Brian Eason, brian.eason@indystar.com 4:15 p.m. EDT September 11, 2014

Thursday, September 11th, 2014, the Kirsh family sits on their front porch in Carmel Indiana. Left to right, Jacque Kirsh, grandson Holden Kirsh, age 1, Steve Kirsh.(Photo: Michelle Pemberton/The Star)

CARMEL Music venues don't get much more intimate than this.

A few blocks north of the state-of-the-art Palladium concert hall, more than 40 acts will perform in a Carmel neighborhood Sunday afternoon, using porches for a stage.

Organizers have high hopes that the quirky event, the city's inaugural PorchFest, will turn into an annual showcase of emerging musicians as well as the suburb's revitalized urban core.

For its first year, 43 acts will play on 20 porches along around three square blocks of the Arts & Design District northwest of Main Street and Rangeline Road. City Councilwoman Sue Finkam, the event chairwoman, said they're going for a laid back, grassroots atmosphere, with festival-goers bringing their own lawn chairs, food and drink.

Think of it as a small get-together with friends, gathered around an acoustic guitar except with more music genres, a larger audience and likely more talent than the last porch-side concert you attended. Finkam said a panel of judges whittled down the field from close to 70 applicants, and all but a handful were deemed "performance ready" for the 40-minute sets.

The lineup will play from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. and includes rock, blues, folk, and classical; acoustic sets and amplifiers; four-piece bands and solo acts. Plus, with as many as eight artists performing at once, visitors will have a plethora of alternatives if they find certain performers not to their tastes.

The original PorchFest was held in 2007 in Ithaca, N.Y., a city of about 30,000. Seven years later, Ithaca has seen the festival grow to 137 artists, and offshoots have sprung up in more than a dozen cities around the country.

Finkam said Mayor Jim Brainard suggested the festival last year after seeing another PorchFest elsewhere, and the idea took off from there. And while the music is the biggest selling point, Finkam's said she's most excited about the potential it has to connect people to Carmel.

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Newest music event: Carmel's PorchFest

By Sanjay Salomon

Boston.com Staff

September 11, 2014 10:22 AM

In this special section to Boston.com, we consulted a wide array of experts from various sectors of the real estate market for their advice on making the homebuying and selling process go as smoothly as possible. In this edition, we spoke with Mike Walsh, president of Walsh Home Inspections, about what a home inspector looks for on the job.

Exterior

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Everyone looks at the curb appeal of a home. But Walsh said its a different story for those in his line of work.

Things might look good when you stand back. Rotted wood might look good, chipped paint might look good. But up close, its a different story, he said. Inspectors look at the state of everything outside the home, including the gutters, the paint job, porches, windows, everything that is outside the home.

Inspectors also look at the grating to make sure water flows away from the home, not towards it.

Basement

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A Home Inspectors Checklist

Best porches Oak Ridge NC
Archadeck of the Piedmont Triad wants to show you a few fabulous porches and decks they #39;re build in Oak Ridge NC. Take a look at some before and after photos...

By: Archadeck of the Piedmont Triad

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Best porches Oak Ridge NC - Video

The sounds of a Cajun band blasted from the front porch as a crowd of hundreds packed the yards and street of a residential Minneapolis neighborhood. That scene took place at a unique music festival held last September.

"People were holding hands and swinging around their neighbors or people who live down the block, who they may never have met, just laughing hysterically," remembered festival co-organizer Niky Duxbury.

On Saturday, 24 bands from Minneapolis and one from St. Paul will again haul banjos, fiddles and amps to the Powderhorn Park neighborhood of Minneapolis and set up on front porches for a festival appropriately called Powderhorn PorchFest.

The music festival takes place on the 3200 and 3300 blocks of 17th Avenue in the Powderhorn Park neighborhood of Minneapolis. It's the third year the event has been held, and it keeps growing. This year, bands will play on five porches spread across the two city blocks, both of which will be closed to cars.

Duxbury said the idea came about two years ago when she and co-organizer Aaron Blum were talking about how there were few venues where people could see neighborhood bands for free.

"Why aren't all of our very talented musician friends and singer songwriters playing out more and getting more exposure and getting listened to?" Blum said. "A lot of them were just playing their music online, which is a great forum for exposure, but we wanted to bring it to the community, we wanted to bring it to the street."

They wanted an unpretentious festival that wasn't sequestered in a bar or big commercial venue. South Minneapolis' huge stock of front porches fit the bill.

"There's something traditional and old about gathering on a porch in somebody's yard, and playing music," Duxbury said.

"It's an invitation into somebody's home and space," Blum added.

Bands this year will be playing styles including Cajun, folk, hip-hop, old-timey and cumbia, which organizers said was meant to represent the diversity of the neighborhood.

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Bands tune up for Powderhorn PorchFest

PORCHES @ Empty Bottle - Chicago, IL 08.05.14

By: Dillon Kelley

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PORCHES @ Empty Bottle - Chicago, IL 08.05.14 - Video

Updated: Monday, September 8 2014, 04:50 PM CDT

By: CBS 21 Web Staff

MANCHESTER TOWNSHIP, Pa. -- Police in northern York County are alerting residents to a suspicious person seen lurking around homes.

Northern York County Regional Police said Monday officers responded to the 300 block of Harvest Drive in Manchester Township for a report of someone prowling overnight Saturday in Sunday.

Two residents reported someone had been on the back porches of their homes, police said. The residents said there were muddy footprints on their porches, and at another home, someone tried to open a back door.

The residents didn't see or hear anything during the overnight hours, police said.

Anyone with information about the incidents was asked to contact police at 717-292-3647 or report a crime tip through their website.

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Prowler reported in York Co. neighborhood

Federal prosecutors and law enforcement officials gathered Monday for a news conference at an outdoor basketball court on the Lower West Side to symbolically return the neighborhood to its residents.

The site, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph M. Tripi, is where many area youths took their first steps down a criminal path.

This is where kids became lookouts, moved on to drug dealers, and where they were introduced to street violence and the 10th Street Gang, Tripi said. This court is now used for its intended purpose, and the families of five homicide victims may have some semblance of peace now that the people responsible for these murders have been convicted.

With Fridays conviction, 44 gang members who have stood accused of racketeering, numerous counts of violence, over two dozen shootings, dozens of narcotics transactions, are all now convicted, said Hochul.

Since 2010, Hochuls office has prosecuted 22 homicides and removed 200 10th Street Gang members from the street, said Buffalo Police Commissioner Daniel Derenda.

They started moving into Riverside, but theyre gone now, Derenda said. Weve also made arrests of 7th Street Gang members. And were taking on gangs in other parts of the city, including the East Side.

In crediting members of the Buffalo Police Department, the State Police and the FBI Safe Streets Task Force, Hochul did not forget to thank neighborhood residents.

The citizens of the West Side of Buffalo stood shoulder-to-shoulder with law enforcement, providing testimony and identification of the gang members who were making their lives miserable for many decades, he said.

While no neighborhood residents were present at the news conference, some were seen standing in driveways and doorways of nearby homes. Those sitting on porches were wondering why television trucks surrounded the playground.

One man, who asked that his name not be used, told of motorbikes disturbing the peace late at night. He also mentioned a corner deli and the customers who camp out in front of the store drinking until 1 a.m. But he admitted the neighborhood is peaceful compared with past conditions.

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Prosecutors cite drop in crime with breakup of 10th Street Gang

Tiny Homes with Tiny Porches, Small Houses
Follow us on: http://www.howtobuildahouseblog.com Music: Whistling Down the Road Downloaded it from the YouTube Audio Library http://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music.

By: Grig Stamate

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Tiny Homes with Tiny Porches, Small Houses - Video

York City Building Inspector Steve Buffington on a vehicle that crashed into two porches on West Kin
York City Building Inspector Steve Buffington on a vehicle that crashed into two porches on West King Street. @ydrom By: Ted Czech - Day cops reporter for @y...

By: York Daily Record/Sunday News

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York City Building Inspector Steve Buffington on a vehicle that crashed into two porches on West Kin - Video

Porches (the original Hard Drivers)
Before Hard Drivers existed, we wrote a track called Porsches. I still prefer it 🙂 credits: Ekstrak Nolan Weekes.

By: Robert Bullough

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