So I live in the suburbs, right? And while it's not the wasteland that it could be, it's definitely not the bubbling hub of activity that DC proper is.
That said, I have some questions that I'd like to ask Ingress players. For example, my town has this hilarious fondness for attaching clocktowers to buildings (I don't know; I can't explain): the regional library, Panera, Chipotle, the new Mexican restaurant down the street. So it makes sense that these places would either be PokeStops or gyms.
What doesn't make as much sense to me is the wooden rooster in the window of a bodega a mile or two away from me. (It is called Wooden Rooster on the map and not the other name they could have gone by LOL.)
The criteria for an Ingress portal submission (which is what was used as the basis for pokestops and whatnot) is really just "weirdass thing you'd tell someone else about". So, if someone's got a wooden rooster in the window, and an Ingress player lived nearby (because mostly, you submitted for portals in places you'd go, or go past, frequently) you'd take a picture and submit it as a portal. And if what makes the place interesting/unique is not what it IS, but the weird thing you're noticing, then yes, portals often get named after the weird thing.
(There's a church near me. Churches aren't that big a deal. But THIS church has the most bizarre, insane looking sculpture of children hanging off the prow of a boat - possibly meant to be the Ark, but if so it's a very shrinkrayed Ark - that is frankly creepy. It would not surprise me at all if the sculpture, which is in fact ATTACHED TO THE CHURCH, is what the local portal is named, and not the name of the church itself.)
Ah, that explains the huge number of Pokéstops we have in my city that are attached to street art and graffiti. I was wondering about that. We have Pokéstops named things like 'Animals Crawling All Over The Walls' because that's exactly what the art shows :)
Yup! Ingress players gain levels by controlling and linking portals. So, the more portals near you, the better. And the easiest portals to get approved tend to be "hey there's a Weird/Neat/Art Thing here!" types.
I sometimes play in Cambridge, England, and there are a lot of very funky pokestops in the city. But my absolute favourite is near my workplace, in the Midlands: the Church of Data and Coding, which is exactly that, a deconsecrated hospital chapel which is now used as a medical records office.
-~Centennial quilt~ on display inside City Hall. Do you have to go inside the building to use the stop? No. Do I know what this thing actually looks like aside from the photo in the game? Also no. ;V
-An indie cafe-and-cigars shop. (Not that I'm complaining, their coffee is amazing, but of all the cafes in town to use for an ingress portal/pokestop....)
-A run-down historic/no-longer-used cemetery. Catching pokemon is probably the least-sketchy reason anybody would go to this particular graveyard.
-A dumpster in the parking lot of a homeless outreach centre. To be fair, it's very impressively-painted, so I guess it'd fall under the category of "street art", but... it's still a dumpster.
My personal favourite is our nearest Pokestop, which is just a random square fountain in the street. It's just a block of cement with water coming out of it; there's about three of them on the street. It's actually essentially called "Fountain Street". But what makes me laugh is that the gym is one of the fountains, and another is the pokestop, and they're labelled (translating loosely) "Undrinkable Water" in the app. And I... just don't get it. It's a historic town full of stuff -- the walls of an old fort, a dozen churches, monuments, decorated fountains, even modern graffiti art commissioned by the city. Some of those aren't pokestops. And then there's these two cement block fountains.
We drove through Coffeyville Kansas recently, which is where the Dalton Gang met its end. They have a lot of stuff there for them that are pokestops, but the weirdest is that they have painted outlines down "Death Alley" of where the 4 members of the gang fell when they died.
The one for Grat Dalton is a pokestop. Ironically, it gave me a revive.
My favorite one so far is the one where, okay, my martial arts teacher used to have an art studio on this street, with one of his more huge sculptures out front. It's been gone for maybe a year and a half now since he moved his studio, but the pokestop is still labeled as his Mascot.
One of the PokeStops near me is a "Berry Mural." The storefront used to be a frozen yogurt place & the berry mural once covered an entire wall. It is now a sushi restaurant & that mural is gone, but it lives on in PokeGo.
My local hospital recently went from being run by the Daughters of Charity to a secular non-profit; the PokeStop in front and gym in back are both named for the religious icons that are no longer in those particular places. ;-)
I'm fond of the "Bejeweled Parking Bollard of S 13th St". I didn't know what a parking bollard was before this, but it's a sturdy short post onto which, sure enough, someone has stuck a bunch of plastic jewels.
There's a pokestop near a park here that's a manhole cover painted like a pokeball!
And I wouldn't classify it as the most interesting by far, maybe the worst actually, but there's a kinda nsfw one which I don't know if it's still around:
There's a church near where I work (that I've never noticed before because it's in a generic strip mall between a bookstore and a State Farm office) that has a big sign on their door in a half dozen different languages that basically says: "Come in and ask us questions! We'll put out lures if you do!"
... and they really do. Every time I glance at my phone during the day, they have another lure up.
(Also, the gym nearest to my apartment is at a currently abandoned building. The facility that was there closed several years ago, but it lives on digitally!)
Right now my favorite ones are the kinda weird hidden ones, even if they're unintentionally hidden.
In the park where I go a walking a lot, there's a Pokestop for one of the painted trash cans and it's listed as being painted one thing in the game, but when you look for it, it's no where to be seen. Which confused me for a while until I realized that the trash can had been repainted to resemble a soup can, which is entirely less fun than the original paint job. I can see the bright blue of the original paint job under the flaking paint. XD
And I'll have to go back and check when I have the chance, but I think there's a somewhat hidden Mary statue that's been made into a Pokestop. I couldn't find the actual statue, but the description says it's hard to see?? So I'll need to try and find the mysterious Mary, I guess.
I didn't even realize it until downloading Pokemon Go and looking at the Pokestop info, but apparently the local statue I'd always thought of as 'that weird art installation thing' is actually made from a piece of the World Trade Center.
The most bewildering one is in the parking lot of the nearest Indigo . . . . and it's bewildering because the picture on the stop and the name are of a sculpture about a block away on a main road. (Which also has its own pokestop.)
weirdest Pokestop: NRA headquarters. went once because my friend thought she saw Pikachu.
most gentrified Pokestop: a statue of two Buddhas outside a suburban chain store in one of those planned "walkable" communities with stores/restaurants/housing (except no one who works in the stores can afford the housing.)
It has ALL the lures and Pokestops and also ice cream, so I have been there a few times.
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That said, I have some questions that I'd like to ask Ingress players. For example, my town has this hilarious fondness for attaching clocktowers to buildings (I don't know; I can't explain): the regional library, Panera, Chipotle, the new Mexican restaurant down the street. So it makes sense that these places would either be PokeStops or gyms.
What doesn't make as much sense to me is the wooden rooster in the window of a bodega a mile or two away from me. (It is called Wooden Rooster on the map and not the other name they could have gone by LOL.)
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(There's a church near me. Churches aren't that big a deal. But THIS church has the most bizarre, insane looking sculpture of children hanging off the prow of a boat - possibly meant to be the Ark, but if so it's a very shrinkrayed Ark - that is frankly creepy. It would not surprise me at all if the sculpture, which is in fact ATTACHED TO THE CHURCH, is what the local portal is named, and not the name of the church itself.)
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-~Centennial quilt~ on display inside City Hall. Do you have to go inside the building to use the stop? No. Do I know what this thing actually looks like aside from the photo in the game? Also no. ;V
-An indie cafe-and-cigars shop. (Not that I'm complaining, their coffee is amazing, but of all the cafes in town to use for an ingress portal/pokestop....)
-A run-down historic/no-longer-used cemetery. Catching pokemon is probably the least-sketchy reason anybody would go to this particular graveyard.
-A dumpster in the parking lot of a homeless outreach centre. To be fair, it's very impressively-painted, so I guess it'd fall under the category of "street art", but... it's still a dumpster.
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The one for Grat Dalton is a pokestop. Ironically, it gave me a revive.
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And I wouldn't classify it as the most interesting by far, maybe the worst actually, but there's a kinda nsfw one which I don't know if it's still around:
https://onsizzle.com/i/t-10-12-00-am-verizon-club-z-seattles-only-24-7-1319736
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... and they really do. Every time I glance at my phone during the day, they have another lure up.
(Also, the gym nearest to my apartment is at a currently abandoned building. The facility that was there closed several years ago, but it lives on digitally!)
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In the park where I go a walking a lot, there's a Pokestop for one of the painted trash cans and it's listed as being painted one thing in the game, but when you look for it, it's no where to be seen. Which confused me for a while until I realized that the trash can had been repainted to resemble a soup can, which is entirely less fun than the original paint job. I can see the bright blue of the original paint job under the flaking paint. XD
And I'll have to go back and check when I have the chance, but I think there's a somewhat hidden Mary statue that's been made into a Pokestop. I couldn't find the actual statue, but the description says it's hard to see?? So I'll need to try and find the mysterious Mary, I guess.
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most gentrified Pokestop: a statue of two Buddhas outside a suburban chain store in one of those planned "walkable" communities with stores/restaurants/housing (except no one who works in the stores can afford the housing.)
It has ALL the lures and Pokestops and also ice cream, so I have been there a few times.
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Favourite name of a Pokemon gym seen today from the same train: Kiss All Men.