America the Beautiful

by JanieM

Part I: Where are these places?

Below is a list of scenes in the Lincoln Project ad. Anyone who feels like something lighthearted will help us get through the next 48 hours, and for that matter the next few weeks, is invited to try to identify the locations. I've filled in the ones I know. Some are so generic I doubt we'll ever know, unless someone here happens to live next door to one of those. If the Lincoln Project has published a list of where the shots were taken, I haven't found it. (I didn't look too hard.) As people identify places, I'll update the post.

1. lighthouse -- Nubble Light, Cape Neddick, York, Maine

2. cornfield and farmstead

3. city -- New York City, One World Trade Center at the center (or so I am told, and other online images seem to confirm)

4. swamp / Florida?

5. village and fields

6. autumn: orchards and grapevines?

7. city – big flat roof with a stylized star on it -- Dallas, with the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in the foreground (h/t anonymous, but the ID came from dogged google-fu, not from someone who lives there)

8. Florida Keys

9. Mount Rushmore / South Dakota

10. mountain…kind of solitary but not Rainier…? -- South Sister, the third-tallest mountain in Oregon at 10,363 feet. The view is an iconic one, taken from the shore of Sparks Lake. The lower peak in the foreground is Bachelor Butte, and the mountain to the right is Broken Top (h/t commenter Fletcher DeLancey)

11. city view with lots of red buildings and reddish streets, streets too straight to be NE? -- Harbor Springs MI (h/t commenter jack lecou)

12. city, river, bridge - Memphis, Mississippi River, Hernando de Soto Bridge

13. St. Louis - Arch

14. Seattle, Rainier in the distance

15. rider on a horse in a field, ridge in the distance

16. Statue of Liberty / New York

**********************************

Part II: Our own places

At the bottom of the post is a picture of the lift bridge across the Ashtabula River in my home town, to start us off. I would love to see pictures of places that are special to everyone else in comments: for my pics that are uploaded to a Flickr account, Flicker will provide (via the "share" icon) an html string that succeeds in embedding a photo in the comments -- just copy and paste it into the comment box. (I used 400x300 for the size.) That's not supposed to work in Typepad, is my understanding, but my experiment in the previous thread worked fine, and we've done this before.

If lj checks in, maybe he can help me figure out how to receive pics from people who don't have them in a cloud account of some sort, and then I can upload and post them. Apologies if this is glitchy...we talked about doing it a few years ago but it never got off the ground.

Lift Bridge, Ashtabula, Ohio

Tybee Island Georgia, looking west across the Back River toward Little Tybee Island (from Priest)

P.S. Typo in title corrected....

Comments

[hairshirthedonist]

I've spent some time in Ashtabula, back in the nuclear phase of my career, when I was at the Perry plant. One of my coworkers, whom I had worked with elsewhere and gotten to be good friends with, moved permanently to Ashtabula (as opposed to just for the duration of the gig). I found it to be 2 parts quaint and 1 part depressing.

[JanieM]

It's pretty depressing now. Most of the city proper isn't in great shape; the nicer neighborhoods are in the outlying townships.

NE Ohio has been in an economic downturn since I left town -- no connection :-), just that my childhood was when the town's population was at its peak (about 24K). In those years there was a lot of (very stinky) industry, and lake shipping was thriving, especially after the Seaway opened.

The factories mostly went away in later years, and the decline of the steel industry in Pittsburgh didn't help. Previously, iron ore was brought in by boat from up Lake Superior way and loaded onto trains to be taken south to Youngstown or Pittsburgh. There was grain shipping as well. My dad worked at the docks as one of his jobs over the years.

Almost the entire industrial harbor is now sailboats and the yacht club.

The picture below tells some headlines, though I don't know if it will be big enough to be readable. The notion that the harbor was as tough as Shanghai or Calcutta sounds like something some ad agency made up. But I do think it was a pretty rough place in some eras -- e.g. when my dad was growing up and sailing on the "lake boats."

Steve Inskeep on NPR did a spot on Ashtabula a few months ago, relating mostly to the campaign. He got a lot of things wrong (like saying that Bridge Street, named for that bridge, was "downtown" -- it most emphatically is not). It was a lesson in how skeptical to be about pretty much anything in the news. Dismaying, actually.

[Kit Mason]

I may be wrong about the lighthouse -- it may be somewhere else altogether -- but the way it's set up with the house next to it looks to me like the Portland Head light, in Portland, Maine.

[JanieM]

I don't think it's Portland Head...it's squatter and the house is a different shape. But now that you mention it, it looks a lot like the Nubble light, which is also in Maine.

The first picture in this set is Portland Head. There are some other nice Maine ones there too.

[liberal japonicus]

Sorry, just saw JanieM's call. On the computer all the time, so just attach the photos and send them to the kitty and I'll post them. I have lots of boring work dealing with student writing, so excuses to take a break are always welcome!!

[Fletcher DeLancey]

Long time lurker here, speaking up to identify #10 for you. I'm an Oregon expatriate who has lived in Portugal for the past 14 years, but it would take more years than that to forget the outline of South Sister, the third-tallest mountain in Oregon at 10,363 feet. The view is an iconic one, taken from the shore of Sparks Lake. The lower peak in the foreground is Bachelor Butte, and the mountain to the right is Broken Top.

Thanks for this opportunity to think of something other than the election today! Due to Oregon's sensible vote-by-mail laws, I was able to send my absentee ballot via email and get a confirmation from my local county clerk. A Washington expat friend of mine was able to do the same, but you wouldn't believe the lengths I have seen expats go to this year to make sure their ballots were not captured by the USPS suppression efforts. Taking their ballots to the embassy for delivery with diplomatic mail, paying €50 to Fed-Ex it, asking friends who are traveling to the US to courier their ballot and drop it in the mail once they arrive...I've felt guilty for the ease of my own vote. Oregon gets a lot of things right.

[cleek]

let's see if this works...

Colton Point, above Pine Creek, PA Grand Canyon.

[JanieM]

cleek -- that's lovely. Wow.

Fletcher DeLancey -- thank you for ID-ing #10! I'll adjust the list shortly.

[JanieM]

And Fletcher -- glad you delurked!

[JanieM]

Also, I was going to call #4 the Everglades, but I wasn't sure, and one of my Florida relatives wasn't either. She thought it might be Louisiana.

[worn]

Delurking for a second here - while I put off getting to work owing to election day nervousness - to chime in. I recognized South Sister & Mt. Ranier in an instant, having resided in the PNW for 25 years now. As for the swamp shot, I'd bet dollars to donuts it was taken at the cypress-laden end of Caddo Lake, which spans the TX-LA border.

I can also confirm the Manhattan shot;it was taken from here, although with a drone so the viewpoint is elevated above street level.

Thanks for the distraction!

[JanieM]

Thanks for delurking, worn. Don't be a stranger.

And I should also have thanked Kit Mason for proposing Portland Head. I had kind of dismissed Maine as a possibility, because in the darkness of the video I didn't think the coastline was rugged enough. But your suggestion made me rethink that hunch.

[JanieM]

#12 is the Hernando de Soto bridge in Memphis, looking toward Memphis. Here's a view from the bridge itself.

[russell]

some personal happy places from my neck of the woods.

Salem Harbor, from the old customs wharf.

Same place, looking the other way.

Marblehead MA, looking back at downtown from the harbor.

Essex bay, from behind the old Farnham house.

If I'm not mistaken, Gloucester Harbor, from up on the Magnolia side.

Pioneer Valley MA, basically the Connecticut River valley between the Berkshires and the hills of central MA.

Another Pioneer Valley view.

[JanieM]

Evocative and beautiful pictures, russell. They make me feel nostalgic for places I've never lived. Thanks for gathering them.

[russell]

The big ship in the Salem Harbor pictures is the "Friendship", a recreation of a tall ship from when Salem was the premier US port for the China trade.

A good friend of my wife and I, a retired physicist who had worked at CERN on the big collider, taught himself celestial navigation from Bowditch's "Practical Navigator", and then taught it to the crew of the Friendship.

Everybody needs a hobby!

He's since passed on, but ship is still here. They just re-installed the masts after it had been through an extensive re-build.

Cape Ann (the big bump in northeast MA) and the Connecticut river valley are pretty much top of my list for favorite places.

[jack lecou]

#11: Harbor Springs MI

[nous]

A few of my favorite shots taken at my places:

Hills by campus with Super Blood Moon eclipse:
https://assets2.ello.co/uploads/asset/attachment/3060705/ello-optimized-4a64a6cb.jpg

Hiking trails 6 miles away at Crystal Cove:
https://assets0.ello.co/uploads/asset/attachment/4295117/ello-optimized-a3f3b667.jpg

Hiking in Joshua Tree:
https://assets2.ello.co/uploads/asset/attachment/2869606/ello-optimized-058e4757.jpg

Super bloom above Escondido:
https://assets1.ello.co/uploads/asset/attachment/5651355/ello-optimized-13650d3b.jpg

Top of Trail Ridge in Rocky Mountain National Park:
https://assets1.ello.co/uploads/asset/attachment/3067921/ello-optimized-5deea81a.jpg

[JanieM]

Priest, jack lecou, nous: thanks....

[JanieM]

Google satellite view of #7.