The two teenagers are too funny!
It’s easy to see the Triassic Basin on the ground when traveling on I 40. The eastern edge (escarpment) is just beyond Harrison Avenue and the western edge is US 15-501. Chapel Hill is located beyond the western escarpment. The airport and the entire city of Durham lies in the Triassic Basin and has low hills and terrible soil for anything but bricks.
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Coming back from the west you round a bend on 40 and you can see the basin sort of on a giant panorama display out in front of you. Once its pointed out to you, you can’t unsee it.
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To the non-geologists in us. What exactly are we looking for, at?
Maybe @Buck means that you see how the land drops and flattens out into a basin?
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I’m not a geologist either but my boss is and he pointed it out as John described. Goes to approximately Umstead and is recognizable from all the quartz all over there (super heated sandstone from the heat of the fracture zone if I am recalling his explanation correctly)
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I worked at the Preston development when it first opened, doing landscaping of the entrances/roads/golf course, and it is smack dab in this basin. We often planted things only to come back 3 months later and pull them out, dead by drowning, because the holes did not drain at all.
I always marveled that folks would pay that kind of money to live right under the flight path into RDU. I am I guess hyper-aware of noise, and that would make me crazy. In fact one of the benefits of sorts of this Clampdown is the lack of flights in and out of ATL. I am under the flight path here in Alabama, and there is a nice absence of jet noise over my house. Nothing but birds and tree frogs these days - well that and a lot of lawn equipment.
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I didn’t see a better place to put this, so I figured I’d revive this topic.
I was reading “The Address Book” by Diedre Mask, which is excellent by the way, and in the book she says that every U.S. city with at least 500,000 people has numerical street names. Knowing that Raleigh is close to 500,000 people and does not have numerical street names, I did a little research on Wikipedia, and it does indeed appear that Raleigh is the largest city in the United States that does not use numbered streets in its downtown. (Feel free to crowdsource the fact-checking on this, but it think this is correct.)
If I had to guess why this would be the case, it’s that Raleigh’s original downtown was so small that it didn’t particularly need numbered streets, and this is yet another quirk of the city having grown with just astonishing speed over the last century.
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We do have a 42nd Street Oyster Bar though!
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Insert Bono-like voice into the travel promotions for Raleigh :
“Where the Streets Have No Numbers”…play it from the rooftops ( which should be taller)…
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What about Atlanta? I think that they are now over 500K.
Numbered east / west streets in midtown from 1st to 26th
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but not downtown, right?
An anagram for Raleigh is Hair Gel
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Technically no, but Atlanta considers that all the core per say. Any laymen would think it’s downtown.
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I suppose that’s fair, and according to @daviddonovan he didn’t distinguish where the numbered streets are in these cities.
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When I am at the Ikea in Atlantic Station, I certainly consider myself in DTATL, lol.
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“Leg hair” also works. That must by why Olympic swimmers come out of Cary instead.
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Yeah, I was just going off what was cited in The Address Book, which did not specify between downtown and other parts of a city (although I would imagine in the vast majority of cases, the numbered streets would be in downtown proper).
So it looks like Raleigh is 1st when it comes to not having a 1st (or 2nd or 3rd)!
@NoRaAintAllBad Diedre Mask writes about street names a lot, and she mentions in the book that editors are very fond of writing headlines for her stories that reference that song. As a newspaper editor myself, I can certainly appreciate that. I’m sure I would have done the exact same thing in those editors’ shoes.
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I always tell people that Midtown Atlanta feels more like Downtown Raleigh than Downtown Atlanta does.
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