On December 28, 1912, the San Francisco Municipal Railway (Muni), operator of the city’s famed cable car system, opened its first line, the A Geary-Park line running between the Financial District and the Richmond District on the western side of the city.
There are five cities in the US that were the largest in their state 50 years ago but have lost that supreacy. They are:
Hartford CT, now number 4 behind Bridgeort, New Haven, and Stamford
St. Louis MO, now behind Kansas City
Great Falls MT, now third behind Billings and Missoula
Cleveland OH, now behind Columbus
Richmond VA, now fourth behind Virginia Beach, Norfolk and Chesapeake.
Jacksonville FL temporarily lost the top spot to Miami, but regained it by consolidating with Duval County.
New Orleans LA lost the top spot to Baton Rouge briefly after Katrina, but regained it.
Buffalo, NY, has an estimated population of 261,000, which ranks 73rd in the United States. Buffalo’s population peaked in 1950, like many former industrial cities, at which time it was the 15th largest city in the country. Buffalo’s population has declined in every census since 1950, when its population was 580,000. In 2006, Buffalo’s population was equivalent to its population in 1890, essentially reversing it 120 years.
After a decades-long loss of young people, the Buffalo-Niagara area has finally turned things around and is once more seeing a growth in the number of Millennials moving to the region. From 2006 to 2016, the number of Millennials (aged 20 through 34) has grown by over 10% while the region’s total population shrank 1%. This has been the strongest growth of young people among all counties in New York and exceeds national growth for the age group.
The popular song “Low Bridge, Everybody Down” was written in 1905 by Thomas S. Allen after Erie Canal barge traffic was converted from mule power to engine power, raising the speed of traffic. the song memorializes the years from 1825 to 1880 when the mule barges made boomtowns out of Utica, Rome, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo.
The song, with a modern artist’s interpretation: Erie Canal - Bruce Springsteen (Lyrics) - YouTube
On July 20, 1940, the Arroyo Seco Parkway, one of the first freeways built in the US, opened to traffic. It connected downtown Los Angeles with Pasadena.
William Kissam Vanderbilt II, the great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, was an auto-racing enthusiast and created the Vanderbilt Cup, the first major road racing competition, in 1904. He ran the races on local roads in Nassau County on Long Island, outside New York City, during the first decade of the 20th century, but the deaths of two spectators and injury to many others showed the need to eliminate racing on residential streets. Vanderbilt created a company to build a graded, banked and grade-separated highway suitable for racing that was also free of the horse manure dust churned up by motor cars. The result was the Long Island Motor Parkway, built in 1908, with its banked turns, guard rails, reinforced concrete tarmac, and controlled access. It was the first limited-access roadway in the world designed for automobile use only.
**Kissam **Avenue is located on Staten Island, New York. The street is mostly deserted now due to the property damage caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
Elizabeth Smart was discovered walking down the street with her captors in Sandy, Utah, nine months after being abducted from her home in 2002. The event dramatized in the CBS movie The Elizabeth Smart Story.
The Get Smart movie The Nude Bomb lost out on a Golden Razzie to Can’t Stop the Music.
The “Worst Career Achievement” Razzie has been given five times, to Ronald Reagan in 1981, to Linda Blair in 1983, to Irwin Allen in 1985, to “Bruce the Rubber Shark” from Jaws in 1987, and to director Uwe Boll in 2009, who received this for his achievement as “Germany’s answer to Ed Wood”.
Irwin Allen made his directorial debut with the documentary The Sea Around Us in 1953. Based on Rachel Carson’s best-selling book of the same name, it was made with largely stock footage and won the 1952 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Ms.Carson was so disappointed with Allen’s final version of the script that she never again sold film rights to her work.
In response to Rachel Carson’s suggestion in Silent Spring that DDT be banned, former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson—in a letter to former President Dwight D. Eisenhower—reportedly concluded that because she was unmarried despite being physically attractive, she was “probably a Communist.”
President Ronald Reagan appointed James A. Watt as Secretary of the Interior, responsible for conserving public lands. Watt’s critics openly pointed out that his idea of a “wilderness area” was a parking lot with no lines pained on it.
On March 30, 1867, US Secretary of State William H. Seward negotiated the Alaska Purchase (also known as “Seward’s Folly”) with the Russians for $7.2 million. For most of Alaska’s first decade under the US flag, Sitka was the only community inhabited by American settlers.
Sitka is from the Inuit name. The Russians called the town New Arkangel.
Nunavut is the only Canadian province or territory where aboriginal people make up the majority of the population. Both dialects of Inuit (Inuktitut and Inuvialakutun)) are official languages of Nunavut.
According to the 2011 Census, the Northwest Territories also has a (slight) majority Aboriginal population, with 51.9%.
In play:
Prince Edward Island is the Canadian province with the smallest aboriginal population, with only 1.6% of its inhabitants (2,230 people) identifying as aboriginal.
Prince Edward, youngest son of Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh, is not a duke, unlike his older brothers Charles (Duke of Cornwall and of Rothesay) and Andrew (Duke of York). Edward holds the title of Earl of Wessex, and is expected to be named Duke of Edinburgh upon his father’s death.
The title of Duke of York became a royal dukedom upon the accession of Edward IV to the throne in 1461 and 1471.
Although it has been awarded several times since then to the second royal son, it has never passed directly from father to son, either becoming extinct or merging with the Crown.
That pattern will continue with the current dukedom, as the Duke of York does not have any sons. When Prince Andrew dies, the title will again become extinct.
New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island all have two counties named Kings and Queens. Those two counties in New Brunswick largely comprise the federal constituency of Fundy-Royal.