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This view from the 2nd baseball diamond is pointed to the northwest. So most of the school play equipment along the back of the school is visible under the canopy of leafless trees of late April. The grass is marked for different age categories of youth soccer leagues - bigger fields for the older ones, smaller for the younger ones.
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In the early light of Sunday morning the spring colors of trees now in blossom or else proceeding with new leaves gives patches of green to the expanse of trees extending into the distance.
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Since the very last step in building the new school to the left (south) of the current one will be to demolish the building and pave the parking area & drop off lanes, at this time in late April next year (2026), the old 1920s school should still be present. Within a few months after that, though, noise and dust will accompany the demolition crews.
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The calm air and bright light almost 2 hours from sunrise makes vivid drone imagery possible on this Sunday. The future school will combine the student body here with those from Palmer Elementary in a campus occupying much of the grassy fields of the foreground. In place of the existing 1920s building there will be parking and drop off curb space for buses and private vehicles. The existing slope will remain as a barrier between the traffic and the learning areas, according to a public presentation by the city, district, and designers on April 15, 2025.
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Sunday morning a couple hours after daybreak at Aberdeen Academy (elementary school, GRPS.org, Grand Rapids Public Schools).
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After a few generations of milling flour, the final decade or so of operations was for doughnut ingredients. The drone just about reaches the height of the big white storage section of the former mill.
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Near the drone's 100' altitude ceiling in the Beginner Mode, this view down the oblong lake shows part of the golf course, located at the west end of the long lake.
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The most recent period of glaciers from 10,000 years ago flattened much of Michigan's surface. It also rounded the rough edges of stones and bulldozed sand into long lines of deposit that modern excavators dig up for mixing into cement, among other things. This view from the drone's lens shows a vast pit now accumulating water from snow melt and rain storms, year after year.
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The intersection of Lyon and College is at the lower right corner of the photo. Since it is still 30 minutes before the noon hour, the lunchtime crowd is not yet filling the streets.
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Bridge Street changes its name to Michigan Street at the left edge of the photo where the bridge reaches the riverbank and the main Post Office can be seen stretching left and out of the frame. The prominent building at the center is the convention hall, Devos Place.
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For this enthusiast model, the sequence begins by pairing the controller with the aircraft and then calibrating the compass by rotating the UAV horizontally and then along a vertical axis. After that it takes several seconds to automatically triangulate a GPS reference in order to RTH (return to home) at the end of the flight. With everything now ready, unlock the quadcopter's motors and press the button to hover at eye level before moving the stick to rise into the sky.
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At the center of the photo is the line of six prominent women who contributed to the suffrage movement more than 100 years ago in the USA. The angle of the springtime sun shines perfectly into the gap between the big buildings to spotlight the portraits of the muralist.
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The big, long Grand River flows along the valley bottom just beyond the line of large buildings in the distance. These are part of the health care in the city of Grand Rapids. Now nearing the last days of March, many trees have buds ready to flower and then leaves to grow out to capture solar power into biological energy by means of chlorophyl and photosynthesis. Once the tree canopy fills out, most of the buildings in this 100' view will be hidden.
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The parking lot at the center has a sign near its entrance inviting employees of Medtronic corporation. But across the train tracks is a gated lot for people working or studying at the Pew Campus (downtown) of Grand Valley State University. At the top right edge of the photo a section of the Grand River can be seen. All the cement and asphalt makes it hard to see the same features from the 1868 birdseye view that was drawn and printed for this same view northeast; see, www.loc.gov/resource/g4114g.pm003500/?r=0.162,0.107,0.142...
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In the lower right corner is a sidewalk trash barrel that gives a sense of scale to the big sculpture installation. The museum stands to the left of the frame and behind the drone camera's position, too. At the top right is a small glimpse of the Grand River in its passage through the city's downtown.
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Mine Dock aerial view of CSX99-473 with a train carrying a bit of everything. June 2023.
(23Z.0432_CSX99-473_Manifest_MineDkWt)
The opening pages of the live radio broadcast sounds like an emergency announcement about outer space creatures riding in something like water towers that stride along the landscape. That dramatic reading was too truthy for many listeners and they called the police or sheriff to find out where to escape and what to do. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds
This photo comes from hobby drone early in the morning looking south across the Fair Plains Cemetery toward the high point in the land where a city water tower stands above the tree tops.
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Launching from the parking area of the elementary school around 8:30 this morning, this view shows the north boundary of the Fair Plains Cemetery [equivalent to Elysian Fields in English?], operated by the City of Grand Rapids. The L shaped patch of rough grass is a few years of an experiment to plant native short-grass prairie to allow insects, birds and other small creatures to find food and shelter in the city limits. It is mowed at the start of the growing season, but otherwise requires little maintenance, unlike the neatly cropped lawn throughout the rest of the grounds, shaded by leafy trees.
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Extending into the distance is Diamond. The street intersecting it near the baseball field in the middle is the east-west Dorroll Street. On the horizon near the corner of the photo is the city of Grand Rapids downtown with its multistory buildings rising above the horizon.
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The exaggerated shadows of the first hour of sun cover the playing fields where soccer markings and nets for smallest players and those in the next age ranges will gather on Saturday's in the fall and spring. The baseball diamonds, diagonally opposite to each other, rarely have balls and bats in play. Rather, it is adult kick-ball leagues after work during summer that takes over the playing fields and runs the bases.
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