Around the Town Thursday: The Seattle Space Needle

As promised, here's the bonus Around the Town Thursday post!  Instead of flying into Canada directly for my work trip I opted to fly into Seattle, Washington and take a drive up the coast into Canada.  I'm so glad I did too.  First, because I got to see some fantastic sites.  Second, because I remembered (as the plane was touching down in Seattle) that my dad used to live somewhere near Seattle (Tacoma to be exact) and I decided to make the trip somewhat of a "pilgrimage" and see the city my dad spoke so highly of.  But that's a story for another time.

While in Seattle I decided to stop in and see the famed Space Needle of Seattle.  A friend told me there was a restaurant in the Space Needle and that eating at that restaurant was the best way to experience the Needle.  So I made a reservation at SkyCity Restaurant and made a night of it at the Space Needle.

Seattle Space Needle at night

The food at SkyCity was good.  It's an expensive place to eat but the view is absolutely awesome!  If you don't want to pay the menu prices you can also pay to go to the observation deck.  If I hadn't eaten there I definitely would have paid to go to the observation deck.  The view from the deck is almost as good as the view from the restaurant.

View of downtown Seattle from the Space Needle Observation Deck

View of the city and bay from the observation deck

I'm not the greatest night photographer, but the view from the
observation deck is gorgeous at night too!

Hello from SkyCity in the Seattle Space Needle!

This is definitely a must see sight if you go to Seattle.  Entree prices at the restaurant start at around $50 and go up from there.  There are appetizers and some fantastic desserts so you could just opt to have one of those items, which are somewhat cheaper.

The other option is to pay the fee to see just the observation deck.  Ticket prices were $19 when I went in September (ticket prices can be found here) so really a better option is to make a reservation at the restaurant and have appetizers or dessert and enjoy the observation deck along with your food (and the rotating restaurant as well).  Although, if you're going to be in Seattle for a few days your best option is to buy a Seattle CityPASS, which gets you admission to six different popular Seattle attractions (the Space Needle among them).

I enjoyed my visit to the Space Needle and if you get a chance, you should definitely head for the top!

Around the Town Thursday: Twelfth Street Viaduct Bridge

Welcome to another Around the Town Thursday!  Now I know what you're thinking: "A bridge??  You're writing about a bridge??"  But this isn't just any bridge.  Today I'm highlighting the Twelfth Street Viaduct Bridge in the West Bottoms of Kansas City, Missouri.

Mid-level of the Twelfth Street Viaduct Bridge

Native Kansas Citians will recognize this bridge as being down near all the popular haunted houses and the American Royal.  But the bridge has a very interesting history.  Created to be a link between the business district and the industrial district of Kansas City, Missouri, the Viaduct was created by the great minds at Waddell and Harrington (a Kansas City architecture firm) in 1915.  It is one of the earliest examples of a double-decked, reinforced concrete bridge.  The upper level goes from the Central Business District to the West Bottoms.  The lower level goes into Westside, which contains a variety of restaurants and shops.  And below the bridge...well below the bridge are the original cobblestone street farmers would travel back in the day when the bridge was still young.

View from the lower level of the Twelfth Street Viaduct Bridge

Architectural & Historic Research, LLC has a fantastic piece on their website titled "An Historical Perspective of Kansas City's Twelfth Street Trafficway Viaduct 1911-1915" (written by Cyndy Millstein) that contains a ton of great information about the history of the Viaduct and the architects that built it.  There's also a brief history of the bridge on the Historic West Bottoms website.

A very interesting piece of information I discovered during the researching of this post: you can rent the bridge for events.  Weddings, parties, and other events can be held (for a price) either on the lower level or below the bridge on the cobblestone street.  How fun!  I'm not sure how I missed THAT venue for my wedding in June but D1 definitely had a bit of venue envy when I told him the bridge could be rented for events.  You can find rental information for the bridge here.

And just because I can, I'm going to throw a little spotlight my dear husband's way.  In 1997, the music group U2 did a music video here in Kansas City for their song "Last Night on Earth".  The video producers were looking for some old, run down cars for the video and D1 was (and still is) the proud owner of a 1972 Chevy Chevelle.  Said Chevelle ended up in that video as an "extra" (the music video can be viewed on Dailymotion).  At 2:33 if you look past the open truck door to the next car bumper, that bumper belongs to D1's Chevelle. And then again at 2:40 if you look through the rear view window of the car being driven down the bridge you can see some round taillights of a car.  Those taillights belong to D1's Chevelle as well.  It's a memory D1 smiles about each time he tells the story.

It was fun to take a drive down the bridge for pictures for this post.  If you're planning to go see the bridge I would strongly suggest going on a Sunday evening, around 4:00pm or so because there's hardly any traffic at all.

Around the Town Thursday: Pioneer Crossing Park

It's Around the Town Thursday and today we're looking at a park located in Shawnee, Kansas.  Pioneer Crossing Park sits on a small tract of land in that was formerly a used car lot.
 

 It features two sculptures by a local Shawnee artist named Charles Goslin (the same Charles Goslin that created the statue of Chief Bluejacket located in Herman Laird Park, featured in last week's Around the Town Thursday post).

 

Sculpture of wagon master, Dick Williams.
Sculpture by Charles Goslin.

Wagon train sculpture.  Sculpture by Charles Goslin.

The park includes native grass and flowers and plaques which include descriptions about each of the pioneer trails that crossed thru Shawnee as well as a map of all the trails and a plaque describing the wagon master's house (which previously sat on the southeast corner of Nieman Road and Shawnee Mission Parkway).

The park has a nice walking trail in it and at the back of the park is a set of stairs leading up to a playground area.  I didn't even know it was there until I walked back to the back of the park and saw the stairs.

Front section of Pioneer Crossing Park

Back section of Pioneer Crossing Park

Playground located up the stairs at the back of
Pioneer Crossing Park

The park was created to commemorate the Sesquicentennial of Shawnee in 2006.  Located at Shawnee Mission Parkway and Melrose, the park has a quiet, serene feeling while being just off to the side of a busy thoroughfare.   The official park description can be found here, courtesy of the Shawnee CVB.

Do Re Mi...

As Julie Andrews sang in "The Sound of Music": "Let's start at the very beginning, it's a very good place to start..."

I've wondered about blogs, read blogs, shared interesting blog posts with friends, wished I had the ability to write a blog post, seriously considered writing a blog post and then convinced myself no one would read it anyway and decided to not write a blog post, read some more blogs, got serious about reading blogs I found to be interesting and finally (with the help of some very special people - ahem, D1 and a certain group of 'Bugs!) finally decided to take the plunge and, as Nike so eloquently put it, "Just Do It!"

So this is it.  The ramblings of an amateur genealogist, history buff, amateur photographer and avid scrapbooker laid out for all the World Wide Web to see.  May these musings be of some interest and assistance to you out there in Virtual World.  I hope to make this a mix of my personal genealogical journey (with all its successes and wrong turns), bits of history and other odds and end.

Currently I'm working on gathering documentation to support my application for the Daughters of the American Revolution, trying to either prove (or disprove) a verbal history of a possible Native America connection in my family that my grandfather passed down and reviewing some family tree database apps for the iPad.  I hope to have a series of posts about those iPad apps up starting in the next week or so.  I'm very excited about the iPad apps I've been reviewing.  I think there's some good stuff out there.

And in case you're wondering about the name of the blog, check out my About Me page.  There's an explanation of where Talking Box Genealogy came from ;)