I took extra pictures of the old train station, so I may as well use them. It is a neat old building:
Click the image to embiggen it in a new tab. The old Auburn Railroad Depot is one of those Places in Peril lists. In the old days, this was the center of everything, but the last person got off and on the train in Auburn in 1970 and things have just crumbled and suffered lately.
There was a real estate company operating out of there for two decades, but the depot has sat vacant for 10 years now. Here’s a look through the windows:
And the overly fancy door handle:
In addition to the official marker, found here, there is an older plaque mounted on a large stone just outside the depot.
The building is described as “A typical example of Victorian railroad architecture, the one-story Richardson Romanesque-styled station boasts long hip roofs, deep eaves, dormers, finials, rounded arches over the windows and flat lintels.”
It is owned by a Montgomery lawyer, who is asking a steep price on a building that needs a lot of work, in a historic district — which would make a new building on the property problematic. So there is a sad stasis to the whole place.
But I love this. This would have been the sign you saw getting off the train:
A little bit more of that font in life would never be a bad thing.
This is the third building, built after a 1904 fire. Eight trains a day once stopped there.
The Jolley principle: Where there is smoke there is smoke.
If you are still trying to figure out what a Roopstigo is, and you want to hear some poor arguments for journalism, and from an Auburn journalism grad of all things, you can listen to the interview the guys at 790 The Zone conducted with Selena Roberts. She’s been doing things like this for years, though, and nothing here is that surprising. It is amusing to hear the host’s exasperation with the entire thing. This a direct link to their mp3.
Oh, and now ESPN is stepping in it. They’re calling it a six-month investigation into Auburn, which is great. It took Jay Jacobs, Auburn’s long-suffering athletics director, about four hours to dismantle the entire thing:
The facts clearly demonstrate that the Auburn Athletics Department and the Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics acted appropriately and aggressively in response to the growing threat of synthetic marijuana during the 2010-2011 academic year.
Auburn Athletics began testing its student-athletes for synthetic marijuana three days after a test became available. Since our drug testing policy was amended to include synthetic marijuana as a banned substance, there have been three positive tests for the drug out of more than 2,500 drug tests administered.
It becomes an item-by-item, blow-by-blow mitigation of everything ESPN thinks they have. It is thorough. It is just this side of terse. And it is just about the most thorough media pimp slap you’ll ever see from a group of people who’d prefer to take the high road.
Also, if you’re still wondering about the Roopstigo thing — who? — she named it after her dog. So, previously, we wondered why Selena couldn’t sell her creative writing to another outlet. (Then you read the creative writing which was, in a matter of hours, refuted by almost every source she pretends to quote.) Now we’re wondering “What did you name your dog after?”
Meanwhile, The War Eagle Reader found the first thing she wrote in college. It was … strange.
All you really need to know:
If you’re keeping score at home: Chizik called someone “short on logic,” & Jay Jacobs outplayed an ESPN senior writer. I’ll be in my bunker.
— Aubielicious (@Aubielicious) April 5, 2013
BREAKING: Selena Roberts just released her interview footage… twitter.com/Aubielicious/s…
— Aubielicious (@Aubielicious) April 4, 2013
