Exciting Day!

I was going to post earlier after our 8:30 HST 480 seminar this morning, but got caught up in the events of the day, but now that exciting thing number two has happened regarding this class, I cannot help but pull myself away from my thesis on the thought of Pierre Manent to post.

First things first, this morning in class, my fellow public historians in training, Ed and Kelly produced what has seemed like the hardest things to find, yet, in my mind at least, one of the central parts of our research project--AN ALTERNATIVE to the I-496 interstate!  While it is not the exact portion of the expressway we have been working with, the fact that an alternative indeed exists means that MDOT did at least consider alternatives to the route. Also this alternative is labeled as "2" which means there has to be a first somewhere, even if we can't find it.

Along these same lines, I discovered amidst the files my father has been sending me, construction/acquisition files from 1966 when the portion we are concerned with (33047 is the official code number I believe) was built! One of the files is labeled "removal items" and details what must be removed from the houses in question...I would like to post the picture here but can't seem to figure out how to download the tiff file at the moment, but still... AWESOME RIGHT?

BUT THEN...my day got even better as far as this class goes. On the way out of class, Dr. K was asking me how my individual project on the grant proposal was going...I explained how thrilled I was to have had RB Bernstein comment on my post and offer his help, but that I was still waiting on the LeFrak forum for the grant proposal they had sent to NEH as an example (as the forum was where my idea came from) and lo and behold, Professor Melzer came through tonight and the document he sent IS PERFECT. It doesn't really include budgetary things as far as I could tell from my quick skim of it, but as the important part of this project is the history anyway, I think I'll stick mostly to the narrative portion myself.

All in all, public history can be a great struggle, but the small successes become awesome victories :)

Where are these "alternatives" hiding?!

I have been in email contact with my Dad every few hours for the last few days as he is trying to help us find those alternative construction plans for I-496.  Here is some text from an email that I thought would be helpful:

You know if you go to the following link: http://mdotwas1.mdot.state.mi.us/public/ROWFiles/index.cfm you can view our current R/W ownership along I-496. It also has all the acquisition records (in the table). I can help you interpret them if needed.


If the alternatives don't work out (well either way), I can get you original construction plans but I don't know if I can justify printing them out (maybe a half-size set) & digitally it would overload your computer, but let me know.

Hopefully we are able to find what we are looking for but here is some more stuff to add to our piles!