Some spherical images of a dead mall…
6 minute read
February 12, 2024, 11:10 AM
Do you remember when Elyse and I visited Owings Mills Mall back in 2015? I wrote about it in the second part of the “Everything Else” photo set, but what I didn’t show you, mainly because I lacked the capability to display it properly at the time, was that I also shot some spherical photos of the place. I was glad that I did, too, because the management would close the interior of the mall less than two weeks after our visit, and the mall was demolished about a year later in preparation for redevelopment. The property now contains an outdoor shopping center called Mill Station, and from everything that I can tell, the center is now thriving. I suppose that tells you that the mall itself was the problem, and that the area is, in fact, a good location for retail – just not that retail, apparently. It’s also spurred additional development beyond the old mall property, so clearly, things are going well there.
So as far as the spherical panorama images go, when we were exploring the mall, I used the Google camera app, which could shoot spherical panoramas, and took eight photo spheres of the place. You start in one spot, and then it tells you how to move the camera in order to image the entire thing. The result is essentially a single Google Street View image of wherever you are standing. I first learned how to do this in August 2014, and I did it on and off for about a year. I eventually lost interest in the photo spheres, after Google discontinued the Panoramio service and rolled it all into Google Maps. As is typical when Google rolls an existing service into another, much functionality was lost, and Panoramio’s going into Maps was no exception. The way that they wanted you to shoot photo spheres after that was with a separate Street View app, and it would more or less upload directly to Google Street View, and wouldn’t save as an image file of mine. So that was a bit of a deal-breaker for me. As far as this website goes, I couldn’t get the images to display properly on here natively, and really didn’t want to have any additional plugins for the site just to power a single Journal entry. Then I recently discovered that Flickr will embed these things on third party websites, such as this one, and we were in business.
Continue reading…Categories: Baltimore County, Photography, Retail
Had never traveled a business Interstate before…
9 minute read
July 24, 2016, 8:55 PM
…and now I have. Elyse and I made an impromptu road trip to York, Pennsylvania on Thursday, July 14. We got together in Ellicott City, but didn’t know quite what we wanted to do, and so we ended up doing that.
However, our first stop was a completely unplanned one, in Catonsville. There, the McDonald’s in 40 West Plaza recently closed, and was in the process of being vacated. At the time that we came by, they had started roofing over the McDonald’s-style mansard, and removed the signage, and were packing stuff up inside.
Categories: Baltimore County, Elyse, Fire alarms, Roads, York
Fun with music…
3 minute read
December 20, 2015, 12:41 PM
This past Thursday, among other places, Elyse and I checked out a store called Bill’s Music in Catonsville. What a wonderful place this was, with professional-grade equipment for sale at professional-grade prices (but you’re paying for quality). The store has every single piece of musical equipment that you could imagine, including some stuff I hadn’t seen in years, like real xylophones and such. Elyse actually knows a thing or two about music, unlike me.
The first thing that we discovered was a metallic xylophone (metallophone?). I hadn’t played one of these since sixth grade music class, a six-week “exploratory” course at Stuarts Draft Middle School. It was pretty awesome, working not so much with singing, but mostly with musical instruments – primarily xylophones. We learned some very basic songs on them, and apparently I still remember a couple of them:
Categories: Baltimore County, Elyse, Middle school, Music, Today's Special, WMATA
Hello… Roanoke?
4 minute read
September 16, 2015, 5:46 PM
This past Friday, I was out with my friend Elyse checking out a few interesting shopping centers in the Baltimore area. We weren’t so much interested in shopping as we were in seeing the centers themselves, and their various eccentricities. We first visited Owings Mills Mall, which is a large. two-story facility in Owings Mills, Maryland that contains only six tenants: Bath & Body Works, DTLR, Gymboree, JCPenney, Macy’s, and Victoria’s Secret. Needless to say, this was a dead mall. Then we visited the Centre at Glen Burnie, which is a small and well-hidden single-level indoor mall off of Route 2 in Glen Burnie. This was no dead mall by any means, but its being an enclosed mall surprised me. I’d been by this shopping center many times in the past, and shopped at the Target store there, and never would have guessed that this was an enclosed mall. Then our third and final mall was Security Square, a mid-sized single-level mall in Woodlawn. Security Square was interesting for its former JCPenney building, which, after Penney’s closed, was converted to “Seoul Plaza”, a mall-within-a-mall consisting mostly of Korean businesses, though now approaching dead mall status (though the rest of the mall is doing well).
However, the biggest surprise of the day came as Elyse and I were walking through the Sears wing of Security Square. Does this remind you of anywhere in particular?
Categories: Baltimore County, Elyse, Retail
I completely nerded out on Sunday, and it was awesome…
14 minute read
June 24, 2014, 10:21 PM
I went out on a miniature road trip on Sunday, and I had a blast, taking photos of anything that vaguely interested me. It was more or less spur of the moment, when you consider that for what ended up being a photography trip, I only had my cell phone, and then, I didn’t bring my spare battery along. Thus it was a bit of a continual battle to keep a sufficient charge on the phone with only the car charger, but somehow, I managed, and the results came out pretty well despite my leaving my real camera at home. The way this trip came about is that I wanted to go up to and explore Westminster, Maryland. I’ve been wanting to explore Westminster for a while, ever since my father took an overnight business trip to Westminster a few years ago and I didn’t find out about it until it was too late in the day to go up and visit, because Dad didn’t realize that Westminster was as close to me as it was. That sucked, because I would have totally gone up if I had known. I’ll gladly travel an hour or so on relatively short notice to hang out with family.
So early Sunday morning, I just decided to go up and see what there was. I like doing these sorts of trips, because it’s basically a scouting trip, seeing if there’s anything that I want to explore and photograph in more detail in the future. Getting to Westminster is pretty easy: turn onto Georgia Avenue (MD 97) and take it all the way to Westminster. Seriously, it’s that easy. I got to Westminster just as the sun was coming up. After a quick drive through the main commercial area along Route 140, I located the downtown area.
The downtown area in Westminster has what I consider an unusual feature: a single-track rail line for the Maryland Midland Railway running diagonally through the main intersection in downtown. Main Street goes one way, and Liberty Street and Railroad Avenue (both MD 27) go the other way, and the rail line runs diagonally across the intersection. I would have loved to have seen a train come through here while I was in the area, but unfortunately, I did not get to see that this time.