Thursday, 6/22

That went well!

That's a (phone) picture of  the first dozen of 50 or so people who showed up for my Marquette Regional History Center bike tour last night. After we did it last year, I wasn't quite sure how many people would want to either do it or do it again this year.

I guess now I know.

When I do this tour I tell a lot of stories and try to share a few pictures, something that isn't really easy when you're trying to herd a gaggle of bike riders around the bike path system. And I had one new picture this year, a picture someone had found at the Michigan State Archives and then posted on Facebook, and that was of one place the bike path goes right by--

The old railroad roundhouse property, now better known as the upcoming home of UP Heath Systems, Marquette. Wanna see it?

That's right; the new hospital is bring built upon this land where the DSS&A had repair facilities and a “roundhouse”--a big metal rotating thingee upon which a train would sit and be turned in any direction. After all, you just can't turn a train around like you can a car. It's kind of hard to U-turn a train. You need a way to do it. And that's what the Roundhouse did. It operated 24 hours a day, and according to people who lived in that neighborhood when it was in operation you could hear it 24 hours a day. But, much like dust in the air from the Lower Harbor coal yard or the stink from the North Marquette Cliffs-Dow plant, that was just something you lived with in old Marquette.

I'm kind of glad it's different now.

I also like the picture because, if you look at the right hand side of it, you can see the old Bishop Baraga School and the pre-1933 fire version of St. Peter's Cathedral. The school doesn't exist any more, while the church was radically rebuilt after the fire (the second, by the way, in its history). But if nothing else, the picture sure shows just how closely people and industry used to exist in “old” Marquette. Can you imagine living in one of those houses right across the street from the Roundhouse?

Yikes!

Hope you enjoyed the picture; if you were on the tour, I'm just sorry you didn't get to look at it a little more closely. But, then, I guess that's one of the great things about the Interweb. Now, you can spend as long as you'd like looking at it.

(jim@wmqt.com)