Former Troy City Hall site empty seven years later
Troy’s plan to hold charrettes — public gatherings to hear ideas and come up with solutions to an issue — came after several earlier efforts to redevelop the former Troy City Hall site failed.
And it may have left some observers wondering why this approach wasn’t tried in the first place.
To a degree, it was. But what’s different here, is that this three-day event is designed to build grass-roots support for what would work at the site, on the shore of the Hudson River.
It’s the fifth attempt since the demolition of Troy City Hall at the beginning of 2011.
At the time, the fear of many residents was that, with nothing planned, the site would remain vacant for years. They were right.
Emily Roebling engineers a notable nod in history
After decades of being in the background, Emily Warren Roebling is finally getting credit for all that she accomplished.
Last Sunday, The New York Times ran the obituaries of a number of notable women — including Roebling — who it didn’t recognize when they died.
Roebling, the wife of Washington Roebling, an 1857 graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy and builder of the Brooklyn Bridge, became her husband’s “unofficial aide-de-camp and exerted a profound influence over the construction of the bridge.
“She carried out all written communication and face-to-face interviews with contractors with a thorough grasp of the engineering,” according to his RPI biography.
In her insightful new book “Built: The Hidden Stories Behind Our Structures,” Roma Agrawal, the structural engineer who worked on The Shard in London, devotes a chapter, appropriately titled “Idol,” to Roebling.
Emily Roebling died in 1903. Her husband, despite his physical disabilities, lived until 1926.
The futures, or not, of Toys R Us; I Heart radio
First Toys R Us. Then I Heart radio. Twice in two days, businesses that entertained us have gotten into enough financial trouble to threaten their futures.
I Heart, the company that bought up most of our favorite radio stations, likely will survive bankruptcy court, although another round of cost-cutting could rob those stations of their remaining personalities.
For Toys R Us, the company has thrown in the towel and will close or sell all of its U.S. stores.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)