Tag Archives: Erie

Flood Measures

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There is an enormous floodwall on the Covington, KY, side of the Roebling bridge, which spans the Ohio River.  It shocked me to see such a huge wall when I was there last year.  I wondered if there couldn’t have been some other means of flood control that would not have produced such a large barrier.  It reminded me of the significant physical barriers to the waterfront that I observed in Erie, Pittsburgh, Homestead, PA, and Cleveland.  Unlike Erie, Homestead, and Cleveland, Covington did not have any significant economic drivers separated from the town by the barrier wall.  The river side only had a small park and parking lot.

In addition to acting as a barrier, the sheer massiveness of the flat concrete wall bothered me.  I wanted to see it broken up into staggered segments, even though I knew that would not be useful in a structure intended to block the path of water.  However, Covington handled the flat wall with style by turning it into a canvas for a giant mural.  Almost as long as the wall itself, this mural depicts the history of the crossing at this location from 8000 BCE to the present day.  While the mural did not help with the scale of the wall, it broke the monotony while turning it into a destination for its own sake.

In the back of my mind, this wall continued to bother me until observing the effects of the significant flooding experienced in Pittsburgh this year at the forks of the Ohio River (see Checking on the Rivers and The Aftermath).  A google search showed me that the flooding Pittsburgh experienced in February this year also affected the Covington-Cincinnati region in the worst flood in that area since 1997.  The concept of a wall still bothers me, but this one probably prevents a lot of property damage and Covington has taken steps to soften its negative effects.

Erie Churches

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Erie has a variety of attractive church buildings.  As I walked around admiring them, I was surprised to see that they were all still used as churches.  I did not find a single adaptively reused church building.  Given Erie’s location, relatively close to Cleveland, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh, I assumed it had similar significant population loss creating a need to either abandon, demolish or adapt some church buildings.  It turns out, that at least on the county level, this assumption was false.  Since 1900, the population of Erie County has grown every decade, except from 1980 to 1990 when there was a slight (1.5%) population loss, from 98,509 to 280,843 (2000’s population).  Allegheny County (Pittsburgh’s county), on the other hand saw growth from 775,058 in 1900 to 1,628,587 in 1960 after which the population has declined steadily to 1,223,348 in 2010.

I could not find statistics for the population change of the city of Erie; it is possible that there was a different trend within the city.  There were signs of abandonment and decay in other buildings and aspects of the town.  Yet the churches are still intact and appear to be thriving.  In fact, one of the larger churches was undergoing a major renovation while I was there.

Whatever the reason for the churches’ continued use, I enjoyed my treasure hunt chasing down as many steeples as I could in two hours:

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St. Patrick's Church 1903

Russian Old Believers Church of the Holy Trinity 1984

Russian Orthodox Church of the Nativity of Christ (Old Rite) 1987

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St. Peter Cathedral 1872

Cathedral School

St. Paul's United Church of Christ

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Methodist Church

First United Presbyterian Church of the Covenant 1929

Isolated Waterfronts

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In October 2012, I spent a few days in Erie, PA, to attend a conference.  Before arriving, I had looked at the map to figure out how to get from the bus station to my accommodations to the convention center.  On the map it looked pretty straight forward and simple.  All the places I had to get were within a mile of each other—piece of cake.  I often walk that far just to get to a bus in Pittsburgh.  Shortly after arriving in Erie, I realized that purely considering distance does not capture the true picture.  The seemingly short mile-long paths that I had to take included significant geographical and man-made barriers.

The main drag ran up through the town and straight out to the waterfront ending at the convention center hotel.  From the town square (6th Street), most of the buildings are flush with the sidewalk, except for the parking-lot-centric McDonald’s in the middle of these older buildings.  At 3rd Street, this changes.  The next two blocks are dominated by the campus of a UPMC hospital.  Then the barriers come.

First there is a small hill down toward the waterfront, then a wide parkway, followed by a barren strip of land on one side of the road and a marina on the other.  Finally, there is the convention center hotel.  Of course you have to pass the long parking garage, the lobby and rooms of the hotel, go up an elevator across a pedestrian bridge over the entrance to the marina, and down another elevator before you get to the convention center.

I was staying in a Bed and Breakfast near the town square, so several times a day I walked back and forth along this route to attend the conference events.  Even though the walk was only about a mile long, it seemed to take forever because of the barriers of the hill, road, vacant land, and water.  After going back and forth a few times, I realized that the set up was not much different from what I had seen in Cleveland this summer.  That city also has a major roadway cutting off the town from the shores of Lake Erie.  This road of course was much bigger than the one in Erie as the city is correspondingly bigger.

Despite the fact that there is a major freeway dividing the waterfront from downtown Cleveland, I still felt welcome to cross this barrier to reach the waterfront park or the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.  In Erie, I got a very clear impression that the downtown residents were not welcome to cross the barriers to get to the convention center/hotel or the little public jetty next to it and that the visitors at the hotel/conference center were not encouraged to explore into downtown Erie.  This situation seems to defeat part of the purpose of convention centers to bring economic benefits to the surrounding area, by bringing in more people to use local services.