National Park Service
The National Park Service is an agency of the United States federal government that manages all national parks, many national monuments, other conservation and historical properties with various title designations. It was created on August 25, 1916, by Congress through the National Park Service Organic Act and is an agency of the United States Department of the Interior; the NPS is charged with a dual role of preserving the ecological and historical integrity of the places entrusted to its management, while making them available and accessible for public use and enjoyment. As of 2018, the NPS employs 27,000 employees who oversee 419 units, of which 61 are designated national parks. National parks and national monuments in the United States were individually managed under the auspices of the Department of the Interior; the movement for an independent agency to oversee these federal lands was spearheaded by business magnate and conservationist Stephen Mather, as well as J. Horace McFarland. With the help of journalist Robert Sterling Yard, Mather ran a publicity campaign for the Department of the Interior.
They wrote numerous articles that praised the scenic and historic qualities of the parks and their possibilities for educational and recreational benefits. This campaign resulted in the creation of a National Park Service. On August 25, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed a bill that mandated the agency "to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and wildlife therein, to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." Mather became the first director of the newly formed NPS. On March 3, 1933, President Herbert Hoover signed the Reorganization Act of 1933; the act would allow the President to reorganize the executive branch of the United States government. It wasn't until that summer when the new President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, made use of this power. Deputy Director Horace M. Albright had suggested to President Roosevelt that the historic sites from the American Civil War should be managed by the National Park Service, rather than the War Department.
President Roosevelt issued two Executive orders to make it happen. These two executive orders not only transferred to the National Park Service all the War Department historic sites, but the national monuments managed by the Department of Agriculture and the parks in and around the capital, run by an independent office. In 1951, Conrad Wirth became director of the National Park Service and went to work on bringing park facilities up to the standards that the public expected; the demand for parks after the end of the World War II had left the parks overburdened with demands that could not be met. In 1952, with the support of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, he began Mission 66, a ten-year effort to upgrade and expand park facilities for the 50th anniversary of the Park Service. New parks were added to preserve unique resources and existing park facilities were upgraded and expanded. In 1966, as the Park Service turned 50 years old, emphasis began to turn from just saving great and wonderful scenery and unique natural features to making parks accessible to the public.
Director George Hartzog began the process with the creation of the National Lakeshores and National Recreation Areas. Since its inception in 1916, the National Park Service has managed each of the United States' national parks, which have grown in number over the years to 60. Yellowstone National Park was the first national park in the United States. In 1872, there was no state government to manage it, so the federal government assumed direct control. Yosemite National Park began as a state park. Yosemite was returned to federal ownership. At first, each national park was managed independently, with varying degrees of success. In Yellowstone, the civilian staff was replaced by the U. S. Army in 1886. Due to the irregularities in managing these national treasures, Stephen Mather petitioned the federal government to improve the situation. In response, Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane challenged him to lobby for creating a new agency, the National Park Service, to manage all national parks and some national monuments.
Mather was successful with the ratification of the National Park Service Organic Act in 1916. The agency was given authority over other protected areas, many with varying designations as Congress created them; the National Park System includes. The title or designation of a unit need not include the term park; the System as a whole is considered to be a national treasure of the United States, some of the more famous national parks and monuments are sometimes referred to metaphorically as "crown jewels". The system encompasses 84.4 million acres, of which more than 4.3 million acres remain in private ownership. The largest unit is Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska. At 13,200,000 acres, it is over 16 percent of the entire system; the smallest unit in the system is Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial, Pennsylvania, at 0.02 acre. In addition to administering its units and other properties, the National Park Service provides technical and financial assistance to several "affiliated areas" authorized by Congress.
The largest affiliated area is New Jersey Pinelands National Reserve at 1,164,025 acres. The smallest is Benjamin Franklin National Memorial at less than 0.01 acres. Although all units of the Nat
Real estate
Real estate is "property consisting of land and the buildings on it, along with its natural resources such as crops, minerals or water. Also: the business of real estate, it is a legal term used in jurisdictions whose legal system is derived from English common law, such as India, Wales, Northern Ireland, United States, Pakistan and New Zealand. Residential real estate may contain either a single family or multifamily structure, available for occupation or for non-business purposes. Residences can be classified by. Different types of housing tenure can be used for the same physical type. For example, connected residences might be owned by a single entity and leased out, or owned separately with an agreement covering the relationship between units and common areas and concerns. Major categoriesAttached / multi-unit dwellings Apartment or Flat – An individual unit in a multi-unit building; the boundaries of the apartment are defined by a perimeter of locked or lockable doors. Seen in multi-story apartment buildings.
Multi-family house – Often seen in multi-story detached buildings, where each floor is a separate apartment or unit. Terraced house – A number of single or multi-unit buildings in a continuous row with shared walls and no intervening space. Condominium – A building or complex, similar to apartments, owned by individuals. Common grounds and common areas within the complex are shared jointly. In North America, there are rowhouse style condominiums as well; the British equivalent is a block of flats. Cooperative – A type of multiple ownership in which the residents of a multi-unit housing complex own shares in the cooperative corporation that owns the property, giving each resident the right to occupy a specific apartment or unit. Semi-detached dwellings Duplex – Two units with one shared wall. Detached dwellings Detached house or single-family detached house Portable dwellings Mobile homes or residential caravans – A full-time residence that can be movable on wheels. Houseboats – A floating home Tents – Usually temporary, with roof and walls consisting only of fabric-like material.
The size of an apartment or house can be described in square meters. In the United States, this includes the area of "living space", excluding the garage and other non-living spaces; the "square meters" figure of a house in Europe may report the total area of the walls enclosing the home, thus including any attached garage and non-living spaces, which makes it important to inquire what kind of surface area definition has been used. It can be described more by the number of rooms. A studio apartment has a single bedroom with no living room. A one-bedroom apartment has a dining room separate from the bedroom. Two bedroom, three bedroom, larger units are common. Other categoriesChawls Villas HavelisThe size of these is measured in Gaz, Marla and acre. See List of house types for a complete listing of housing types and layouts, real estate trends for shifts in the market, house or home for more general information, it is common practice for an intermediary to provide real estate owners with dedicated sales and marketing support in exchange for commission.
In North America, this intermediary is referred to as a real estate broker, or a real estate agent in everyday conversation, whilst in the United Kingdom, the intermediary would be referred to as an estate agent. In Australia the intermediary is referred to as a real estate agent or real estate representative or the agent
Heritage Documentation Programs
Heritage Documentation Programs is a division of the U. S. National Park Service responsible for administering the Historic American Buildings Survey, Historic American Engineering Record, Historic American Landscapes Survey; these programs were established to document historic places in the United States. Records consist of measured drawings, archival photographs, written reports, are archived in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. In 1933, NPS established the Historic American Buildings Survey following a proposal by Charles E. Peterson, a young landscape architect in the agency, it was founded as a constructive make-work program for architects and photographers left jobless by the Great Depression. Guided by field instructions from Washington, D. C. the first HABS recorders were tasked with documenting a representative sampling of America's architectural heritage. By creating an archive of historic architecture, HABS provided a database of primary source material and documentation for the then-fledgling historic preservation movement.
Earlier private projects included the White Pine Series of Architectural Monographs, many contributors to which joined the HABS program. Notable HABS photographers include Jack Boucher; the Historic American Engineering Record program was founded on January 10, 1969, by NPS and the American Society of Civil Engineers. HAER documents historic mechanical and engineering artifacts. Since the advent of HAER, the combined program is called "HABS/HAER". Today much of the work of HABS/HAER is done by student teams during the summer, or as part of college-credit classwork. Eric DeLony headed HAER from 1971 to 2003. In October 2000, NPS and the American Society of Landscape Architects established a sister program, the Historic American Landscapes Survey, to systematically document historic American landscapes. A predecessor, the Historic American Landscape and Garden Project, recorded historic Massachusetts gardens between 1935 and 1940; that project was funded by the Works Progress Administration, but was administered by HABS, which supervised the collection of records.
The permanent collection of HABS/HAER/HALS are housed at the Library of Congress, established in 1790 as the replacement reference library of the United States Congress. It has since been expanded to serve as the National Library of the United States. S. publishers are required to deposit a copy of every copyrighted and published work, book monograph and magazine. As a branch of the United States Government, its created works are in the public domain in the US. Many images and documents are available through the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, including proposed and existing structures. Jack Boucher, former HABS/HAER photographer Jet Lowe, former HAER photographer National Register of Historic Places Notes Further reading "HAER: 30 Years of Recording Our Technological Heritage". IA, The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology. 25. 1999. JSTOR i40043493. "Documenting Complexity: The Historic American Engineering Record and America's Technological History". IA, The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology.
23. 1997. JSTOR i4004348. Lindley, John; the Georgia Collection: Historic American Buildings Survey. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 0-8203-0613-4. Witcher, T. R.. "Fifty Years of Preservation: The Historic American Engineering Record". Civil Engineering. National Park Service−NPS: official Heritage Documentation Programs website
National Register of Historic Places listings in Alachua County, Florida
This is a list of the National Register of Historic Places listings in Alachua County, Florida. This is intended to be a complete list of the properties and districts on the National Register of Historic Places in Alachua County, United States; the locations of National Register properties and districts for which the latitude and longitude coordinates are included below, may be seen in a map. There are 63 properties and districts listed on the National Register in the county, including 1 National Historic Landmark; this National Park Service list is complete through NPS recent listings posted April 12, 2019. List of National Historic Landmarks in Florida National Register of Historic Places listings in Florida
Golf course
A golf course is the grounds where the game of golf is played. It comprises a series of holes, each consisting of a teeing ground, a fairway, the rough and other hazards, a green with a flagstick and hole. A standard round of golf consists of 18 holes. Most courses contain 18 holes. Par-3 courses consist of 18 holes all of which have a par of three strokes. Many older courses are links coastal. Courses are private and municipally owned, feature a pro shop. Many private courses are found at country clubs. Although a specialty within landscape design or landscape architecture, golf course architecture is considered a separate field of study; some golf course architects become celebrities in their own right, such as Robert Trent Jones, Jr.. The field is represented by the American Society of Golf Course Architects, the European Institute of Golf Course Architects, the Society of Australian Golf Course Architects, although many of the finest golf course architects in the world choose not to become members of any such group, as associations of architects are not government-sanctioned licensing bodies, but private groups.
While golf courses follow the original landscape, some modification is unavoidable. This is the case as new courses are more to be sited on less optimal land. Bunkers and sand traps are always artificial, although other hazards may be natural; the layout of a course follows certain traditional principles, such as the number of holes, their par values, the number of holes of each par value per course. It is preferable to arrange greens to be close to the tee box of the next playable hole, to minimize travel distance while playing a round, to vary the mix of shorter and longer holes. Combined with the need to package all the fairways within what is a compact square or rectangular plot of land, the fairways of a course tend to form an oppositional tiling pattern. In complex areas, two holes may share the same tee box, fairway, or green, it is common for separate tee-off points to be positioned for men and amateurs, each one lying closer to the green. Eighteen-hole courses are traditionally broken down into a "front 9" and a "back 9".
On older courses, the holes may be laid out in one long loop and ending at the clubhouse, thus the front 9 is referred to on the scorecard as "out" and the back 9 as "in". More recent courses tend to be designed with the front 9 and the back 9 each constituting a separate loop beginning and ending at the clubhouse; this is for the convenience of the players and the club, as it is easier to play just a 9-hole round, if preferred, or stop at the clubhouse for a snack between the front 9 and the back 9. A successful design is as visually pleasing. With golf being a form of outdoor recreation, the strong designer is an adept student of natural landscaping who understands the aesthetic cohesion of vegetation, water bodies, grasses and woodwork, among other elements. Most golf courses have only par-3, −4, −5 holes, although some courses include par-6 holes; the Ananti CC and the Satsuki golf course in Sano, Japan are the only courses with par 7 holes. Typical distances for the various holes from standard tees are as follows.
Men Par 3 – 250 yards and below Par 4 – 251–450 yards Par 5 – 451–690 yards Women Par 3 – 210 yards and below Par 4 – 211–400 yards Par 5 – 401–575 yards Harder or easier courses may have longer- or shorter-distance holes, respectively. Terrain can be a factor, so that a long downhill hole might be rated par 4, but a shorter uphill or treacherous hole might be rated par 5. Tournament players will play from a longer-distance tee box, behind the standard men's tee, which increases the typical distance of each par; this compensates for the longer distance pro players can put on tee and fairway shots as compared to the average "bogey golfer". The game of golf is played in what is called a "round"; this consists of playing a set number of holes in an order predetermined by the course. When playing on an 18-hole course, each hole is played once. To begin a hole, players start by striking the ball off a tee. Playing the ball off a tee can only be used on the first shot of every hole although it is not required to use a tee on the first shot.
Tees are a small wooden or plastic peg used to hold the ball up, so that when hit by the club the ball travels as far as possible. The first section of every hole consists of tee-box. There is more than one available box where a player places his ball, each one a different distance from the hole to provide differing difficulty; the teeing ground is as level as feasible, with mown grass similar to that of a putting green, most are raised from the surrounding fairway. Each tee box has
Villa Medici
The Villa Medici is a Mannerist villa and an architectural complex with a garden contiguous with the larger Borghese gardens, on the Pincian Hill next to Trinità dei Monti in Rome, Italy. The Villa Medici, founded by Ferdinando I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany and now property of the French State, has housed the French Academy in Rome since 1803. A musical evocation of its garden fountains features in Ottorino Respighi's Fontane di Roma. In ancient times, the site of the Villa Medici was part of the gardens of Lucullus, which passed into the hands of the Imperial family with Messalina, murdered in the villa. In 1564, when the nephews of Cardinal Giovanni Ricci of Montepulciano acquired the property, it had long been abandoned to viticulture; the sole dwelling was the Casina of Cardinale Marcello Crescenzi, who had maintained a vineyard here and had begun improvements to the villa under the direction of the Florentine Nanni Lippi, who had died however, before work had proceeded far. The new proprietors commissioned the late architect's son, to continue work.
Interventions by Michelangelo are a tradition. In 1576, the property was acquired by Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici, who finished the structure to designs by Bartolomeo Ammanati; the Villa Medici became at once the first among Medici properties in Rome, intended to give concrete expression to the ascendancy of the Medici among Italian princes and assert their permanent presence in Rome. Under the Cardinal's insistence, Ammanati incorporated into the design Roman bas-reliefs and statues that were coming to sight with every spadeful of earth, with the result that the facades of the Villa Medici, as it now was, became a virtual open-air museum. A series of grand gardens recalled the botanical gardens created at Pisa and at Florence by the Cardinal's father Cosimo I de' Medici, sheltered in plantations of pines and oaks. Ferdinando de' Medici had a studiolo, a retreat for study and contemplation, built to the north east of the garden above the Aurelian wall. Now these rooms look onto Borghese gardens but would have had views over the Roman countryside.
These two rooms were only uncovered in 1985 by the restorer Geraldine Albers: the concealing whitewash had protected and conserved the superb fresco decoration carried out by Jacopo Zucchi 1576 and 1577. Among the striking assemblage of Roman sculptures in the villa were some one hundred seventy pieces bought from two Roman collections that had come together through marriage, the Capranica and the della Valle collections. An engraving detailing the arrangement of statues prior to 1562 was documented by Galassi Alghisi. Three works that arrived at the Villa Medici under Cardinal Fernando, ranked with the most famous in the city: the Niobe Group and the Wrestlers, both discovered in 1583 and purchased by Cardinal Ferdinando, the Arrotino; when the Cardinal succeeded as Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1587, his elder brother having died, he satisfied himself with plaster copies of his Niobe Group, in full knowledge of the prestige that accrued to the Medici by keeping such a magnificent collection in the European city whose significance far surpassed that of their own capital.
The Medici lions were completed in 1598, the Medici Vase entered the collection at the Villa, followed by the Venus de' Medici by the 1630s. The antiquities from the Villa Medici formed the nucleus of the collection of antiquities in the Uffizi, Florence began to figure on the European Grand Tour; the fountain in the front of the Villa Medici is formed from a red granite vase from ancient Rome. It was designed by Annibale Lippi in 1589; the view from the Villa looking over the fountain towards St Peter's in the distance has been much painted, but the trees in the foreground have now obscured the view. Like the Villa Borghese that adjoins them, the villa's gardens were far more accessible than the formal palaces such as Palazzo Farnese in the heart of the city. For a century and a half the Villa Medici was one of the most elegant and worldly settings in Rome, the seat of the Grand Dukes' embassy to the Holy See; when the male line of the Medici died out in 1737, the villa passed to the house of Lorraine and in Napoleonic times, to the Kingdom of Etruria.
In this manner Napoleon Bonaparte came into possession of the Villa Medici, which he transferred to the French Academy at Rome. Subsequently, it housed the winners of the prestigious Prix de Rome, under distinguished directors including Ingres and Balthus, until the prize was withdrawn in 1968. In 1656, Queen of Sweden was said to have fired one of the cannon on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo without aiming it first; the wayward ball hit the villa. In 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte moved the French Academy in Rome to the Villa Medici with the intention of preserving an institution once threatened by the French Revolution. At first, the villa and its gardens were in a sad state, they had to be renovated in order to house the winners of the Prix de Rome. In this way, he hoped to retain for young French artists the opportunity to see and copy the masterpieces of antiquity and the Renaissance; the young architect Auguste-Henri-Victor Grandjean de Montigny undertook the renovation. The competition was interrupted during the first World War, Benito Mussolini confiscated the villa in 1941, forcing the Academy of France in Rome to withdraw until 1945.
The competition and the Prix de Rome were eliminated in 1968 by André Malraux. The Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Institut de France lost their guardianship of the Villa Medici to the Ministry of Culture and the French State. From th
Florida East Coast Railway
The Florida East Coast Railway is a Class II railroad operating in the U. S. state of Florida owned by Grupo México. The FEC was a Class I railroad owned by Florida East Coast Industries from 2000 to 2016, FOXX Holdings between 1983 and 2000, the St. Joseph Paper Company prior to 1983. Built in the last quarter of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century, the FEC was a project of Standard Oil principal Henry Flagler, he visited Florida with his first wife, Mary. A key strategist who worked with John D. Rockefeller building the Standard Oil Trust, Flagler noted both great potential and a lack of services during his stay at St. Augustine, he subsequently began what amounted to his second career, developing resorts and communities all along Florida's shores abutting the Atlantic Ocean. The FEC is best known for building the railroad to Key West, completed in 1912; when the FEC's line from the mainland to Key West was damaged by the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, the State of Florida purchased the remaining right-of-way and bridges south of Dade County, they were rebuilt into road bridges for vehicle traffic and became known as the Overseas Highway.
However, a greater and lasting Flagler legacy was the developments along Florida's eastern coast. During the Great Depression, control was purchased by heirs of the du Pont family. After 30 years of fragile financial condition, the FEC, under leadership of a new president, Ed Ball, took on the labor unions. Ball claimed the company could not afford the same costs as larger Class 1 railroads and needed to invest saved funds in its infrastructure, the condition of, fast becoming a safety issue; the company—using replacement workers—and some of its employees engaged from 1963 until 1977 in one of the longest and more violent labor conflicts of the 20th century. Federal authorities had to intervene to stop the violence, which included bombings and vandalism. However, the courts ruled in the FEC's favor with regard to the right to employ strikebreakers. During this time Ball invested in numerous steps to improve the railroad's physical plant, installed various forms of automation; the FEC was the first US railroad to operate two-man train crews, eliminate cabooses, end all of its passenger services by 1968.
In modern times, the company's primary rail revenues come from its rock trains. In January 2018, passenger rail service Brightline began using FEC tracks for its route from West Palm Beach to Fort Lauderdale; the Florida East Coast Railway was developed by Henry Morrison Flagler, an American tycoon, real estate promoter, railroad developer and John D. Rockefeller's partner in Standard Oil. Formed at Cleveland, Ohio as Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler in 1867, Standard Oil moved its headquarters in 1877 to New York City. Flagler and his family relocated there as well, he was joined by Henry H. Rogers, another leader of Standard Oil who became involved in the development of America's railroads, including those on nearby Staten Island, the Union Pacific, in West Virginia, where he built the remarkable Virginian Railway to transport coal to Hampton Roads, Virginia. Flagler's non-Standard Oil interests went in a different direction, when in 1878, on the advice of his physician, he traveled to Jacksonville, Florida for the winter with his first wife, quite ill.
Two years after she died in 1881, he married Ida Alice Shourds. After their wedding, the couple traveled to St. Augustine, Florida in 1883. Flagler found the city charming, he recognized Florida's potential to attract out-of-state visitors. Though Flagler remained on the Board of Directors of Standard Oil, he gave up his day-to-day involvement in the firm in order to pursue his Florida interests; when Flagler returned to Florida, in 1885 he began building a grand St. Augustine hotel, the Ponce de Leon Hotel. Flagler realized that the key to developing Florida was a solid transportation system, purchased the 3 ft narrow gauge Jacksonville, St. Augustine and Halifax River Railway on December 31, 1885, he discovered that a major problem facing the existing Florida railway systems was that each operated on different gauge systems, making interconnection impossible. He converted the line to 4 ft 8 1⁄2 in standard gauge in 1890 and the small operation was incorporated in 1892; the earliest predecessor of the FEC was the narrow gauge St. John's Railway, incorporated in 1858, which constructed a now-abandoned line between St. Augustine and Tocoi, a small settlement on the east bank of the St. Johns River, midway between Palatka and Green Cove Springs.
In 1883, Henry Flagler, now retired from Standard Oil, moved to St. Augustine, built the mentioned Ponce de Leon and the Alcazar Hotels, purchased the Casa Monica, just east of the Alcazar, changing the name to Cordova; the east coast of Florida was undeveloped at that time, Flagler found it difficult to obtain the construction materials he needed. His purchase of the JStA&HR Railway was intended to make it faster and easier to supply his building projects; the JStA&HR Railway served the northeastern portion of the state and was the first operation in the Flagler Railroad system. Before Flagler bought the line, the railroad stretched only between South Jacksonville and St. Augustine and lacked a depot sufficient to accommodate travelers to his St. Augustine resorts, he built a modern depot facility as well as schools, h
