View allAll Photos Tagged Properties!
Clewiston is a city in Hendry County, Florida, United States. Its location is on the Atlantic coastal plain. The population was 7,155 at the 2010 census, up from 6,460 at the 2000 census. The estimated population in 2015 was 7,505. The city is located on the south bank of Lake Okeechobee, and the Lake Okeechobee Scenic Trail passes through the edge of the city.
The city is home to the Clewiston Museum and the Dixie Crystal Theatre. The area has been home to Seminole tribe members and sugar plantations. The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole Indian Museum is located 32 miles south of the city.
The area beside Lake Okeechobee was once used as a fishing camp by the Seminole tribe. The first permanent settlement began in 1920, when John O'Brien of Philadelphia and Alonzo Clewis of Tampa purchased a large tract of land to establish a town. They commissioned a town plan and built the Moore Haven & Clewiston Railroad to connect the community to the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad at Moore Haven. Incorporated as a city in 1925, Clewiston would become noted for its sport fishing, particularly of largemouth bass.
Large sugar plantations were established around Lake Okeechobee. By the 1950s and 1960s, the cultivation of citrus, vegetables and cattle were also important to the economy. The US Sugar Corporation, however, remained the dominant manufacturer in Clewiston, which became known as "America's Sweetest Town". On June 24, 2008, Governor Charlie Crist announced that the state of Florida had arranged to buy for $1.75 billion the company's 187,000 acres (76,000 ha), including the refinery in Clewiston. On November 11, the plan was scaled back to $1.34 billion for 181,000 acres (73,000 ha) of farmland, no longer including the mill, citrus processing facilities and other assets. This would allow the company to remain in business and leave open the possibility of preserving its 1,700 jobs.
Over the next seven crop cycles, the farmland would be leased back from the state to US Sugar for $60 million. It would then be converted into reservoirs and water-filtering areas as part of the ongoing restoration of the Everglades ecosystem.
Clewiston is located in the northeast corner of Hendry County at 26°45′12″N 80°56′01″W, on the southwestern shore of Lake Okeechobee. It is part of the Florida Heartland region.
U.S. Route 27 passes through the center of Clewiston, leading west then north 15 miles (24 km) to Moore Haven, and southeast 16 miles (26 km) to South Bay. Florida State Road 80 runs with US 27 through Clewiston but leads west 31 miles (50 km) to LaBelle, the Hendry County seat.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Clewiston has a total area of 4.7 square miles (12.2 km2), of which 0.027 square miles (0.07 km2), or 0.54%, are water.
Credit for the data above is given to the following website:
01 April 2018
Its into the 9th year since I shot this and the situation in the DTES has only deteriorated. Governments have worsened the situation by piling more social housing in the area adding to the “customers with no cash” syndrome. The area is named “Canada’s poorest postal code” by activists and the poverty pimps love the situation making the area one of “Canada’s richest postal codes”, the only differenence being the pimp money goes home at night. Helpful groups support too many by offering them food daily with zero obligation. Its become an impossible sitiuation to address given the current state of political governance.
I wish this was just a sick April Fools Day joke but unfortuantely not.
Sleeping on a sidewalk in the Downtown East Side (DTES) of Vancouver BC takes on a different sense of survival than is observed in many west side sleepers. A combination of mental issues, drug sale and use, area resident poverty and the resulting community of "Customers With No Cash" combine for a perfect locale to take advantage of people on the edge where living is not comparable to what most of us bring to mind in our own comfortable world. Prostitution and drugs are a large part of this community. One can not help feel sorry and remorseful this exists in self important Vancouver.
The irony of this photo is it was shot about 10 feet from the entrance of BC Housing's recently opened Orange Hall office (open 10 am to 4 pm Monday to Friday) 297 Hastings Street at Gore Ave. This situation has steadily gone downhill since the Federal Governemt cut back funding for social housing.
BLAH, BLAH, BLAH:
From BC Housing website:
October 3rd, 2014
VICTORIA – The B.C. government is strengthening the non-profit housing sector by transferring provincially-owned properties to non-profit housing providers.
The Province owns approximately 350 parcels of land throughout British Columbia that are currently leased long-term to non-profit housing providers who own and operate social housing buildings on these properties.
The non-profit housing sector has been asking for this step for many years. Having ownership of the land will improve a non-profit’s ability to support better long-term planning and selfsufficiency. Owning the lands they operate on will also help non-profits secure the financing they need to be sustainable.
In order to transfer title, the Province will end these leases, and then transfer ownership of the land to the societies. The properties will be transferred at fair market value. The Province will assist the societies to secure mortgages on the properties. The current operating agreement that BC Housing has with each non-profit society will remain in place. Approximately 115 properties will be transferred by March 31, 2015, and the rest will be transferred over the next three years.
In addition, the Province is looking to transfer ownership of two properties currently managed by BC Housing to non-profit societies. The Province will begin the process by posting Expressions of Interest for Nicholson Tower and Stamps Place in Vancouver shortly.
Tenants will not be impacted by these transfers, and the amount of affordable housing stock will remain stable. Non-profit societies have been providing social housing in B.C. for more than 60 years. Today more than 90% of social housing is managed by non-profit societies.
THE GLOBE & MAIL:
FRANCES BULA
VANCOUVER — The Globe and Mail
Published Monday, Oct. 13 2014
Vancouver won’t solve street homelessness until both the city and province focus on targeting the limited supply of expensive social housing to those who need it most, say experts.
That means help can’t go to anyone who passes through a shelter or an outdoor camp or even to someone who sleeps outside temporarily. In the vast majority of cases, people who become homeless experience it briefly and are able to avoid losing housing again.
But people working on eliminating homelessness do not always understand that the thousands of people who experience homelessness in a year don’t all need expensive subsidized housing. That should be reserved for the chronically homeless, who are not sufficiently helped by temporary assistance with rent or other social supports.
“For nearly 90 per cent of people counted as homeless, they’ll get themselves out of homelessness on their own,” says Tim Richter, who led Calgary’s 10-year plan to end homelessness and is now the president of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness. “It’s critical to set priorities. It shouldn’t be first-come, first-served.”
One of the region’s most experienced homelessness researchers, former Vancouver city-hall staffer Judy Graves, said the city is reaping the results of city and provincial staff not always setting the right priorities for the past six years. This past winter, Vancouver still had a count of 533 people sleeping outside (less than in 2008, but more than in 2011), even though the province and city have opened up thousands of new social-housing units rented at welfare-level rates.
It’s an issue that is returning to haunt Vision Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, who promised in 2008 to end street homelessness by 2015, during this fall’s civic-election campaign.
His administration, which has pushed the issue non-stop since he was first elected, has recently exceeded previous efforts by jumping last month into paying for all the costs of converting a downtown Quality Inn to transitional housing, as well as all the costs of a new shelter nearby. Usually the province covers the majority of costs for both of those kinds of housing.
But Ms. Graves said even that unusual effort, accompanied by several hundred other new provincial units about to open, isn’t going to solve the problem by January, 2015.
That’s because the province is only committed to using half of the incoming housing units for the chronically homeless. And city staff also don’t always correctly identify who is the most in need.
“Both the city and province have bought into housing by wait lists,” said Ms. Graves. “It just can’t work. You have to work as though you’re in a disaster zone.”
She said she had doubts that the majority of people who camped in Oppenheimer Park over the summer were homeless, but they got priority for the scarce number of rooms available.
As well, in the early stages of the province’s big social-housing construction push, which will see 14 towers completed with around 1,400 units by the end, non-profit operators were simply moving people from residential hotel rooms into the new buildings.
That meant the housing didn’t go to the chronically homeless and the most in need, but worse, it then allowed landlords in the residential hotels to do renovations, raise rents, or refuse new low-income tenants once the former tenants were relocated to social housing.
That then reduced the overall number of private, low-cost housing units in the city. Ms. Graves said the whole region is experiencing an acute shortage of those kinds of private units now. It has become a game of musical chairs for housing-outreach workers to get a low-cost unit for someone trying to get out of shelters or off the street, she said.
All cities are grappling with constant pressures that create more homelessness at the front end: low working-class incomes that can’t keep up with gentrification and rising rents key among them, said Ms. Graves. That has left cities trying to solve the problem at the back end, trying to house all the people made homeless as a result of many larger forces.
24 HRS VANCOUVER - 16 OCT 14
16 Oct 2014 24 Hours VancouverJANE DEACON Comment at vancouver.24hrs.c
Laura Dilley, PACE Society Action Week, PACE plans to draft housing recommendations for city council before the coming election.
“Oftentimes we will create housing models not including the voices of those we would be housing,” said Dilley.
Rising rent prices that force people out of SROs is a significant factor, as well as landlords who refuse to rent to sex workers out of legal concerns, said Dilley. Low- income housing conditions that require tenants stay in at night or guests to sign in are also significant barriers. She estimates between 10 to 15% of sex workers fall under the category of “survival” or street- based prostitution. For that vulnerable population, simply switching professions is often not an option, said Dilley.
“They’re really forced and entrenched to continuously do that work because they have no options out of it, because we have such stigma in our society that they can’t seek help, they can’t find affordable housing, so they’re really stuck in that situation,” she said.
17 April 2019:
B.C. drug users demand clean supply, but fear they won’t live to see it happen
By David P. BallStar Vancouver
Tues., April 16, 2019
VANCOUVER—Several hundred Vancouverites marked three years since the province declared a public health emergency over the thousands of people killed by overdoses.
But as they marched Tuesday from the safe-injection clinic Insite through downtown Vancouver, advocates say “contaminated” drugs have taken a toll on their own leaders.
For B.C. Association of People on Methadone member Garth Mullins, the losses are mounting, and it’s been destabilizing and “disorganizing” for the drug-reform movement.
“We’ve lost rank and file members and leaders in such high numbers over the last five years,” he said, wearing a distinctive black case of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone on his belt. “It’s hard to organize or think strategically when you’re always doing triage, planning a memorial.”
Just last month the president of his organization, Chereece Keewatin, died from a fentanyl overdose. Mullins knew Keewatin for at least six years, and invited her to join the editorial board of the podcast Crackdown, of which he is executive producer.
“Chereece was really little, but she had this tremendous capacity to lift people’s spirits,” he said in an interview. “You’d have meetings where we talk about really, really bleak subjects, but she had these funny asides to cut through the bleakness.
“She made people laugh. In that way, she took responsibility for the whole collective emotional state of the group.”
It’s not just the B.C. Association of People on Methadone that’s seen the direct “casualties” of what Mullins called “a war.” The Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users and the national Canadian Association of People who Use Drugs have also lost high-ranking board members in recent years.
Since 2016, nearly 11,000 people have died across Canada from opioid overdoses, according to the most recent federal and provincial data. The majority of those deaths were from opioids such as fentanyl or its more deadly variants, but B.C. remains the epicentre for roughly a third of those deaths, 1,500 of them last year alone.
On average, four British Columbians died every day from overdoses last year, much higher than the national average and largely unchanged since the province’s April 2016 declaration of a public health emergency.
11 May 2020
.
A wall mural in the DTES poses a valid question, "how do we end the drug crisis"? A more basic question, how did we get here?
Vancouver, B.C. is consistently ranked at the top of the list for the world’s most liveable cities - but not for many in the DTES.
The city has a dirty little secret that it has been trying to suppress for decades. The historic four-block area near East Hastings and Main Street — the DTES — known as one of the “poorest postal codes” in Canada, has a combination of drug use, HIV, homelessness, prostitution, mental illness, and crime all making up this poor off neighbourhood.
To be successful as a drug lord you need a steady, reliable, cheap supply of product, a location where you can operate relatively free from prosecution and away you go. The prime location ingredients Vancouver offers is the DTES.
Over the decades continuing city administrations have built a community of “customers with no cash” by loading the DTES with blocks of not for profit social housing. Along with the myriad of Single Room Occupancy hotels (SRO's) the area is prime territory for the drug trade.
Social housing should be spread throughout the city to provide a society of different financial means for common support - IMO.
Administrations over the years have been loath to attempt social housing in the rich city enclaves due to onerous push back. It was and still is more expedient to keep adding more social housing in the DTES where there is minimal opposition.
***** Today there are at least 6 City of Vancouver development permit applications on file for more social housing in the DTES.
The process is welcomed by the myriad of DTES support service groups who like their clientele close at hand and the clientele are fine with it as services are nearby.
DTES government and service support groups along with poverty pimp lawyers who have a hissy fit if anyone tries to change the dial, while also making money off the situation, has resulted in the perfect condition for drug dealers to flourish.
Social housing residents, many older, Asian and often mentally challenged are living in a hell hole neighbourhood with little individual voice.
In recent years, the area is seeing an east creeping gentrification. This is causing the DTES street population to be squeezed into a smaller footprint resulting in more confrontation and the appearance of a worsening situation even though overall the numbers of street people remains fairly constant.
The amount of taxpayer dollars spent in the area is staggering with little to show for the investment.
Vancouver has always had a drug problem. The opioids of choice — and the increasingly staggering death toll — have changed over the years.
In 2017 Fentanyl killed so many Canadians it caused the average life expectancy in B.C. to drop for the first time in decades. But for crime kingpins, it became a source of such astonishing wealth it disrupted the Vancouver-area real estate market.
SOME BACKGROUND:
Excerpt from the Province Newspaper by reporter Randy Shore 18 March, 2017.
When members of the Royal Commission to Investigate Chinese and Japanese Immigration came to Vancouver in 1901, they got an eyeful.
“There were whole rooms of Chinese lying stretched out on beds with the opium apparatus laid out before them — all unmindful that their attitudes and surrounding conditions are being taken note of to assist in keeping the remainder of their countrymen entirely out of Canada,” reported the Vancouver World newspaper.
The fringes of Vancouver’s Chinatown have always been the centre of Canada’s opiate trade. Ever more potent and easily smuggled versions emerged through the decades, culminating in the scourge of synthetic opiates — fentanyl and carfentanil — thousands of times more powerful and many times more deadly than opium.
Opium was a source of revenue for governments of the day. A federal duty imposed on importers fetched hundreds of thousands of dollars between 1874 and 1899. In B.C. ports, and cities charged hundreds of dollars to purveyors in the form of business licences.
Between 1923 and 1932, more than 700 Chinese men were deported for drug-related violations.
Under constant pressure from the police, opium users began to inject their hit, as the technique created no smoke or aroma and used smaller equipment, which could be easily hidden. In the 1920s and 1930s, white users tended to be young criminals, “racetrack hands, and circus and show people” who smoked opium or sniffed heroin.
By the mid-1930s, heroin was one of the most common drugs in circulation and white users were increasingly taking the drug intravenously, especially as prices rose due to scarcity brought about by vigorous law enforcement.
The outbreak of the Second World War put opiate addicts into a state of crisis, as opiate drugs were required in great quantities for the war wounded. The street price of a hit — whether heroin, morphine or codeine — shot up and crime along with it.
In the post-war period, right through to the mid-’60s, Vancouver was ground zero for Canada’s intravenous drug scene, made up mainly of petty criminals, troubled youths fed by drug lords.
Before the ’40s were over, highly refined white heroin had appeared and it was coming from overseas to satisfy a hungry market in Vancouver, home to half of the country’s drug users.
Heroin use remained a constant undercurrent in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside during the ’70s and ’80s, even as alcohol was the neighbourhood’s real drug of choice.
But a flood of a new and even more potent “China White” heroin arriving into the city reignited public outrage in the early ’90s. A spate of 331 overdose deaths in 1993 spurred B.C. coroner Vince Cain to call for the decriminalization of heroin and addicts be prescribed the drug to legally maintain their habit.
It would be nearly 15 years before the Study to Assess Long-term Opioid Maintenance Effectiveness (SALOME) began in Vancouver, just about the time a new threat emerged.
Up to 80 times as powerful as heroin, fentanyl hit the streets and reduced the risk for traffickers as it was so concentrated, transportation was easier.
The carnage wrought by fentanyl has been without precedent.
Heroin seized in drug busts is routinely cut with fentanyl and in recent months the presence of carfentanil.
SUMMARY:
Where will this go next, who knows ?
The richest of societies should be especially judged by how they treat their least fortunate, and Vancouver has its challenge set out for the foreseeable future.
UPDATE 23 MAY 2020 - VANCOUVER SUN
John Mackie: The Downtown Eastside is a war zone disaster — stop ghettoizing it.
John Mackie, Vancouver Sun 23 May 2020
Twenty years ago local musician Kuba Oms was recording at the Miller Block, a now defunct Hastings Street recording studio near Save-On-Meats.
He jaywalked and was stopped by a cop, who handed him a ticket.
“I said ‘Are you kidding me?’” Oms recounts. “You know there’s a guy shooting up over there, and a crack dealer over there. And the cop said ‘That’s a health issue.’”
That story pretty much sums up the city’s attitude toward the Downtown Eastside over the past few decades.
In some ways the cop was right — it is a Vancouver health issue. But letting people openly do drugs in public and turn Hastings and the wider Downtown Eastside into a ghetto is political correctness gone mad.
Drive down Hastings Street between Abbott and Gore and you’ll see dozens, even hundreds of people hanging out on the street, in various states of sobriety. They are definitely not social distancing. It’s a miracle that COVID-19 hasn’t swept the entire area.
The height of this madness was the recent occupation of Oppenheimer Park. Vancouver has real issues of homelessness, but to some degree Oppenheimer was about a fringe group of politicos manipulating the homeless.
Many police resources were diverted to the park and there was a crime wave in nearby Chinatown — one business closed because they were being robbed a dozen times a day.
The province recently made hotel rooms available for the homeless people occupying Oppenheimer Park, so things have calmed down somewhat. But the big question is what happens in a few months? Is government going to find permanent homes for them?
Odds are if they do, it will be in highrises in the Downtown Eastside. For decades that’s where the city and province have been concentrating social housing, especially for the mentally ill and drug addicted.
Their argument is these residents feel comfortable there. But the reality is the more poverty is concentrated, the worse the area seems to become.
Maybe it’s time for the city of Vancouver to give its head a shake and realize that its much-ballyhooed Downtown Eastside Plan is actually part of the problem, not the solution.
Part of the plan decrees you can’t build condos on Hastings between Carrall Street in Gastown and Heatley Avenue in Strathcona, or in historic Japantown around Oppenheimer Park.
Development in those areas has to be rental only, with at least 60 per cent social housing. This pretty much ensures that no market housing is built in the poorest area of the city.
When the plan was unveiled in 2014, Vancouver’s former head planner Brian Jackson said the aim was to ensure that low-income people in the Downtown Eastside weren’t displaced.
“The plan is attempting to achieve balance,” he explained then.
In fact, the plan does the exact opposite. There is no balance in the Downtown Eastside: It’s been turned into a ghetto. A friend who’s worked there for two decades calls it a war zone.
The city desperately need some market housing, co-ops and development on Hastings and around Oppenheimer. The anti-poverty activists will scream blue murder that it’s gentrification, but it’s actually normalization. You don’t have to displace anybody, you just have add a different mix to make it safer.
I live in Strathcona, where about 6,500 people live in social housing and about 3,500 in market homes. It’s a close-knit neighbourhood that has the balance Brian Jackson was taking about — it’s diverse and features a variety of incomes.
Japantown and the Downtown Eastside could be a real neighbourhood again if the city retained its stock of handsome historic buildings but allowed some development of its many non-descript structures.
It could be like Strathcona, even the West End. But I fear it could get even worse, if the planners and politicians continue to concentrate all the Lower Mainland’s poverty and social ills in one small area.
jmackie@postmedia.com
John Mackie is a veteran Postmedia reporter who has written several stories about Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside Plan.
13 JULY, 2020
Vancouver can’t catch up to its housing crisis
ADRIENNE TANNER
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED 13 JULY 2020
It is obvious now the cheers that erupted when Vancouver’s longest running tent city was dismantled were wildly premature. Fearing a COVID-19 outbreak would take hold in the overcrowded inner-city camp, the provincial government in April acquired emergency housing in hotels for homeless people living there and cleared the site.
Many camp residents embraced the offer of a clean room. Some refused and relocated outdoors. The camp shifted, first to some empty Port of Vancouver land, and when a court order quickly shut it down, finally landed in Strathcona Park. With each move, it grew.
Today there are about 150 tents Strathcona Park, roughly double the number there were in Oppenheimer Park. How many inhabitants are truly homeless is anyone’s guess. Some of the tents were erected by activists with homes. Others belong to people living in single room occupancy hotels, the worst of which are noisy, bug-infested and so hot that some residents prefer to spend summer outside.
There is already an air of permanence to the camp; the city has installed porta-potties, fresh drinking water and handwashing stations. Park rangers drop by a few times daily. The area is reasonably clean, but these are early days.
Strathcona residents are largely sympathetic to homeless people, but are understandably unhappy about losing a large chunk of park space. They fear the same violence and social disorder that cropped up at Oppenheimer is inevitable; there has already been a small fire and there appears to be a bike chop shop on site. There are cries for the city to sanction a permanent tent city location – elsewhere, of course.
So how exactly did the province’s efforts to shut down a tent city and house homeless people backfire so badly? The city and provincial officials have been out-manoeuvered and out-organized by anti-poverty activists who seized a COVID-19 opportunity when they saw it.
The pandemic raised fears the Oppenheimer tent city would turn into a reservoir of disease that could overwhelm the health system. The activists know that’s why the government cleared the camp and purchased hotels for social housing. They understand this is the moment to highlight society’s failure to solve homelessness, even if their end goals seem to differ. Some are calling for permanent housing – others prefer the idea of a permanent, free-wheeling tent city.
The sorry truth is, even with the addition of 600 units of temporary modular housing and, more recently, the purchase of three downtown hotels, there are still more homeless people than homes. Successions of governments at all levels have allowed this crisis to grow. They’ve failed to build enough social housing. Failed to provide adequate mental health services. Failed to fund enough drug rehabilitation programs for those who want to quit and provide a safe drug supply for those who can’t.
So, now here we are with the largest homeless camp the city has ever seen and another stressed-out neighbourhood. Legally, the new tent city may prove more difficult to dismantle – it’s a large park and the tents are well spaced so the pandemic may not wash as a valid reason. And unless housing is available for everyone who is homeless, it is unlikely the courts would grant an injunction.
Solving problems associated with homelessness is a huge challenge. We can start with housing, but that alone is not nearly enough. Many of the people living in the hotels and park are drug users. Many are mentally ill. Some are both. It takes money – and lots of it – to provide decent housing and supports for this segment of society.
But to cave to demands for a permanent tent city is an American-style admission of defeat. The park board seems resigned to tent cities in parks and is considering a bylaw seeking to control locations. City council has resisted sanctioning a permanent spot, instead offering up land for new social housing. The province has stepped up with money for temporary modular housing and purchases of hotels.
It will be tough to keep neighbourhoods onside if more parks are rendered unusable for recreation. There is only one palatable solution; the provincial government must stay the course and keep adding decent, affordable housing. It won’t be cheap or easy. Catchup never is.
01 APRIL 2022
More than 2,200 British Columbians lost to illicit drugs in 2021
The toxic illicit drug supply claimed the lives of at least 2,224 British Columbians in 2021, according to preliminary data released by the BC Coroners Service.
“Over the past seven years, our province has experienced a devastating loss of life due to a toxic illicit drug supply,” said Lisa Lapointe, chief coroner. “This public health emergency has impacted families and communities across the province and shows no sign of abating. In 2021 alone, more than 2,200 families experienced the devastating loss of a loved one. In the past seven years, the rate of death due to illicit drug toxicity in our province has risen more than 400%. Drug toxicity is now second only to cancers in B.C. for potential years of life lost. We cannot simply hope that things will improve. It is long past time to end the chaos and devastation in our communities resulting from the flourishing illicit drug market, and to ensure, on an urgent basis, access across the province to a safe, reliable regulated drug supply.”
The last two months of 2021 saw the largest number of suspected illicit drug deaths ever recorded in the province, with 210 deaths in November and an additional 215 in December. The 2,224 total number of deaths is 26% more than the 1,767 illicit drug-related deaths investigated by the BC Coroners Service in 2020, and equates to an average of 6.1 lives lost every day.
The provincewide death rate in 2021 was 42.8 per 100,000 residents. Every health authority in B.C. experienced a record loss of lives.
Since the public health emergency into substance-related harms was first declared in April 2016, more than 8,800 British Columbians have been lost to toxic drugs.
Toxicological testing once again underscores the reality that the illicit drug supply continues to be unstable and increasingly toxic. Fentanyl was detected in 83% of samples tested in 2021. Carfentanil was present in 187 results, almost triple the number recorded in 2020 (66).
Additionally, 50% of samples in December tested positive for etizolam, more than three times the rate of detection in July 2020 (15%). Benzodiazepines create significant challenges for life-saving efforts as naloxone does not reverse its effects. As with previous reporting, almost all test results included the presence of multiple substances.
“We need decision-makers at all levels to recognize and respond to this public health emergency with the level of urgency it demands,” Lapointe said. “The reality is this: every day we wait to act, six more people will die. COVID-19 has shown what is possible when goverments act decisively to save lives. And in order to save lives in this public-heath emergency, we need to provide people with access to the substances they need, where and when they need them. Time has run out for research and discussion. It is time to take action.”
Additional key preliminary findings are below. Data is subject to change as additional toxicology results are received:
In 2021, 71% of those who died as a result of suspected drug toxicity were between 30 to 59, and 78% were male.
The townships that experienced the highest number of illicit drug toxicity deaths in 2021 were Vancouver, Surrey and Victoria.
By health authority, in 2021, the highest numbers of illicit drug toxicity deaths were in the Fraser and Vancouver Coastal health authorities (765 and 615 deaths, respectively), making up 62% of all such deaths during this period.
By health authority, in 2021, the highest rates of death were in Vancouver Coastal Health (49 deaths per 100,000 individuals) and Northern Health (48 per 100,000).
By Health Service Delivery Area, in 2021, the highest rates of death were in Vancouver, Thompson Cariboo, Northwest, Northern Interior and Fraser East.
By Local Health Area, in 2021, the highest rates of death were in Upper Skeena, Merritt, Enderby, Lillooet and North Thompson.
Quotes:
Dr. Nel Wieman, deputy chief medical officer, First Nations Health Authority –
“The number of deaths due to toxic drug poisonings for 2021 translates to devastating losses of First Nations people: daughters and sons, aunties and uncles, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, and grandfathers and grandmothers. These are people who loved and were loved. In every year since this public health emergency was declared, B.C. First Nations people have been over-represented in toxic drug-poisoning events and deaths. We must change our understanding of the root causes of substance use and addiction, and work together to address the stigmas surrounding toxic drug use and the people who use drugs. We must continue to invest in Indigenous-specific, culturally safe harm-reduction, treatment and recovery services that are accessible, timely and free from discrimination and racism.”
Guy Felicella, peer clinical adviser, Vancouver Coastal Health –
“I join the thousands of British Columbians who are heartbroken, frustrated and angry over this unfathomable loss. Every one of these deaths was preventable and represents a failure to act, a failure to learn from mistakes. Change nothing and nothing changes. That’s been the story now for years as the approach throughout this crisis has been to meet policies where they’re at, rather than meeting people who use drugs where they’re at. This approach is killing and continues to kill people. Who has the courage to step forward and make this stop?”
AUGUST 2023
Today’s release of the report on drug toxicity deaths for the month of July 2023 by the BC Coroners Service is a stark reminder that the ongoing toxic-drug crisis continues to have a devastating impact on communities across our province. We hold in our hearts the memories of the 198 people lost in July in British Columbia.
The coroners service said the 1,455 deaths from January to July are the most ever reported in the first seven months of the year since a public health emergency over drug poisoning deaths in the province was declared in 2016.
It puts the province on pace to potentially exceed the 2,383 deaths recorded in 2022. A total of 12,739 people in the province have died from drug overdoses in the seven years.
30 NOVEMBER, 2023
At least 2,039 British Columbians have died from toxic drugs so far this year, according to preliminary figures released by the B.C. Coroners Service on Thursday, 29 November, 2023.
Of those, 189 people died in October, which is about 6.1 deaths a day. Most of the dead were between 30 and 59 years of age, and more than three-quarters were men, according to the coroner.
While the largest number of deaths reported so far has been in urban centres, such as Vancouver, Surrey and Victoria, the health authority with the highest rate of death in 2023 is Northern Health, with 61 deaths per 100,000 residents, according to the coroner.
As in previous months, fentanyl was found in most — 85 per cent — of the illicit drugs tested, often combined with other opioids or stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamine.
Earlier this month, Interior Health issued a drug advisory warning for people who use drugs that some substances being advertised as hydromorphone on the black market contain isotonitazine, a drug the coroner says is as potent as fentanyl.
Unregulated drug toxicity is the leading cause of death in B.C. for people aged 10 to 59, accounting for more deaths than homicides, suicides, accidents and natural disease combined, the coroner said.
Since a public health emergency was declared in 2016, more than 13,000 people have died.
JANUARY 2024:
Jennifer Whiteside, Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, has released the following statement regarding the BC Coroners Service year-end report on illicit drug toxicity deaths:
“Today, as we reflect on the year behind us, our hearts are heavy with the loss of 2,511 people in British Columbia to toxic drugs. Each of these lives was precious and important, each with their own story, their own dreams and people who love them. They were part of our community, and their loss is felt deeply by us all.
So what is the game plane to stop it?
C. seeks to keep cash seized from Downtown Eastside gang
Courtesy Kim Bolan and the Vancouver Sun.
Kim Bolan is an experienced and award-winning journalist who has covered gangs in British Columbia for the past 40 years. Bolan also investigated the Air India bombing for 25 years until the publication in 2005 of her book, Loss of Faith.
The B.C. government has filed a lawsuit against a group of alleged Downtown Eastside drug traffickers, seeking the forfeiture of more than $150,000 seized from them.
The lawsuit, filed this week by the director of civil forfeiture, names four defendants that it alleges are part of a criminal organization investigated by the Vancouver Police Department.
While the group is not named in the statement of claim, details of the VPD probe outlined in the court document match an investigation into Zone 43 — a gang that originated in Montreal but has taken over the Downtown Eastside in recent years. Zone 43 has connections to B.C.’s notorious Wolfpack gang alliance.
In June, the VPD announced arrests of several Zone 43 gangsters, though they were released pending approval of charges.
The VPD said it had seized firearms, 24 kilos of drugs and $150,000 in cash during searches on May 14 in Vancouver and Burnaby.
The civil forfeiture lawsuit refers to three VPD searches done on the same date in the same cities and alleges Shayne Cozier-Flanagan, Evantee Jevontee Eustace Stoney, Tristin Johnson and Raimon Geday were “participating in the activities of a criminal organization.”
When police searched Stoney’s apartment on the 30th floor at 2388 Madison Ave. in Burnaby, they found $143,910.75 in Canadian currency and $607 in U.S. currency, the lawsuit said.
Officers seized another $5,800 at Cozier-Flanagan’s suite, also on the 30th floor, at 5665 Boundary Rd. in Vancouver, it said.
About $3,417 was seized from Johnson, who also lives in the Madison apartment, when he was arrested in the 300-block of East Hastings. Another $1,920 was found in Geday’s room in a supportive housing building on Kaslo Street, the lawsuit said.
The VPD also seized a 2017 Acura RDX, of which Stoney is the registered owner and which was used “to facilitate the trafficking of controlled substances,” the civil forfeiture director alleged.
The statement of claim notes that both Stoney and Geday have previous trafficking convictions and are banned from possessing firearms.
All four men named in the lawsuit “trafficked in controlled substances in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver and the surrounding areas,” the lawsuit alleges.
In the Boundary apartment, police also found a money counter and business cards with the number to call to purchase drugs — known as a ‘dialer’ number.
In the Madison suite, the VPD also found dilaudid pills, oxycodone pills and “score sheets” documenting drug sales, collection and debts.
In Geday’s room, police found crack cocaine, powdered cocaine, crystal methamphetamine and another 275 dilaudid pills, as well as score sheets, bear spray and “miscellaneous drug packaging materials.”
The cash and car should be forfeited to the government because they are proceeds of or were used for unlawful activity, the lawsuit alleged.
The crimes committed include possession for the purpose of trafficking and trafficking, committing offences for the benefit of a criminal organization, conspiracy, money laundering and failure to declare taxable income, it alleged
No statements of defence have yet been filed on behalf of the four men.
Vancouver Police Insp. Phil Heard said at the June news conference that Zone 43 gangsters “pose a very significant risk to the public. They’re involved in a well-documented conflict ongoing in the province of Quebec with a rival group.”
Sources say the gang is still selling drugs in the Downtown Eastside.
AUGUST 2025:
The law protects the rights of the most vulnerable among us to live in filth and despair
Pete McMartin: I'm tired of how homelessness and addiction take up so much oxygen in the social discourse.
Published Aug 03, 2025
In 2014, Vancouver Sun reporter Lori Culbert and I wrote a weeklong series of stories identifying the government social welfare programs — and their cost to taxpayers — in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Over 100 programs existed just for housing. Thirty provided health care, 30 offered family services and a miscellany of another 100 services — including a food bank for pets — brought the total to 260 social welfare agencies operating solely within the eight square blocks of the DTES.
Those 260 programs served just 6,500 clients.
Five years earlier, in 2009, Province reporter David Carrigg also did a survey of the programs available in the DTES, and he identified 174 social welfare agencies offering services to about 5,000 clients.
In other words, in the five years between Carrigg’s survey and Culbert’s and mine, not only had the number of people needing help grown but so had the number of agencies serving them.
And the cost to taxpayers?
Over $360 million annually.
That astounding figure — almost a million dollars a day — did little to satisfy the DTES’s voracious appetite for tax dollars. More to the point, it did nothing to eradicate the misery and living conditions of the people who lived there.
Rather than winning the war on poverty — and what a quaint phrase that seems now — governments engineered a truce, with the unstated understanding that if they couldn’t solve the problem or spend their way out of it, they could contain it. Those 260 social service bureaucracies weren’t solutions to an intractable problem; they were barricades. They ghettoized their impoverished clientele by concentrating the services on which they depended.
And let’s be honest: The public was complicit in this, and content for it to continue as long as the misery stayed confined within the borders of the DTES.
And yet here we are. The squalor spreads. It corrodes a once-vibrant downtown core. It infiltrates the suburbs. Daily acts of random violence and vandalism have become normalized, while a cornucopia of drugs — some decriminalized, some tolerated, many deadly — act as accelerants.
In 2016, a year after our survey, provincial health officer Dr. Perry Kendall declared a public health emergency under the Public Health Act due to the alarming rise in opioid-related overdose deaths. Since then, over 16,000 people have died from those opioids. That’s not progress. It’s a plague.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, has worked. Over the decades, the problem has been studied to death — admittedly, a poor choice of words — with consultants and academics and the legions of poverty industry advocates offering up solutions that ultimately fail. They fail because they’re predicated on two simple criteria:
1. Give us more money.
2. Give us more of everything — housing, hospital beds, food banks, drugs, injection sites, counselling or — and this is always implicit — empathy, with a side order of collective guilt.
I’ve seen this in my own newspaper.
In one recent opinion piece, the author laments that it has been the public’s and governments’ norm “to daily bypass our downtrodden, our homeless, our addicted or mentally ill on the street as though they are either invisible or merely equivalent to lampposts” — to which I have to reply: ‘Are you f—ng kidding me?’
The public and its governments have done exactly the opposite and, short of bathing their feet with Christ-like piety, have directed billions of tax dollars not only to ease the suffering of the homeless, the addicted and the mentally ill, but also to make them completely dependent upon those dollars.
Another Sun story — this one again by Culbert — examined the merits of involuntary care through the experiences of three addicts who underwent the process, and while two saw it as beneficial and helped them get clean, the third condemned it as “dehumanizing” and a cause of her PTSD. Though she no longer does drugs, she said that if she relapses she would prefer to take her chances with street drugs that could possibly kill her rather than be readmitted to hospital against her will.
Well, OK, I thought, ‘You’re an adult. Good for you for having the honesty to express that choice, however idiotic I may find it.’
But what I thought was missing in her testimonial was (a) any appreciation of the monumentally expensive efforts governments and the public had tried to make on her behalf, however ill-informed she may have believed those attempts to be, and (b) her failure to recognize the destructive effects that a relapse would have not just on her own health and family, but, more importantly, also on the collective health of the public, who would be asked to offer up yet more money, and deal yet again with her relapse — providing she survives it.
Finally, in The Sun, there was another column, this one by Sam Sullivan, who wrote that, after 52 years, it was time to end the DTES “experiment” and the restrictive housing policies that he believes led to the homelessness and violence bedevilling it.
Funny thing about that.
Between 1993 and 2005, Sullivan was a Vancouver city councillor, and for three years after that, he was mayor. Yet despite the fact that his 15-year tenure at city hall placed him in the midst of that DTES experiment, if not close to its helm, it is only now, 20 years later, that he publicly declares the experiment to be a failure, and — as far as I could tell from reading his opinion piece — without taking any responsibility for it.
I will refrain here, in my own column, from claiming to speak for the public or with any inkling of what popular sentiment might be.
But this is how I feel:
My patience is Exhausted.
I’m tired of the endless, self-regenerating calls for more studies and more funding when all I see is a colossal waste of money and effort leading to no improvement. I’m tired of how homelessness and addiction take up so much oxygen in the social discourse. I’m tired of civil rights that supersede my own, and treat the right to defecate in the streets with greater regard than my right to be offended by it.
Finally, I’m tired of a social welfare system that not only encourages dependency, but refuses, out of moral timidity, to also admit its complicity in it, and which shies away from asking hard questions about personal responsibility and the consideration of measures more draconian than safe injection sites — measures like a return to complete drug criminalization, a higher threshold of minimum sentences for trafficking, the establishment of rehabilitation centres or work camps exclusively in wilderness areas far from the temptations of cities, the discontinuation of any efforts that facilitate drug use, and yes, the robust expansion of an involuntary care system.
It’s also my opinion that none of these measures, given the current legal climate, will become reality, at least for the foreseeable future. Under our Constitution and the Criminal Code, the law, in its majestic equality, protects the rights of the most vulnerable among us to live in filth and despair, and, as so often happens, bring about their own deaths.
How enlightened we have become! What progress we have made! We’ve reached that point when now sleeping under bridges, begging in the streets and stealing one’s daily bread are no longer evidence of a system’s failure.
They are the system.
Same perspective and view as my previous post, but different camera, lens, f/stop, and exposure. At 16mm, f/22, and 6-second exposure I was able to capture the movement of the clouds and their reflections in the water.
-30-
Press 'F' on your keypad if you like this photo. © All rights reserved. Please do not use or repost images, sole property of Thuncher Photography.
With the backshop guys happily eating the provided pizzas, they left us to have fun around the complex. Here a set of GE trucks gets some love and care on April 29, 2016.
Taken on railroad property with permission.
© Eric T. Hendrickson 2016 All Rights Reserved
The Flatiron Building, originally the Fuller Building, is a triangular 22-story, 285-foot-tall (86.9 m) steel-framed landmarked building located at 175 Fifth Avenue in the eponymous Flatiron District neighborhood of the borough of Manhattan, New York City. Designed by Daniel Burnham and Frederick Dinkelberg, it was one of the tallest buildings in the city upon its 1902 completion, at 20 floors high, and one of only two "skyscrapers" north of 14th Street – the other being the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, one block east. The building sits on a triangular block formed by Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and East 22nd Street – where the building's 87-foot (27 m) back end is located – with East 23rd Street grazing the triangle's northern (uptown) peak. As with numerous other wedge-shaped buildings, the name "Flatiron" derives from its resemblance to a cast-iron clothes iron.
The building, which has been called "one of the world's most iconic skyscrapers and a quintessential symbol of New York City", anchors the south (downtown) end of Madison Square and the north (uptown) end of the Ladies' Mile Historic District. The neighborhood around it is called the Flatiron District after its signature building, which has become an icon of New York City. The Flatiron Building was designated a New York City landmark in 1966, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1989.
In 1901, the Newhouse family sold "Eno's flatiron" for about $2 million to Cumberland Realty Company, an investment partnership created by Harry S. Black, CEO of the Fuller Company. The Fuller Company was the first true general contractor that dealt with all aspects of building construction except design, and they specialized in building skyscrapers. Black intended to construct a new headquarters building on the site, despite the recent deterioration of the surrounding neighborhood. Black engaged Burnham to design the building, which would be Burnham's first in New York City, would also be the first skyscraper north of 14th Street. It was to be named the Fuller Building after George A. Fuller, founder of the Fuller Company and "father of the skyscraper", who had died two years earlier. However, locals persisted in calling it "The Flatiron", a name which has since been made official.
Once construction of the building began, it proceeded at a very fast pace. The steel was so meticulously pre-cut that the frame went up at the rate of a floor each week. By February 1902 the frame was complete, and by mid-May the building was half-covered by terra-cotta tiling. The building was completed in June 1902, after a year of construction.
The Flatiron Building was not the first building of its triangular ground-plan: aside from a possibly unique triangular Roman temple built on a similarly constricted site in the city of Verulamium, Britannia; Casa Saccabarozzi, Turin, Italy (1840); Bridge House, Leeds, England (1875); the Maryland Inn in Annapolis (1782); the Granger Block in Syracuse, New York (1869); I.O.O.F. Centennial Building (18760) in Alpena, Michigan; the Phelan Building in San Francisco (1881); the Gooderham Building of Toronto (1892); and the English-American Building in Atlanta (1897) predate it. All, however, are smaller than their New York counterpart.
Two features were added to the Flatiron Building following its completion. The "cowcatcher" retail space at the front of the building was added in order to maximize the use of the building's lot and produce some retail income. Harry Black had insisted on the space, despite objections from Burnham. Another addition to the building not in the original plan was the penthouse, which was constructed after the rest of the building had been completed to be used as artists' studios, and was quickly rented out to artists such as Louis Fancher, many of whom contributed to the pulp magazines which were produced in the offices below.
The Flatiron Building became an icon of New York City, and the public response to it was enthusiastic, but the critical response to it at the time was not completely positive, and what praise it garnered was often for the cleverness of the engineering involved. Montgomery Schuyler, editor of Architectural Record, said that its "awkwardness [is] entirely undisguised, and without even an attempt to disguise them, if they have not even been aggravated by the treatment. ... The treatment of the tip is an additional and it seems wanton aggravation of the inherent awkwardness of the situation." He praised the surface of the building, and the detailing of the terra-cotta work, but criticized the practicality of the large number of windows in the building: "[The tenant] can, perhaps, find wall space within for one roll top desk without overlapping the windows, with light close in front of him and close behind him and close on one side of him. But suppose he needed a bookcase? Undoubtedly he has a highly eligible place from which to view processions. But for the transaction of business?"
When the building was first constructed, it received mixed feedback. The most known criticism received was known as "Burnham's Folly". This criticism, focused on the structure of the building, was made on the grounds that the "combination of triangular shape and height would cause the building to fall down." Critics believed that the building created a dangerous wind-tunnel at the intersection of the two streets, and could possibly knock the building down. The building's shape was blamed for the 1903 death of a bicycle messenger, who was blown into the street and run over by a car. However, the building's structure was meant to accommodate four times the typical wind loads in order to stabilize and retain the building's iconic triangular shape.
The Flatiron was to attract the attention of numerous artists. It was the subject of one of Edward Steichen's atmospheric photographs, taken on a wet wintry late afternoon in 1904, as well as a memorable image by Alfred Stieglitz taken the year before, to which Steichen was paying homage. Stieglitz reflected on the dynamic symbolism of the building, noting upon seeing it one day during a snowstorm that "... it appeared to be moving toward me like the bow of a monster ocean steamer – a picture of a new America still in the making," and remarked that what the Parthenon was to Athens, the Flatiron was to New York. When Stieglitz's photograph was published in Camera Work, his friend Sadakichi Hartmann, a writer, painter and photographer, accompanied it with an essay on the building: "A curious creation, no doubt, but can it be called beautiful? Beauty is a very abstract idea ... Why should the time not arrive when the majority without hesitation will pronounce the 'Flat-iron' a thing of beauty?"
A 1919 image of the 165th Infantry Regiment passing through Madison Square's Victory Arch. The Flatiron Building is in the background.
After the end of World War I, the 165th Infantry Regiment passes through the Victory Arch in Madison Square, with the Flatiron Building in the background (1919).
Besides Stieglitz and Steichen, photographers such as Alvin Langdon Coburn, Jessie Tarbox Beals, painters of the Ashcan School like John Sloan, Everett Shinn and Ernest Lawson, as well as Paul Cornoyer and Childe Hassam, lithographer Joseph Pennell, illustrator John Edward Jackson as well the French Cubist Albert Gleizes all took the Flatiron as the subject of their work. But decades after it was completed, others still could not come to terms with the building. Sculptor William Ordway Partridge remarked that it was "a disgrace to our city, an outrage to our sense of the artistic, and a menace to life".
The Fuller Company originally took the 19th floor of the building for its headquarters. In 1910, Harry Black moved the company to Francis Kimball's Trinity Building at 111 Broadway, where its parent company, U.S. Realty, had its offices. U.S. Realty moved its offices back to the Flatiron in 1916, and left permanently for the Fuller Building on 57th Street in 1929.
The Flatiron's other original tenants included publishers (magazine publishing pioneer Frank Munsey, American Architect and Building News and a vanity publisher), an insurance company (the Equitable Life Assurance Society), small businesses (a patent medicine company, Western Specialty Manufacturing Company and Whitehead & Hoag, who made celluloid novelties), music publishers (overflow from "Tin Pan Alley" up on 28th Street), a landscape architect, the Imperial Russian Consulate, the Bohemian Guides Society, the Roebling Construction Company, owned by the sons of Tammany Hall boss Richard Croker, and the crime syndicate, Murder, Inc.
The retail space in the building's "cowcatcher" at the "prow" was leased by United Cigar Stores, and the building's vast cellar, which extended into the vaults that went more than 20 feet (6.1 m) under the surrounding streets, was occupied by the Flatiron Restaurant, which could seat 1,500 patrons and was open from breakfast through late supper for those taking in a performance at one of the many theatres which lined Broadway between 14th and 23rd Streets.
In 1911, the building introduced a restaurant/club in the basement. It was among the first of its kind that allowed a black jazz band to perform, thus introducing ragtime to affluent New Yorkers.
Even before construction on the Flatiron Building had begun, the area around Madison Square had started to deteriorate somewhat. After U.S. Realty constructed the New York Hippodrome, Madison Square Garden was no longer the venue of choice, and survived largely by staging boxing matches. The base of the Flatiron became a cruising spot for gay men, including some male prostitutes. Nonetheless, in 1911 the Flatiron Restaurant was bought by Louis Bustanoby, of the well-known Café des Beaux-Arts, and converted into a trendy 400-seat French restaurant, Taverne Louis. As an innovation to attract customers away from another restaurant opened by his brothers, Bustanoby hired a black musical group, Louis Mitchell and his Southern Symphony Quintette, to play dance tunes at the Taverne and the Café. Irving Berlin heard the group at the Taverne and suggested that they should try to get work in London, which they did. The Taverne's openness was also indicated by its welcoming a gay clientele, unusual for a restaurant of its type at the time. The Taverne was forced to close due to the effects of Prohibition on the restaurant business.
In October 1925, Harry S. Black, in need of cash for his U.S. Realty Company, sold the Flatiron Building to a syndicate set up by Lewis Rosenbaum, who also owned assorted other notable buildings around the U.S. The price was $2 million, which equaled Black's cost for buying the lot and erecting the Flatiron. The syndicate defaulted on its mortgage in 1933, and was taken over by the lender, Equitable Life Assurance Company after failing to sell it at auction. To attract tenants, Equitable did some modernization of the building, including replacing the original cast-iron birdcage elevators, which had cabs covered in rubber tiling and were originally built by Hecla Iron Works, but the hydraulic power system was not replaced. By the mid-1940s, the building was fully rented.
When the U.S. entered World War I, the Federal government instituted a "Wake Up America!" campaign, and the United Cigar store in the Flatiron's cowcatcher donated its space to the U.S. Navy for use as a recruiting center. Liberty Bonds were sold outside on sidewalk stands. By the mid-1940s, the cigar store had been replaced with a Walgreens drug store. During the 1940s, the building was dominated by clothing and toy companies.
Equitable sold the building in 1946 to the Flatiron Associates, an investor group headed by Harry Helmsley, whose firm, Dwight-Helmsley (which would later become Helmsley-Spear) managed the property. The new owners made some superficial changes, such as adding a dropped ceiling to the lobby, and, later, replacing the original mahogany-panelled entrances with revolving doors.
In 1959, St. Martin's Press moved into the building, and gradually its parent company, Macmillan, rented other offices as they became available, until by 2004, all 21 floors of the Flatiron Building's office space was rented by Macmillan. During its tenancy, Macmillan renovated some of the Flatiron Building's floors. for its imprints such as Tor/Forge, Picador and Henry Holt and Company. Macmillan, which is owned by Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck of Stuttgart, Germany, wrote about the building:
The Flatiron's interior is known for having its strangely-shaped offices with walls that cut through at an angle on their way to the skyscraper's famous point. These "point" offices are the most coveted and feature amazing northern views that look directly upon another famous Manhattan landmark, the Empire State Building.
Because the Helmsley/Flatiron Associates ownership structure was a tenancy-in-common, in which all partners have to agree on any action, as opposed to a straightforward partnership, it was difficult to get permission for necessary repairs and improvements to be done, and the building declined during the Helmsley/Flatiron Associates era. The facade of the Flatiron Building was restored in 1991 by the firm of Hurley & Farinella. Helmsley-Spear stopped managing the building in 1997, when some of the investors sold their 52% of the building to Newmark Knight-Frank, a large real estate firm, which took over management of the property. Shortly afterwards, Helmsley's widow, Leona Helmsley, sold her share as well. Newmark made significant improvements to the property, including installing new electric elevators, replacing the antiquated hydraulic ones, which were the last hydraulic elevators in New York City.
During a 2005 restoration of the Flatiron Building a 15-story vertical advertising banner covered the facade of the building. The advertisement elicited protests from many New York City residents, prompting the New York City Department of Buildings to step in and force the building's owners to remove it.
In January 2009, Italian real estate investment firm Sorgente Group, based in Rome, bought a majority stake in the Flatiron Building, with plans to turn it into a luxury hotel. The firm's Historic and Trophy Buildings Fund owns a number of prestigious buildings in France and Italy, and was involved in buying, and then selling, a stake in the Chrysler Building in Midtown New York. The value of the 22-story Flatiron Building, which is already zoned by the city to allow it to become a hotel, was estimated to be $190 million.
In July 2017, Macmillan announced it was consolidating its New York offices to the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway. By June 2019, Macmillan had left the building, and all 21 office floors were vacant. Following Macmillan's departure, the owners of the Flatiron Building, the family-owned GFP Real Estate, planned to use the absence of tenants to upgrade the interior of the building. GFP planned to install a central air and heating system, strip away all interior partitions – leaving triangular open floors – put in a new sprinkler system and a second staircase, and upgrade the elevators. The lobby would also be renovated. The cost would be $60–80 million and the project was estimated to take a year. The owners were interested in renting the entire building to a single tenant, hiring a high-profile real estate agency to find a suitable tenant. The executive director of the ownership company said: "The building was born as a commercial property, and we want to keep it as such." As of November 2020, the building is empty, and the full renovation is expected to take at least until 2022.
National Trust Properties
Smallhythe Place, Small Hythe, nr Tenterden, Kent.
Smallhythe is a half-timbered house built possibly at the end of the 15th or at the beginning of the 16th century. If anyone had visited it in the last 200 odd years it would been difficult to believe that it was a thriving shipyard. The river Rother used to come up to the house which was then called ‘Port House’ for that very reason the sea receded many years ago. The word ‘Hythe’ in Old English means a landing place I believe that the ‘Time Team’ had a dig here and they found much evidence of the ship building trade and also the existence of old river beds.
It was the home from 1899 – 1928 of the famous Victorian Actress Ellen Terry. In the house are many show cases of her costumes and many other items from other famous actors, playwrights and theatre managers. The grounds include an orchard, a rose garden, a nuttery and a fully working Barn Theatre. The house was opened to the public in 1929 and from 1947, The National Trust have cared for the property. It was designated a Grade II listed building in 1950.
A great place to visit, especially that Sissinghurst Castle is very near by.
The school building at 15/17 Tērbatas Street was built in 1905-1906, designed by architects E. Laube and K. Pēkšēns; formerly the property of Stockett, later the property of poet and public figure Atis Ķeniņš and his wife Anna Rūmane-Keniņa, later their heirs, in the 1930s the property of the Central Union of Mutual /Fire/Insurance. The house was used by various schools, a publishing house, a bookshop, a printing house, a grocery shop, and a few other shops.
In this view taken in June 1990, BR large logo 56103 was approaching Wilnecote, Staffordshire with a Railfreight Construction train of empty Tiger Rail POA mineral wagons forming the 6R64 MWFO 12:00 Witton to Toton.
All images on this site are exclusive property and may not be copied, downloaded, reproduced, transmitted, manipulated or used in any way without expressed written permission of the photographer. All rights reserved – Copyright Don Gatehouse
Apparently, i wasn't allowed to use a camera on this "private property" according to the security guard who came out of the building in the rain to tell me to stop.
Not sure how they "manage" this policy when approximately 90% of the 6 million people that live in the Greater Toronto Area and its 21 million annual visitors carry some kind of device in their pocket or purse that is quite capable of taking excellent photographs?
That would be a total of 27 million "potential" civil disobedience cases per year.
This policy must be VERY difficult to enforce? Unless of course you are one of the only ones on the street at the time?
Sorry for the swaying reeds in the foreground but there was a terribly false dog on the property that could not be talked to (Looked like my mother-in-law)
The street fighting in the streets of Kowloon last year amounted to damage to property and people, but one has to ask the question of what can a small army of spirited people hope to achieve against the militia and its armoury. Observing broken bamboo barricades brought home to me the poignancy of their fight.
Carris Remodelado 542 had just arrived at Martim Moniz in Lisbon to complete another return Line 28 service from Campo Ourique (Prazeres).
All images on this site are exclusive property and may not be copied, downloaded, reproduced, transmitted, manipulated or used in any way without expressed written permission of the photographer. All rights reserved – Copyright Don Gatehouse
This is my first attempt at light painting a house since I watched Mike Kelley's video. I decided to smash my brains at a non-client property, and now I am trying to collect wisdom for improving. I realise now that I should have bracketed each shot and that I should have made sure I concentrated all the flash pops in a tighter time window. I also learned not to cover lots of small areas, but rather fire the flash as wide as possible to make the light more even in the processed image, and to save on layers (the TIFF file is 3GB!).
The pool had no lights, so with the help of a friend I used a flower vase to stick a flash under the surface.
If you have a moment, please have a go at this, and give me some CC.
1. The Mind-Body Problem and the History of Dualism
1.1 The Mind-Body Problem
The mind-body problem is the problem: what is the relationship between mind and body? Or alternatively: what is the relationship between mental properties and physical properties?
Humans have (or seem to have) both physical properties and mental properties. People have (or seem to have)the sort of properties attributed in the physical sciences. These physical properties include size, weight, shape, colour, motion through space and time, etc. But they also have (or seem to have) mental properties, which we do not attribute to typical physical objects These properties involve consciousness (including perceptual experience, emotional experience, and much else), intentionality (including beliefs, desires, and much else), and they are possessed by a subject or a self. Physical properties are public, in the sense that they are, in principle, equally observable by anyone. Some physical properties – like those of an electron – are not directly observable at all, but they are equally available to all, to the same degree, with scientific equipment and techniques. The same is not true of mental properties. I may be able to tell that you are in pain by your behaviour, but only you can feel it directly. Similarly, you just know how something looks to you, and I can only surmise. Conscious mental events are private to the subject, who has a privileged access to them of a kind no-one has to the physical. The mind-body problem concerns the relationship between these two sets of properties. The mind-body problem breaks down into a number of components. The ontological question: what are mental states and what are physical states? Is one class a subclass of the other, so that all mental states are physical, or vice versa? Or are mental states and physical states entirely distinct?
The causal question: do physical states influence mental states? Do mental states influence physical states? If so, how?
Different aspects of the mind-body problem arise for different aspects of the mental, such as consciousness, intentionality, the self. The problem of consciousness: what is consciousness? How is it related to the brain and the body? The problem of intentionality: what is intentionality? How is it related to the brain and the body? The problem of the self: what is the self? How is it related to the brain and the body? Other aspects of the mind-body problem arise for aspects of the physical. For example:
The problem of embodiment: what is it for the mind to be housed in a body? What is it for a body to belong to a particular subject?
The seemingly intractable nature of these problems have given rise to many different philosophical views.
Materialist views say that, despite appearances to the contrary, mental states are just physical states. Behaviourism, functionalism, mind-brain identity theory and the computational theory of mind are examples of how materialists attempt to explain how this can be so. The most common factor in such theories is the attempt to explicate the nature of mind and consciousness in terms of their ability to directly or indirectly modify behaviour, but there are versions of materialism that try to tie the mental to the physical without explicitly explaining the mental in terms of its behaviour-modifying role. The latter are often grouped together under the label ‘non-reductive physicalism’, though this label is itself rendered elusive because of the controversial nature of the term ‘reduction’.
Idealist views say that physical states are really mental. This is because the physical world is an empirical world and, as such, it is the intersubjective product of our collective experience.
Dualist views (the subject of this entry) say that the mental and the physical are both real and neither can be assimilated to the other. For the various forms that dualism can take and the associated problems, see below.
In sum, we can say that there is a mind-body problem because both consciousness and thought, broadly construed, seem very different from anything physical and there is no convincing consensus on how to build a satisfactorily unified picture of creatures possessed of both a mind and a body.
Other entries which concern aspects of the mind-body problem include (among many others): behaviorism, consciousness, eliminative materialism, epiphenomenalism, functionalism, identity theory, intentionality, mental causation, neutral monism, and physicalism.
1.2 History of dualism
In dualism, ‘mind’ is contrasted with ‘body’, but at different times, different aspects of the mind have been the centre of attention. In the classical and mediaeval periods, it was the intellect that was thought to be most obviously resistant to a materialistic account: from Descartes on, the main stumbling block to materialist monism was supposed to be ‘consciousness’, of which phenomenal consciousness or sensation came to be considered as the paradigm instance.
The classical emphasis originates in Plato’s Phaedo. Plato believed that the true substances are not physical bodies, which are ephemeral, but the eternal Forms of which bodies are imperfect copies. These Forms not only make the world possible, they also make it intelligible, because they perform the role of universals, or what Frege called ‘concepts’. It is their connection with intelligibility that is relevant to the philosophy of mind. Because Forms are the grounds of intelligibility, they are what the intellect must grasp in the process of understanding. In Phaedo Plato presents a variety of arguments for the immortality of the soul, but the one that is relevant for our purposes is that the intellect is immaterial because Forms are immaterial and intellect must have an affinity with the Forms it apprehends (78b4–84b8). This affinity is so strong that the soul strives to leave the body in which it is imprisoned and to dwell in the realm of Forms. It may take many reincarnations before this is achieved. Plato’s dualism is not, therefore, simply a doctrine in the philosophy of mind, but an integral part of his whole metaphysics.
One problem with Plato’s dualism was that, though he speaks of the soul as imprisoned in the body, there is no clear account of what binds a particular soul to a particular body. Their difference in nature makes the union a mystery.
Aristotle did not believe in Platonic Forms, existing independently of their instances. Aristotelian forms (the capital ‘F’ has disappeared with their standing as autonomous entities) are the natures and properties of things and exist embodied in those things. This enabled Aristotle to explain the union of body and soul by saying that the soul is the form of the body. This means that a particular person’s soul is no more than his nature as a human being. Because this seems to make the soul into a property of the body, it led many interpreters, both ancient and modern, to interpret his theory as materialistic. The interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy of mind – and, indeed, of his whole doctrine of form – remains as live an issue today as it was immediately after his death (Robinson 1983 and 1991; Nussbaum 1984; Rorty and Nussbaum, eds, 1992). Nevertheless, the text makes it clear that Aristotle believed that the intellect, though part of the soul, differs from other faculties in not having a bodily organ. His argument for this constitutes a more tightly argued case than Plato’s for the immateriality of thought and, hence, for a kind of dualism. He argued that the intellect must be immaterial because if it were material it could not receive all forms. Just as the eye, because of its particular physical nature, is sensitive to light but not to sound, and the ear to sound and not to light, so, if the intellect were in a physical organ it could be sensitive only to a restricted range of physical things; but this is not the case, for we can think about any kind of material object (De Anima III,4; 429a10–b9). As it does not have a material organ, its activity must be essentially immaterial.
It is common for modern Aristotelians, who otherwise have a high view of Aristotle’s relevance to modern philosophy, to treat this argument as being of purely historical interest, and not essential to Aristotle’s system as a whole. They emphasize that he was not a ‘Cartesian’ dualist, because the intellect is an aspect of the soul and the soul is the form of the body, not a separate substance. Kenny (1989) argues that Aristotle’s theory of mind as form gives him an account similar to Ryle (1949), for it makes the soul equivalent to the dispositions possessed by a living body. This ‘anti-Cartesian’ approach to Aristotle arguably ignores the fact that, for Aristotle, the form is the substance.
These issues might seem to be of purely historical interest. But we shall see in below, in section 4.5, that this is not so.
The identification of form and substance is a feature of Aristotle’s system that Aquinas effectively exploits in this context, identifying soul, intellect and form, and treating them as a substance. (See, for example, Aquinas (1912), Part I, questions 75 and 76.) But though the form (and, hence, the intellect with which it is identical) are the substance of the human person, they are not the person itself. Aquinas says that when one addresses prayers to a saint – other than the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is believed to retain her body in heaven and is, therefore, always a complete person – one should say, not, for example, ‘Saint Peter pray for us’, but ‘soul of Saint Peter pray for us’. The soul, though an immaterial substance, is the person only when united with its body. Without the body, those aspects of its personal memory that depend on images (which are held to be corporeal) will be lost.(See Aquinas (1912), Part I, question 89.)
The more modern versions of dualism have their origin in Descartes’ Meditations, and in the debate that was consequent upon Descartes’ theory. Descartes was a substance dualist. He believed that there were two kinds of substance: matter, of which the essential property is that it is spatially extended; and mind, of which the essential property is that it thinks. Descartes’ conception of the relation between mind and body was quite different from that held in the Aristotelian tradition. For Aristotle, there is no exact science of matter. How matter behaves is essentially affected by the form that is in it. You cannot combine just any matter with any form – you cannot make a knife out of butter, nor a human being out of paper – so the nature of the matter is a necessary condition for the nature of the substance. But the nature of the substance does not follow from the nature of its matter alone: there is no ‘bottom up’ account of substances. Matter is a determinable made determinate by form. This was how Aristotle thought that he was able to explain the connection of soul to body: a particular soul exists as the organizing principle in a particular parcel of matter.
The belief in the relative indeterminacy of matter is one reason for Aristotle’s rejection of atomism. If matter is atomic, then it is already a collection of determinate objects in its own right, and it becomes natural to regard the properties of macroscopic substances as mere summations of the natures of the atoms.
Although, unlike most of his fashionable contemporaries and immediate successors, Descartes was not an atomist, he was, like the others, a mechanist about the properties of matter. Bodies are machines that work according to their own laws. Except where there are minds interfering with it, matter proceeds deterministically, in its own right. Where there are minds requiring to influence bodies, they must work by ‘pulling levers’ in a piece of machinery that already has its own laws of operation. This raises the question of where those ‘levers’ are in the body. Descartes opted for the pineal gland, mainly because it is not duplicated on both sides of the brain, so it is a candidate for having a unique, unifying function.
The main uncertainty that faced Descartes and his contemporaries, however, was not where interaction took place, but how two things so different as thought and extension could interact at all. This would be particularly mysterious if one had an impact view of causal interaction, as would anyone influenced by atomism, for whom the paradigm of causation is like two billiard balls cannoning off one another.
Various of Descartes’ disciples, such as Arnold Geulincx and Nicholas Malebranche, concluded that all mind-body interactions required the direct intervention of God. The appropriate states of mind and body were only the occasions for such intervention, not real causes. Now it would be convenient to think that occasionalists held that all causation was natural except for that between mind and body. In fact they generalized their conclusion and treated all causation as directly dependent on God. Why this was so, we cannot discuss here.
Descartes’ conception of a dualism of substances came under attack from the more radical empiricists, who found it difficult to attach sense to the concept of substance at all. Locke, as a moderate empiricist, accepted that there were both material and immaterial substances. Berkeley famously rejected material substance, because he rejected all existence outside the mind. In his early Notebooks, he toyed with the idea of rejecting immaterial substance, because we could have no idea of it, and reducing the self to a collection of the ‘ideas’ that constituted its contents. Finally, he decided that the self, conceived as something over and above the ideas of which it was aware, was essential for an adequate understanding of the human person. Although the self and its acts are not presented to consciousness as objects of awareness, we are obliquely aware of them simply by dint of being active subjects. Hume rejected such claims, and proclaimed the self to be nothing more than a concatenation of its ephemeral contents.
In fact, Hume criticised the whole conception of substance for lacking in empirical content: when you search for the owner of the properties that make up a substance, you find nothing but further properties. Consequently, the mind is, he claimed, nothing but a ‘bundle’ or ‘heap’ of impressions and ideas – that is, of particular mental states or events, without an owner. This position has been labelled bundle dualism, and it is a special case of a general bundle theory of substance, according to which objects in general are just organised collections of properties. The problem for the Humean is to explain what binds the elements in the bundle together. This is an issue for any kind of substance, but for material bodies the solution seems fairly straightforward: the unity of a physical bundle is constituted by some form of causal interaction between the elements in the bundle. For the mind, mere causal connection is not enough; some further relation of co-consciousness is required. We shall see in 5.2.1 that it is problematic whether one can treat such a relation as more primitive than the notion of belonging to a subject.
One should note the following about Hume’s theory. His bundle theory is a theory about the nature of the unity of the mind. As a theory about this unity, it is not necessarily dualist. Parfit (1970, 1984) and Shoemaker (1984, ch. 2), for example, accept it as physicalists. In general, physicalists will accept it unless they wish to ascribe the unity to the brain or the organism as a whole. Before the bundle theory can be dualist one must accept property dualism, for more about which, see the next section.
A crisis in the history of dualism came, however, with the growing popularity of mechanism in science in the nineteenth century. According to the mechanist, the world is, as it would now be expressed, ‘closed under physics’. This means that everything that happens follows from and is in accord with the laws of physics. There is, therefore, no scope for interference in the physical world by the mind in the way that interactionism seems to require. According to the mechanist, the conscious mind is an epiphenomenon (a notion given general currency by T. H. Huxley 1893): that is, it is a by-product of the physical system which has no influence back on it. In this way, the facts of consciousness are acknowledged but the integrity of physical science is preserved. However, many philosophers found it implausible to claim such things as the following; the pain that I have when you hit me, the visual sensations I have when I see the ferocious lion bearing down on me or the conscious sense of understanding I have when I hear your argument – all have nothing directly to do with the way I respond. It is very largely due to the need to avoid this counterintuitiveness that we owe the concern of twentieth century philosophy to devise a plausible form of materialist monism. But, although dualism has been out of fashion in psychology since the advent of behaviourism (Watson 1913) and in philosophy since Ryle (1949), the argument is by no means over. Some distinguished neurologists, such as Sherrington (1940) and Eccles (Popper and Eccles 1977) have continued to defend dualism as the only theory that can preserve the data of consciousness. Amongst mainstream philosophers, discontent with physicalism led to a modest revival of property dualism in the last decade of the twentieth century. At least some of the reasons for this should become clear below.
2. Varieties of Dualism: Ontology
There are various ways of dividing up kinds of dualism. One natural way is in terms of what sorts of things one chooses to be dualistic about. The most common categories lighted upon for these purposes are substance and property, giving one substance dualism and property dualism. There is, however, an important third category, namely predicate dualism. As this last is the weakest theory, in the sense that it claims least, I shall begin by characterizing it.
2.1 Predicate dualism
Predicate dualism is the theory that psychological or mentalistic predicates are (a) essential for a full description of the world and (b) are not reducible to physicalistic predicates. For a mental predicate to be reducible, there would be bridging laws connecting types of psychological states to types of physical ones in such a way that the use of the mental predicate carried no information that could not be expressed without it. An example of what we believe to be a true type reduction outside psychology is the case of water, where water is always H2O: something is water if and only if it is H2O. If one were to replace the word ‘water’ by ‘H2O’, it is plausible to say that one could convey all the same information. But the terms in many of the special sciences (that is, any science except physics itself) are not reducible in this way. Not every hurricane or every infectious disease, let alone every devaluation of the currency or every coup d’etat has the same constitutive structure. These states are defined more by what they do than by their composition or structure. Their names are classified as functional terms rather than natural kind terms. It goes with this that such kinds of state are multiply realizable; that is, they may be constituted by different kinds of physical structures under different circumstances. Because of this, unlike in the case of water and H2O, one could not replace these terms by some more basic physical description and still convey the same information. There is no particular description, using the language of physics or chemistry, that would do the work of the word ‘hurricane’, in the way that ‘H2O’ would do the work of ‘water’. It is widely agreed that many, if not all, psychological states are similarly irreducible, and so psychological predicates are not reducible to physical descriptions and one has predicate dualism. (The classic source for irreducibility in the special sciences in general is Fodor (1974), and for irreducibility in the philosophy of mind, Davidson (1971).)
2.2 Property Dualism
Whereas predicate dualism says that there are two essentially different kinds of predicates in our language, property dualism says that there are two essentially different kinds of property out in the world. Property dualism can be seen as a step stronger than predicate dualism. Although the predicate ‘hurricane’ is not equivalent to any single description using the language of physics, we believe that each individual hurricane is nothing but a collection of physical atoms behaving in a certain way: one need have no more than the physical atoms, with their normal physical properties, following normal physical laws, for there to be a hurricane. One might say that we need more than the language of physics to describe and explain the weather, but we do not need more than its ontology. There is token identity between each individual hurricane and a mass of atoms, even if there is no type identity between hurricanes as kinds and some particular structure of atoms as a kind. Genuine property dualism occurs when, even at the individual level, the ontology of physics is not sufficient to constitute what is there. The irreducible language is not just another way of describing what there is, it requires that there be something more there than was allowed for in the initial ontology. Until the early part of the twentieth century, it was common to think that biological phenomena (‘life’) required property dualism (an irreducible ‘vital force’), but nowadays the special physical sciences other than psychology are generally thought to involve only predicate dualism. In the case of mind, property dualism is defended by those who argue that the qualitative nature of consciousness is not merely another way of categorizing states of the brain or of behaviour, but a genuinely emergent phenomenon.
2.3 Substance Dualism
There are two important concepts deployed in this notion. One is that of substance, the other is the dualism of these substances. A substance is characterized by its properties, but, according to those who believe in substances, it is more than the collection of the properties it possesses, it is the thing which possesses them. So the mind is not just a collection of thoughts, but is that which thinks, an immaterial substance over and above its immaterial states. Properties are the properties of objects. If one is a property dualist, one may wonder what kinds of objects possess the irreducible or immaterial properties in which one believes. One can use a neutral expression and attribute them to persons, but, until one has an account of person, this is not explanatory. One might attribute them to human beings qua animals, or to the brains of these animals. Then one will be holding that these immaterial properties are possessed by what is otherwise a purely material thing. But one may also think that not only mental states are immaterial, but that the subject that possesses them must also be immaterial. Then one will be a dualist about that to which mental states and properties belong as well about the properties themselves. Now one might try to think of these subjects as just bundles of the immaterial states. This is Hume’s view. But if one thinks that the owner of these states is something quite over and above the states themselves, and is immaterial, as they are, one will be a substance dualist.
Substance dualism is also often dubbed ‘Cartesian dualism’, but some substance dualists are keen to distinguish their theories from Descartes’s. E. J. Lowe, for example, is a substance dualist, in the following sense. He holds that a normal human being involves two substances, one a body and the other a person. The latter is not, however, a purely mental substance that can be defined in terms of thought or consciousness alone, as Descartes claimed. But persons and their bodies have different identity conditions and are both substances, so there are two substances essentially involved in a human being, hence this is a form of substance dualism. Lowe (2006) claims that his theory is close to P. F. Strawson’s (1959), whilst admitting that Strawson would not have called it substance dualism.
3. Varieties of Dualism: Interaction
If mind and body are different realms, in the way required by either property or substance dualism, then there arises the question of how they are related. Common sense tells us that they interact: thoughts and feelings are at least sometimes caused by bodily events and at least sometimes themselves give rise to bodily responses. I shall now consider briefly the problems for interactionism, and its main rivals, epiphenomenalism and parallelism.
3.1 Interactionism
Interactionism is the view that mind and body – or mental events and physical events – causally influence each other. That this is so is one of our common-sense beliefs, because it appears to be a feature of everyday experience. The physical world influences my experience through my senses, and I often react behaviourally to those experiences. My thinking, too, influences my speech and my actions. There is, therefore, a massive natural prejudice in favour of interactionism. It has been claimed, however, that it faces serious problems (some of which were anticipated in section 1).
The simplest objection to interaction is that, in so far as mental properties, states or substances are of radically different kinds from each other, they lack that communality necessary for interaction. It is generally agreed that, in its most naive form, this objection to interactionism rests on a ‘billiard ball’ picture of causation: if all causation is by impact, how can the material and the immaterial impact upon each other? But if causation is either by a more ethereal force or energy or only a matter of constant conjunction, there would appear to be no problem in principle with the idea of interaction of mind and body.
Even if there is no objection in principle, there appears to be a conflict between interactionism and some basic principles of physical science. For example, if causal power was flowing in and out of the physical system, energy would not be conserved, and the conservation of energy is a fundamental scientific law. Various responses have been made to this. One suggestion is that it might be possible for mind to influence the distribution of energy, without altering its quantity. (See Averill and Keating 1981). Another response is to challenge the relevance of the conservation principle in this context. The conservation principle states that ‘in a causally isolated system the total amount of energy will remain constant’. Whereas ‘[t]he interactionist denies…that the human body is an isolated system’, so the principle is irrelevant (Larmer (1986), 282: this article presents a good brief survey of the options). This approach has been termed conditionality, namely the view that conservation is conditional on the physical system being closed, that is, that nothing non-physical is interacting or interfering with it, and, of course, the interactionist claims that this condition is, trivially, not met. That conditionality is the best line for the dualist to take, and that other approaches do not work, is defended in Pitts (2019) and Cucu and Pitts (2019). This, they claim, makes the plausibility of interactionism an empirical matter which only close investigation on the fine operation of the brain could hope to settle. Cucu, in a separate article (2018), claims to find critical neuronal events which do not have sufficient physical explanation.This claim clearly needs further investigation.
Robins Collins (2011) has claimed that the appeal to conservation by opponents of interactionism is something of a red herring because conservation principles are not ubiquitous in physics. He argues that energy is not conserved in general relativity, in quantum theory, or in the universe taken as a whole. Why then, should we insist on it in mind-brain interaction?
Most discussion of interactionism takes place in the context of the assumption that it is incompatible with the world’s being ‘closed under physics’. This is a very natural assumption, but it is not justified if causal overdetermination of behaviour is possible. There could then be a complete physical cause of behaviour, and a mental one. The strongest intuitive objection against overdetermination is clearly stated by Mills (1996: 112), who is himself a defender of overdetermination.
For X to be a cause of Y, X must contribute something to Y. The only way a purely mental event could contribute to a purely physical one would be to contribute some feature not already determined by a purely physical event. But if physical closure is true, there is no feature of the purely physical effect that is not contributed by the purely physical cause. Hence interactionism violates physical closure after all.
Mills says that this argument is invalid, because a physical event can have features not explained by the event which is its sufficient cause. For example, “the rock’s hitting the window is causally sufficient for the window’s breaking, and the window’s breaking has the feature of being the third window-breaking in the house this year; but the facts about prior window-breakings, rather than the rock’s hitting the window, are what cause this window-breaking to have this feature.”
The opponent of overdetermination could perhaps reply that his principle applies, not to every feature of events, but to a subgroup – say, intrinsic features, not merely relational or comparative ones. It is this kind of feature that the mental event would have to cause, but physical closure leaves no room for this. These matters are still controversial.
The problem with closure of physics may be radically altered if physical laws are indeterministic, as quantum theory seems to assert. If physical laws are deterministic, then any interference from outside would lead to a breach of those laws. But if they are indeterministic, might not interference produce a result that has a probability greater than zero, and so be consistent with the laws? This way, one might have interaction yet preserve a kind of nomological closure, in the sense that no laws are infringed. Because it involves assessing the significance and consequences of quantum theory, this is a difficult matter for the non-physicist to assess. Some argue that indeterminacy manifests itself only on the subatomic level, being cancelled out by the time one reaches even very tiny macroscopic objects: and human behaviour is a macroscopic phenomenon. Others argue that the structure of the brain is so finely tuned that minute variations could have macroscopic effects, rather in the way that, according to ‘chaos theory’, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in China might affect the weather in New York. (For discussion of this, see Eccles (1980), (1987), and Popper and Eccles (1977).) Still others argue that quantum indeterminacy manifests itself directly at a high level, when acts of observation collapse the wave function, suggesting that the mind may play a direct role in affecting the state of the world (Hodgson 1988; Stapp 1993).
3.2 Epiphenomenalism
If the reality of property dualism is not to be denied, but the problem of how the immaterial is to affect the material is to be avoided, then epiphenomenalism may seem to be the answer. According to this theory, mental events are caused by physical events, but have no causal influence on the physical. I have introduced this theory as if its point were to avoid the problem of how two different categories of thing might interact. In fact, it is, at best, an incomplete solution to this problem. If it is mysterious how the non-physical can have it in its nature to influence the physical, it ought to be equally mysterious how the physical can have it in its nature to produce something non-physical. But that this latter is what occurs is an essential claim of epiphenomenalism. (For development of this point, see Green (2003), 149–51). In fact, epiphenomenalism is more effective as a way of saving the autonomy of the physical (the world as ‘closed under physics’) than as a contribution to avoiding the need for the physical and non-physical to have causal commerce.
There are at least three serious problems for epiphenomenalism. First, as I indicated in section 1, it is profoundly counterintuitive. What could be more apparent than that it is the pain that I feel that makes me cry, or the visual experience of the boulder rolling towards me that makes me run away? At least one can say that epiphenomenalism is a fall-back position: it tends to be adopted because other options are held to be unacceptable.
The second problem is that, if mental states do nothing, there is no reason why they should have evolved. This objection ties in with the first: the intuition there was that conscious states clearly modify our behaviour in certain ways, such as avoiding danger, and it is plain that they are very useful from an evolutionary perspective.
Frank Jackson (1982) replies to this objection by saying that it is the brain state associated with pain that evolves for this reason: the sensation is a by-product. Evolution is full of useless or even harmful by-products. For example, polar bears have evolved thick coats to keep them warm, even though this has the damaging side effect that they are heavy to carry. Jackson’s point is true in general, but does not seem to apply very happily to the case of mind. The heaviness of the polar bear’s coat follows directly from those properties and laws which make it warm: one could not, in any simple way, have one without the other. But with mental states, dualistically conceived, the situation is quite the opposite. The laws of physical nature which, the mechanist says, make brain states cause behaviour, in no way explain why brain states should give rise to conscious ones. The laws linking mind and brain are what Feigl (1958) calls nomological danglers, that is, brute facts added onto the body of integrated physical law. Why there should have been by-products of that kind seems to have no evolutionary explanation.
The third problem concerns the rationality of belief in epiphenomenalism, via its effect on the problem of other minds. It is natural to say that I know that I have mental states because I experience them directly. But how can I justify my belief that others have them? The simple version of the ‘argument from analogy’ says that I can extrapolate from my own case. I know that certain of my mental states are correlated with certain pieces of behaviour, and so I infer that similar behaviour in others is also accompanied by similar mental states. Many hold that this is a weak argument because it is induction from one instance, namely, my own. The argument is stronger if it is not a simple induction but an ‘argument to the best explanation’. I seem to know from my own case that mental events can be the explanation of behaviour, and I know of no other candidate explanation for typical human behaviour, so I postulate the same explanation for the behaviour of others. But if epiphenomenalism is true, my mental states do not explain my behaviour and there is a physical explanation for the behaviour of others. It is explanatorily redundant to postulate such states for others. I know, by introspection, that I have them, but is it not just as likely that I alone am subject to this quirk of nature, rather than that everyone is?
For more detailed treatment and further reading on this topic, see the entry epiphenomenalism.
3.3 Parallelism
The epiphenomenalist wishes to preserve the integrity of physical science and the physical world, and appends those mental features that he cannot reduce. The parallelist preserves both realms intact, but denies all causal interaction between them. They run in harmony with each other, but not because their mutual influence keeps each other in line. That they should behave as if they were interacting would seem to be a bizarre coincidence. This is why parallelism has tended to be adopted only by those – like Leibniz – who believe in a pre-established harmony, set in place by God. The progression of thought can be seen as follows. Descartes believes in a more or less natural form of interaction between immaterial mind and material body. Malebranche thought that this was impossible naturally, and so required God to intervene specifically on each occasion on which interaction was required. Leibniz decided that God might as well set things up so that they always behaved as if they were interacting, without particular intervention being required. Outside such a theistic framework, the theory is incredible. Even within such a framework, one might well sympathise with Berkeley’s instinct that once genuine interaction is ruled out one is best advised to allow that God creates the physical world directly, within the mental realm itself, as a construct out of experience.
4. Arguments for Dualism
4.1 The Knowledge Argument Against Physicalism
One category of arguments for dualism is constituted by the standard objections against physicalism. Prime examples are those based on the existence of qualia, the most important of which is the so-called ‘knowledge argument’. Because this argument has its own entry (see the entry qualia: the knowledge argument), I shall deal relatively briefly with it here. One should bear in mind, however, that all arguments against physicalism are also arguments for the irreducible and hence immaterial nature of the mind and, given the existence of the material world, are thus arguments for dualism.
The knowledge argument asks us to imagine a future scientist who has lacked a certain sensory modality from birth, but who has acquired a perfect scientific understanding of how this modality operates in others. This scientist – call him Harpo – may have been born stone deaf, but become the world’s greatest expert on the machinery of hearing: he knows everything that there is to know within the range of the physical and behavioural sciences about hearing. Suppose that Harpo, thanks to developments in neurosurgery, has an operation which finally enables him to hear. It is suggested that he will then learn something he did not know before, which can be expressed as what it is like to hear, or the qualitative or phenomenal nature of sound. These qualitative features of experience are generally referred to as qualia. If Harpo learns something new, he did not know everything before. He knew all the physical facts before. So what he learns on coming to hear – the facts about the nature of experience or the nature of qualia – are non-physical. This establishes at least a state or property dualism. (See Jackson 1982; Robinson 1982.)
There are at least two lines of response to this popular but controversial argument. First is the ‘ability’ response. According to this, Harpo does not acquire any new factual knowledge, only ‘knowledge how’, in the form of the ability to respond directly to sounds, which he could not do before. This essentially behaviouristic account is exactly what the intuition behind the argument is meant to overthrow. Putting ourselves in Harpo’s position, it is meant to be obvious that what he acquires is knowledge of what something is like, not just how to do something. Such appeals to intuition are always, of course, open to denial by those who claim not to share the intuition. Some ability theorists seem to blur the distinction between knowing what something is like and knowing how to do something, by saying that the ability Harpo acquires is to imagine or remember the nature of sound. In this case, what he acquires the ability to do involves the representation to himself of what the thing is like. But this conception of representing to oneself, especially in the form of imagination, seems sufficiently close to producing in oneself something very like a sensory experience that it only defers the problem: until one has a physicalist gloss on what constitutes such representations as those involved in conscious memory and imagination, no progress has been made.
The other line of response is to argue that, although Harpo’s new knowledge is factual, it is not knowledge of a new fact. Rather, it is new way of grasping something that he already knew. He does not realise this, because the concepts employed to capture experience (such as ‘looks red’ or ‘sounds C-sharp’) are similar to demonstratives, and demonstrative concepts lack the kind of descriptive content that allow one to infer what they express from other pieces of information that one may already possess. A total scientific knowledge of the world would not enable you to say which time was ‘now’ or which place was ‘here’. Demonstrative concepts pick something out without saying anything extra about it. Similarly, the scientific knowledge that Harpo originally possessed did not enable him to anticipate what it would be like to re-express some parts of that knowledge using the demonstrative concepts that only experience can give one. The knowledge, therefore, appears to be genuinely new, whereas only the mode of conceiving it is novel.
Proponents of the epistemic argument respond that it is problematic to maintain both that the qualitative nature of experience can be genuinely novel, and that the quality itself be the same as some property already grasped scientifically: does not the experience’s phenomenal nature, which the demonstrative concepts capture, constitute a property in its own right? Another way to put this is to say that phenomenal concepts are not pure demonstratives, like ‘here’ and ‘now’, or ‘this’ and ‘that’, because they do capture a genuine qualitative content. Furthermore, experiencing does not seem to consist simply in exercising a particular kind of concept, demonstrative or not. When Harpo has his new form of experience, he does not simply exercise a new concept; he also grasps something new – the phenomenal quality – with that concept. How decisive these considerations are, remains controversial.
4.2 The Argument from Predicate Dualism to Property Dualism
I said above that predicate dualism might seem to have no ontological consequences, because it is concerned only with the different way things can be described within the contexts of the different sciences, not with any real difference in the things themselves. This, however, can be disputed.
The argument from predicate to property dualism moves in two steps, both controversial. The first claims that the irreducible special sciences, which are the sources of irreducible predicates, are not wholly objective in the way that physics is, but depend for their subject matter upon interest-relative perspectives on the world. This means that they, and the predicates special to them, depend on the existence of minds and mental states, for only minds have interest-relative perspectives. The second claim is that psychology – the science of the mental – is itself an irreducible special science, and so it, too, presupposes the existence of the mental. Mental predicates therefore presuppose the mentality that creates them: mentality cannot consist simply in the applicability of the predicates themselves.
First, let us consider the claim that the special sciences are not fully objective, but are interest-relative.
No-one would deny, of course, that the very same subject matter or ‘hunk of reality’ can be described in irreducibly different ways and it still be just that subject matter or piece of reality. A mass of matter could be characterized as a hurricane, or as a collection of chemical elements, or as mass of sub-atomic particles, and there be only the one mass of matter. But such different explanatory frameworks seem to presuppose different perspectives on that subject matter.
This is where basic physics, and perhaps those sciences reducible to basic physics, differ from irreducible special sciences. On a realist construal, the completed physics cuts physical reality up at its ultimate joints: any special science which is nomically strictly reducible to physics also, in virtue of this reduction, it could be argued, cuts reality at its joints, but not at its minutest ones. If scientific realism is true, a completed physics will tell one how the world is, independently of any special interest or concern: it is just how the world is. It would seem that, by contrast, a science which is not nomically reducible to physics does not take its legitimation from the underlying reality in this direct way. Rather, such a science is formed from the collaboration between, on the one hand, objective similarities in the world and, on the other, perspectives and interests of those who devise the science. The concept of hurricane is brought to bear from the perspective of creatures concerned about the weather. Creatures totally indifferent to the weather would have no reason to take the real patterns of phenomena that hurricanes share as constituting a single kind of thing. With the irreducible special sciences, there is an issue of salience , which involves a subjective component: a selection of phenomena with a certain teleology in mind is required before their structures or patterns are reified. The entities of metereology or biology are, in this respect, rather like Gestalt phenomena.
Even accepting this, why might it be thought that the perspectivality of the special sciences leads to a genuine property dualism in the philosophy of mind? It might seem to do so for the following reason. Having a perspective on the world, perceptual or intellectual, is a psychological state. So the irreducible special sciences presuppose the existence of mind. If one is to avoid an ontological dualism, the mind that has this perspective must be part of the physical reality on which it has its perspective. But psychology, it seems to be almost universally agreed, is one of those special sciences that is not reducible to physics, so if its subject matter is to be physical, it itself presupposes a perspective and, hence, the existence of a mind to see matter as psychological. If this mind is physical and irreducible, it presupposes mind to see it as such. We seem to be in a vicious circle or regress.
We can now understand the motivation for full-blown reduction. A true basic physics represents the world as it is in itself, and if the special sciences were reducible, then the existence of their ontologies would make sense as expressions of the physical, not just as ways of seeing or interpreting it. They could be understood ‘from the bottom up’, not from top down. The irreducibility of the special sciences creates no problem for the dualist, who sees the explanatory endeavor of the physical sciences as something carried on from a perspective conceptually outside of the physical world. Nor need this worry a physicalist, if he can reduce psychology, for then he could understand ‘from the bottom up’ the acts (with their internal, intentional contents) which created the irreducible ontologies of the other sciences. But psychology is one of the least likely of sciences to be reduced. If psychology cannot be reduced, this line of reasoning leads to real emergence for mental acts and hence to a real dualism for the properties those acts instantiate (Robinson 2003).
4.3 The Modal Argument
There is an argument, which has roots in Descartes (Meditation VI), which is a modal argument for dualism. One might put it as follows:
It is imaginable that one’s mind might exist without one’s body.
therefore
It is conceivable that one’s mind might exist without one’s body.
therefore
It is possible one’s mind might exist without one’s body.
therefore
One’s mind is a different entity from one’s body.
The rationale of the argument is a move from imaginability to real possibility. I include (2) because the notion of conceivability has one foot in the psychological camp, like imaginability, and one in the camp of pure logical possibility and therefore helps in the transition from one to the other.
This argument should be distinguished from a similar ‘conceivability’ argument, often known as the ‘zombie hypothesis’, which claims the imaginability and possibility of my body (or, in some forms, a body physically just like it) existing without there being any conscious states associated with it. (See, for example, Chalmers (1996), 94–9.) This latter argument, if sound, would show that conscious states were something over and above physical states. It is a different argument because the hypothesis that the unaltered body could exist without the mind is not the same as the suggestion that the mind might continue to exist without the body, nor are they trivially equivalent. The zombie argument establishes only property dualism and a property dualist might think disembodied existence inconceivable – for example, if he thought the identity of a mind through time depended on its relation to a body (e.g., Penelhum 1970).
Before Kripke (1972/80), the first challenge to such an argument would have concerned the move from (3) to (4). When philosophers generally believed in contingent identity, that move seemed to them invalid. But nowadays that inference is generally accepted and the issue concerns the relation between imaginability and possibility. No-one would nowadays identify the two (except, perhaps, for certain quasi-realists and anti-realists), but the view that imaginability is a solid test for possibility has been strongly defended. W. D. Hart ((1994), 266), for example, argues that no clear example has been produced such that “one can imagine that p (and tell less imaginative folk a story that enables them to imagine that p) plus a good argument that it is impossible that p. No such counterexamples have been forthcoming…” This claim is at least contentious. There seem to be good arguments that time-travel is incoherent, but every episode of Star-Trek or Doctor Who shows how one can imagine what it might be like were it possible.
It is worth relating the appeal to possibility in this argument to that involved in the more modest, anti-physicalist, zombie argument. The possibility of this hypothesis is also challenged, but all that is necessary for a zombie to be possible is that all and only the things that the physical sciences say about the body be true of such a creature. As the concepts involved in such sciences – e.g., neuron, cell, muscle – seem to make no reference, explicit or implicit, to their association with consciousness, and are defined in purely physical terms in the relevant science texts, there is a very powerful prima facie case for thinking that something could meet the condition of being just like them and lack any connection with consciousness. There is no parallel clear, uncontroversial and regimented account of mental concepts as a whole that fails to invoke, explicitly or implicitly, physical (e.g., behavioural) states.
For an analytical behaviourist the appeal to imaginability made in the argument fails, not because imagination is not a reliable guide to possibility, but because we cannot imagine such a thing, as it is a priori impossible. The impossibility of disembodiment is rather like that of time travel, because it is demonstrable a priori, though only by arguments that are controversial. The argument can only get under way for those philosophers who accept that the issue cannot be settled a priori, so the possibility of the disembodiment that we can imagine is still prima facie open.
A major rationale of those who think that imagination is not a safe indication of possibility, even when such possibility is not eliminable a priori, is that we can imagine that a posteriori necessities might be false – for example, that Hesperus might not be identical to Phosphorus. But if Kripke is correct, that is not a real possibility. Another way of putting this point is that there are many epistemic possibilities which are imaginable because they are epistemic possibilities, but which are not real possibilities. Richard Swinburne (1997, New Appendix C), whilst accepting this argument in general, has interesting reasons for thinking that it cannot apply in the mind-body case. He argues that in cases that involve a posteriori necessities, such as those identities that need discovering, it is because we identify those entities only by their ‘stereotypes’ (that is, by their superficial features observable by the layman) that we can be wrong about their essences. In the case of our experience of ourselves this is not true.
Now it is true that the essence of Hesperus cannot be discovered by a mere thought experiment. That is because what makes Hesperus Hesperus is not the stereotype, but what underlies it. But it does not follow that no one can ever have access to the essence of a substance, but must always rely for identification on a fallible stereotype. One might think that for the person him or herself, while what makes that person that person underlies what is observable to others, it does not underlie what is experienceable by that person, but is given directly in their own self-awareness.
This is a very appealing Cartesian intuition: my identity as the thinking thing that I am is revealed to me in consciousness, it is not something beyond the veil of consciousness. Now it could be replied to this that though I do access myself as a conscious subject, so classifying myself is rather like considering myself qua cyclist. Just as I might never have been a cyclist, I might never have been conscious, if things had gone wrong in my very early life. I am the organism, the animal, which might not have developed to the point of consciousness, and that essence as animal is not revealed to me just by introspection.
But there are vital differences between these cases. A cyclist is explicitly presented as a human being (or creature of some other animal species) cycling: there is no temptation to think of a cyclist as a basic kind of thing in its own right. Consciousness is not presented as a property of something, but as the subject itself. Swinburne’s claim that when we refer to ourselves we are referring to something we think we are directly aware of and not to ‘something we know not what’ that underlies our experience seemingly ‘of ourselves’ has powerful intuitive appeal and could only be overthrown by very forceful arguments. Yet, even if we are not referring primarily to a substrate, but to what is revealed in consciousness, could it not still be the case that there is a necessity stronger than causal connecting this consciousness to something physical? To consider this further we must investigate what the limits are of the possible analogy between cases of the water-H2O kind, and the mind-body relation.
We start from the analogy between the water stereotype – how water presents itself – and how consciousness is given first-personally to the subject. It is plausible to claim that something like water could exist without being H2O, but hardly that it could exist without some underlying nature. There is, however, no reason to deny that this underlying nature could be homogenous with its manifest nature: that is, it would seem to be possible that there is a world in which the water-like stuff is an element, as the ancients thought, and is water-like all the way down. The claim of the proponents of the dualist argument is that this latter kind of situation can be known to be true a priori in the case of the mind: that is, one can tell by introspection that it is not more-than-causally dependent on something of a radically different nature, such as a brain or body. What grounds might one have for thinking that one could tell that a priori?
The only general argument that seem to be available for this would be the principle that, for any two levels of discourse, A and B, they are more-than-causally connected only if one entails the other a priori. And the argument for accepting this principle would be that the relatively uncontroversial cases of a posteriori necessary connections are in fact cases in which one can argue a priori from facts about the microstructure to the manifest facts. In the case of water, for example, it would be claimed that it follows a priori that if there were something with the properties attributed to H2O by chemistry on a micro level, then that thing would possess waterish properties on a macro level. What is established a posteriori is that it is in fact H2O that underlies and explains the waterish properties round here, not something else: the sufficiency of the base – were it to obtain – to explain the phenomena, can be deduced a priori from the supposed nature of the base. This is, in effect, the argument that Chalmers uses to defend the zombie hypothesis. The suggestion is that the whole category of a posteriori more-than-causally necessary connections (often identified as a separate category of metaphysical necessity) comes to no more than this. If we accept that this is the correct account of a posteriori necessities, and also deny the analytically reductionist theories that would be necessary for a priori connections between mind and body, as conceived, for example, by the behaviourist or the functionalist, does it follow that we can tell a priori that consciousness is not more-than-causally dependent on the body?
It is helpful in considering this question to employ a distinction like Berkeley’s between ideas and notions. Ideas are the objects of our mental acts, and they capture transparently – ‘by way of image or likeness’ (Principles, sect. 27) – that of which they are the ideas. The self and its faculties are not the objects of our mental acts, but are captured only obliquely in the performance of its acts, and of these Berkeley says we have notions, meaning by this that what we capture of the nature of the dynamic agent does not seem to have the same transparency as what we capture as the normal objects of the agent’s mental acts. It is not necessary to become involved in Berkeley’s metaphysics in general to feel the force of the claim that the contents and internal objects of our mental acts are grasped with a lucidity that exceeds that of our grasp of the agent and the acts per se. Because of this, notions of the self perhaps have a ‘thickness’ and are permanently contestable: there seems always to be room for more dispute as to what is involved in that concept. (Though we shall see later, in 5.2.2, that there is a ‘non-thick’ way of taking the Berkeleyan concept of a notion.)
Because ‘thickness’ always leaves room for dispute, this is one of those cases in philosophy in which one is at the mercy of the arguments philosophers happen to think up. The conceivability argument creates a prima facie case for thinking that mind has no more than causal ontological dependence on the body. Let us assume that one rejects analytical (behaviourist or functionalist) accounts of mental predicates. Then the above arguments show that any necessary dependence of mind on body does not follow the model that applies in other scientific cases. This does not show that there may not be other reasons for believing in such dependence, for so many of the concepts in the area are still contested. For example, it might be argued that identity through time requires the kind of spatial existence that only body can give: or that the causal continuity required by a stream of consciousness cannot be a property of mere phenomena. All these might be put forward as ways of filling out those aspects of our understanding of the self that are only obliquely, not transparently, presented in self-awareness. The dualist must respond to any claim as it arises: the conceivability argument does not pre-empt them.......
5.2 The Unity of the Mind
Whether one believes that the mind is a substance or just a bundle of properties, the same challenge arises, which is to explain the nature of the unity of the immaterial mind. For the Cartesian, that means explaining how he understands the notion of immaterial substance. For the Humean, the issue is to explain the nature of the relationship between the different elements in the bundle that binds them into one thing. Neither tradition has been notably successful in this latter task: indeed, Hume, in the appendix to the Treatise, declared himself wholly mystified by the problem, rejecting his own initial solution (though quite why is not clear from the text).
The area outside this property should carry a 'Long Skirt Warning'. ;-) How unlucky is this, twice my skirt gets caught on these railings while I have a little walk.
Just after arriving on property and before receiving the necessary livery changes, former Kansas City Southern SD40 #625 leads a freight eastbound through Brookfiled, Wi. Prior to being repainted and renumbered to #6403, this unit operated with patched white hood sides and a small "Soo" under the cab number.
Photo of Train #246 (Wausau to Chicago [Clearing/BRC]) taken by J. David Ingles on December 13, 1986.
As a reminder, keep in mind that this picture is available only for non-commercial use and that visible attribution is required. If you'd like to use this photo outside these terms, please contact me ahead of time to arrange for a paid license.
and any girl friends coming by when he's older are going to have to answer to MEEEEEE!!! Where's my shotgun LOL