Word: forte
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...what I was looking for in this 167-year-old railroad town of about 27,000 built along the banks of the Mississippi and once known as Catfish Bend. I would eventually get there, but I got sidetracked. Eighteen miles to the south, I came upon the town of Fort Madison (pop. 11,618) and liked what...
...work are nonnegotiable. Gimmicky re-creations, especially those involving period costumes, are disqualifiers, as are any businesses beginning with the name Ye Olde. Functionality is what I look for, an authentic, practical intersection of commercial and social life, and I knew the moment I turned right on Avenue G.--Fort Madison's five-block business strip--that I was home...
...what's Fort Madison's secret? A healthy economy for one thing, with blue- and white-color jobs at Sheaffer pens, Dupont, Dial, Wabash National and a state prison. A sweet, leafy residential area within walking distance of downtown and the riverfront park, for another. And Fort Madison has the dumb luck of being too small to attract the kind of super discount stores that work like neutron bombs on downtowns, leaving the buildings standing but destroying all life forms...
...even at that, nearly 30% of the storefronts are empty. A lot of people are willing to drive half an hour north to the mall and strip stores near Burlington, and a proposed highway bypass will route traffic around Fort Madison. So the true secret of the town's success, then, can be found every Thursday morning at the sinfully addictive Ivy Bake Shoppe, where Martha Wolf and Susan Welch Saunders' blackberry scones make the sorry impostors at a certain ubiquitous coffee-house chain taste like clay pigeons, and where a juiced-up group of local retailers and other...
Cambridge Mayor Anthony D. Galluccio and former mayor Francis H. Duehay '55 presided at a ceremony at Fort Washington, the only remaining revolutionary fort in Cambridge...