Clarksvile, IN: Clockworks/Colgate-Palmolive Plant

(Satellite)

Street View, Jan 2022

From the same location, I could see the main trusses of the Pennsy Bridge over the Ohio River.

Street View, Jan 2022

Just Kentucky posted
August 1965 vs. 2025: A nighttime image of the Colgate-Palmolive building in Clarksville, complete with neon signs and a clock.

2025:

WHAS11 News posted
The Town of Clarksville held an illumination ceremony on Saturday for its iconic Colgate Clock ahead of its upcoming 101st anniversary on Monday.

"At its peak in the mid-1960s, Clarksville's Colgate-Palmolive plant was filled with some 1,500 workers who made toothpaste, shaving cream and cleansers." It closed in 2008. Colgate acquired the building in 1921 to make soap and added the clock in 1924. "In 1941-42, the plant was expanded to also produce toothpaste, shaving cream and other toiletries." [manufacturing]

The property was sold in 2011 for redevelopment. [bizjournals]

But by 2025, Clarksville was not happy with the progress and threatened to redevelop it. [lpm]

NewsAndTribune, a rendering
In May, 2026, plans were announced that included "a conference center, sports park and a Marriott hotel along with several other amenities." The property would be called Clockworks.
[And then I hit a paywall.]

Today's view:

NewsAndTribune

I can't reconcile this rendering with the one above.

NewsAndTribune

NewsAndTribune

Greenwald, MN: Wood Grain Elevator

(Satellite)

Street View, Jun 2023

The wood elevator is peaking through between the metal bin and the new feed mill.

Street View, Jun 2023

Jordan van der Hagen posted

Their feed products include products for deer to improve hunting. [GreenwaldElevator]

The railroad was the SOO.

1965/66 Greenwald Quad @ 24,000

Millstadt, IL: 1876 GM&O/M&O/Columbia & Millstadt Depot and Wood Feed Mill

Depot: (Satellite, a spur came north on the east side of Breese Street. So, I think it was within a block of Madison and Breese Streets.)

Feed Mill: (Satellite)

Andrew Waldo posted

Milstadt, Illinois: Passenger & Freight Station, Mobile & Ohio Railroad. The M&O Passenger & Freight Station at Milstadt, on the very short Milstadt Branch, was estimated as having been built in about 1876. The photograph was taken on 6 June 1916.

Credit: National Archives & Records Administration, ICC Engineering Field Notes, Mobile & Ohio Railroad, Illinois. Digital Image Collection of Andrew Waldo. Fine prints from high resolution copies of the scans are available for purchase in various sizes.

Dede Brinkmann: Is the location of the Millstadt food pantry now?

Ruth Ann Saul Mueller: Dede Brinkmann yes [When I searched for the food pantry, Google Maps offered Millstadt Community Center.]

At first the depot up by Madison Street didn't make sense because this map shows that M&O branch went through town on Elm Street and terminated at a strip mine.

1954/59 Quad @ 24,000

After I read the comments by Dede and Ruth, I took a closer look at this map and found the spur that went up along Breese Street to Washington Street. And this map answers why the feed mill was too blocks north of the elevators down by Elm Street. Specifically, it had its own spur off the spur.

1913/13 Waterloo Quad @ 62,500

But I could not reconcile the map with the photo with the food pantry, so I got an old aerial photo. Washington Street is along the top, and Jefferson Street is along the left side. I still can't figure it out, but I think the depot was within a block of Madison and Breese Streets.

1940 Aerial Photo from IHLAP

I had gotten the 1913 map to determine how the Millstadt Branch connected to the M&O. The junction is north of Columbia where the M&O uses a valley to get through the river bluff.

1913/13 Waterloo Quad @ 62,500

While looking for the depot's location, I discovered these old grain elevators.

The mill on the left (west side) and the storage elevator on the right are gone, but the feed mill in the distant background still stands.

Street View, Jul 2013

The feed mill looks like two traditional elevators that were connected.

Street View, Jun 2026

And there was another traditional elevator north of what we see above. And the red brick indicates that there was another building on this side.

Street View, Jun 2026

Photo, Jun 2024

We know it was still operational in 2024 because it is loading a Purina feed truck.

Photo, Jun 2024

The spur to the depot explains the little smudge near the end of the Millstadt Branch. Today, all of these GM&O and IC routes have been abandoned, not just the Millstadt Branch.

rail.guide

I zoomed out on the aerial photo so that we can see what the strip mine looked like in 1940.

1940 Aerial Photo from IHLAP

Chicago, IL: Jeanne Gang's Aqua Tower

(Satellite)

The Aqua Tower is the wavy building. I think the blue towers to the right are her St. Regis building.

Illinois Field Guide posted

Aqua Tower rises 82 stories above Chicago's Lakeshore East neighborhood, and when it was completed in 2010, it became the tallest building in the world designed by a woman, a title Chicago architect Jeanne Gang held onto until her own follow up project, the St. Regis Chicago, eventually surpassed it just blocks away.

Gang got the job in an unusual way for a project this size. Veteran Chicago developer Jim Loewenberg met her in 2004, at a point when her tallest completed independent work was a 90 foot theater in Rockford, Illinois. He was looking for a young architect willing to break from the standard glass box formula for a tower going up at Lakeshore East, a site boxed in by a crowded field of existing high rises. Gang and her team responded with an idea nobody else in Chicago's skyline was doing at the time, stretching each floor's balconies outward at different lengths, anywhere from two to twelve feet, specifically to open up sightlines toward Lake Michigan and Millennium Park that a typical rectangular tower would have blocked entirely.

The result is the building's signature feature, a rippling, wave-like facade made of contoured concrete balconies jutting out from a rectangular glass core, with every single floor plate shaped slightly differently from the ones above and below it. Gang drew the inspiration directly from the layered limestone outcroppings found along the Great Lakes shoreline, translating that natural topography into poured concrete on a scale nobody had attempted downtown before. The design wasn't just visual either. Those irregular balcony shapes also help break up Chicago's notoriously harsh lake winds and provide shading, doing real structural work rather than existing purely for the sake of appearance.

At 819 feet [1318m] tall, Aqua combines residential apartments, condominiums, a hotel, offices, and parking into one 1.9 million square foot vertical community, all sitting on top of an eight story base topped by a massive terrace complete with gardens, a running track, and a fire pit. It remains one of the largest projects ever awarded to an American architecture firm led by a woman, and it launched Gang and her firm, Studio Gang, into the center of Chicago's architectural conversation almost overnight.

Aqua has stayed one of the most photographed and talked about buildings on the skyline in the years since, recognized by critics and architecture publications as one of the standout skyscrapers built anywhere in the world during the 2010s. For a city that already claims some of the most influential architecture in American history, Aqua gave Chicago something genuinely new, proof that even in a skyline shaped for a century by rigid steel and glass towers, there was still room for something that moved like water instead.

Shreveport, LA: 1887 Water Works Museum

(Satellite)

Street View, Jan 2021

Howard Zhu, Dec 2024

Louisiana Life posted
[Description is padded with a lot of AI platitudes.]

Lawrence Lois Bartel: I loved this museum visit. There's railroad memorabilia right next door too. [The red-brick building in the street view at the top of these notes houses the railroad museum.]

The pump in the above photo is in the background of this photo. I think the pump in the foreground is older because of the header tank used to combine the four pulses of water into a steady stream.

Carter Sutton, Oct 2016

They had at least two drill presses.

Michael Anderson, Jul 2026

"The last known steam-powered municipal water treatment plant in the United States

when its steam engines were finally retired in 1980." [ShreveportWaterWorks]

I was surprised how late some of Chicago's pumping stations used steam. I think it was because they needed variable speed pumps, and they waited until power semiconductors allowed them to use AC motors to replace the steam pumps.

ShreveportWaterWorks_museum, 5 of 5

ShreveportWaterWorks_history

Shelby, TX: Old Feed Store and Dilapidated Gulf Gas Station

(Satellite)

Street View, Mar 2025

C B, Mar 2023

Old Gas Stations posted
Shelby, TX. Based on the pumps, it was originally Gulf.

Kensington, MD: 1891 MARC/B&O Depot

(Satellite)

Street View, Jun 2022

Y A, Jun 2025

Lehigh Valley Railroad & Railroad Photography posted
Former Baltimore & Ohio Railroad station in Kensington, MD

Thomas Dorman: Late Victorian style, designed for the B&O by Baltimore architect E. Francis Baldwin, built in 1891 on the B&O's Metropolitan Branch.