Weird things found on the internet...

[jhetley]

...personal connections division.

Okay, there's this internet site devoted to a particular subset of Victorian-era insane asylums (or  state hospitals, the polite term).  Which I found featured in one of my junk-mail architectural magazines.  And one of the asylums listed:

http://www.kirkbridebuildings.com/buildings/traversecity/

The personal connection -- my grandfather ran the place for about a decade, back around the turn of the previous century, and my mother was born there.  We have, downstairs, an inlaid walnut cribbage board and a "Petoskey Stone" napkin ring made by inmates as presents to the family...

Comments

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Oh, geez, big world folded over a lot. For most of their lives, my paternal grandparents used to live just outside of Wellston, and we made regular trips to Traverse City for groceries and the like. I haven't been back up there since 1982, but the Czarina and I are making plans: I understand that Traverse City isn't even close to being the town it was back then, and I mean that as a high compliment.

[cailleuch.livejournal.com]

Last summer had coffee in a shop that is part of the mixed use renovation. They have some really interesting ideas for the re-use of the buildings. I looked into it pretty extensively as they have some really good deals if you are an artist, which I am. The setting is so beautiful that I think they will probably make a go of it.

Traverse City is nearly unrecogizable from what it looked like in the 1980's when I first traveled there.

[pernishus.livejournal.com]

I have a Petoskey stone, polished, in my top desk drawer as I type this -- and an invitation to spend a week at Lake Leelanau this July from my friends and former pastor David and Mary and their two children. My summers in the early nineteen sixties were spent there -- or a week or two of them, anyway. My uncle's land on the upper end of the lake is one of the very few pieces still undeveloped.