has compared the increased suicide rates in the USA in the month after the publication of front-page stories of suicides, with the suicides which might have been expected from calculations. From 1948 to 1967, 34 suicide stories had these characteristics. In 26 cases the number of suicides was significantly higher than the number expected. In order to exclude the possibility that the increase was caused not by the notice itself of the suicide, but by the death of celebrities, Phillips examined the trend of suicide after the deaths of 8 Presidents of the United States, occured between 1900 and 1968. The increase was not statistically significant, also after the murder of J.F.Kennedy there was a light increase of suicides.

In following researches Phillips found that there was also an increase of fatal car accidents and airplanes crashes after the publication of suicide stories.

In 1982 Phillips himself, studying the role of fictional presentation of suicide in television on suicidal and other violent behaviours, noticed an increase of suicide in white Americans, after the broadcast of fictional suicides, with white actors, by a television in the U.S.A.

Phillips pointed out also an increase of fatal car accidents higher when the driver was alone than in accidents with more passengers.

Nth Doctor posted:

This is common enough that there's a list of possible Suicides by pilot

bamhand posted:

There is an architecture thread in GPS that's honestly not so bad.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3701638&pagenumber=1

NiceGuy posted:

This is just as unnerving to me as anything else in this thread. I have the utmost sympathy for those who get to the point where they feel they need to commit suicide (my great uncle just did so a few months ago), but the desire to take 30-to-40 (edit: more like 30-to-300 ) innocent people down with you just digusts me at the most basic human level. Congratulations sadbrains, you just found a way to make your life an even bigger waste and a more revolting embarrassment through your final actions, wiping away any possible regret anyone could have about you ending your pathetic existence. But hey, you were gonna kill yourself anyway so who cares about all that right??

NiceGuy posted:

This is just as unnerving to me as anything else in this thread. I have the utmost sympathy for those who get to the point where they feel they need to commit suicide (my great uncle just did so a few months ago), but the desire to take 30-to-40 (edit: more like 30-to-300 ) innocent people down with you just digusts me at the most basic human level. Congratulations sadbrains, you just found a way to make your life an even bigger waste and a more revolting embarrassment through your final actions, wiping away any possible regret anyone could have about you ending your pathetic existence. But hey, you were gonna kill yourself anyway so who cares about all that right??