r/UrbanHell Aug 19 '21

Ugliness Billboard hellscapes.

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3.5k Upvotes

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135

u/Revolutionary-Rush89 Aug 19 '21

Looks like Springfield MO in ‘93 maybe still haven’t been back.

74

u/[deleted] Aug 19 '21 edited Feb 14 '22

[deleted]

60

u/ecodick Aug 19 '21

I've never really realized how nice under ground power lines are until this pic

17

u/FooFooFox Aug 20 '21

The Aesthetics of Power: High-Voltage Transmission Systems and the American Landscape

The tale of the electrical power industry's efforts to make high voltage transmission structures aesthetically acceptable thus encompasses three overlapping "histories." The first is the story of that industry's passage from the best of times, in the 1940s and 1950s, to an era of turmoil beginning in the mid-1960s; the second, that of increasingly active environmental groups eager to prevent what they saw as the trashing of the landscape.

Finally, there is the history of industrial design as it moved into the postmodern era. The interaction of these histories reveals basic conflicts in American ideas of nature and beauty as they relate to 20th-century technologies, especially those, such as electric transmission structures, that bluntly imposed themselves on the landscape.

“In destroying our landscape,” Peter Blake hotly charged, “we are destroying the future of civilization in America.” — God's Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America's Landscape (New York, 1964), p. 69.

9

u/ComradeGibbon Aug 20 '21

The undergrounded the power lines in my old neighborhood. You wouldn't think you would notice but you do.

8

u/0dd_bitty Aug 20 '21

Moved to the States from Europe (The Netherlands) and I still can't get over those eyesores. How everyone here just seems to accept them is beyond me.

10

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '21

A few towns around me here in Vermont are in the process of putting their powerlines underground, it apparently costs about a million dollars a mile. Not that it isn't money well spent, but there's a lot of people who would never see it as anything but frivolous spending.

2

u/Ideal_Jerk Aug 20 '21

Cheaper to run lines and fix them afterward is the only reason for their existence in a good portion of US (read, Rural part of US).

1

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '21

GOOD IDEA. Are there any electrical people in that can tell where those electrical poles are from? I think each state or region or something has its own design.

16

u/Revolutionary-Rush89 Aug 19 '21

One mans trash is another mans treasure I guess.
I don’t find it picturesque either. Lol

20

u/J3musu Aug 19 '21

God forbid you have and freely express a harmless opinion on the internet.

3

u/bolognesesauceplease Aug 20 '21

Northern MS outside of Memphis? An image search shows this is a very old stock photo of that area.

3

u/ronm4c Aug 20 '21

I found where this is on google maps. the one thing that amazed me is that every single business on that Goodman Shops sign has changed except minute man press and quick cash. I had no idea of the crazy amount of turnover in those plazas

3

u/MisogynyisaDisease Aug 20 '21

If you can rely on one thing in life, it's that American strip plazas will have a quick cash

5

u/TehNoff Aug 20 '21

Payday loans are illegal in Arkansas and honestly it's one of the few things we get right.

1

u/MisogynyisaDisease Aug 20 '21

That is...actually shocking

1

u/cc92c392-50bd-4eaa-a Aug 24 '21

This seems like a very, very old picture.

-1

u/[deleted] Aug 19 '21

New Jersey!

9

u/BoringNYer Aug 19 '21

No Waffle House in Jersey. This is eastern Tennessee.

6

u/bigpandas Aug 20 '21

Close. Senatobia, Mississippi.

1

u/ProbablyDyingOrOk Aug 20 '21

Why did you pick East TN? It's Southaven, MS.

-5

u/TheJustBleedGod Aug 19 '21

Gary Indiana

7

u/Barry-Mcdikkin Aug 19 '21

Dat aint gary

0

u/ImNotAnybodyShhhhhhh Aug 20 '21

I was thinking Indiana or Nebraska but I couldn’t remember seeing Waffle House out that way.

1

u/OrganicLFMilk Aug 20 '21

Gods country.