mallorys_camera | Dec. 3rd, 2018

You’ve heard of cabbage roses?

These are kale roses.

I bought them as a thank you for Eleanor.

I’d never seen them before. I’d never seen cabbage roses, either.

The guy who sold them to me was the same guy who did the flowers for my wedding to Bill 35 years ago.

So, that was strange.

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I was exhausted all weekend. Just exhausted.

Jet lag?

Gloomy, relentless weather?

Fatal disease?

I mounted the masks I brought back from California. I went for a walk in the freezing rain. I bickered with annoying clients.

And that was about it for useful employments.

I don’t feel as though I’m all the way back. Although clearly, I’m not someplace else either.

Besides hanging out with Max, the thing I mostly did in Berkeley and Oakland was walk.

This was the place where I spent my youth, and it’s bizarre to me that things are so very different now.

I mean, when I left town, the whole place should have been hermetically sealed off like a time capsule, right?

There’s a tremendous amount of construction going on. Shattuck Avenue, back in the day, was this sleepy little small-town Main Street with single-story commercial properties. Now it’s this stretch of 10-story buildings clustered around the BART station. Retail on the ground floor; residential condominiums on the upper stories.

Of course, this is the most effective way to build when you have population density.

“So, has Berkeley’s population increased that dramatically?” I asked Max. As a public policy student, one would expect him to be an expert on demographic trends.

“Not really,” Max said. “At least the permanent population hasn’t increased that much. What has increased is the number of students.”

The transient, itinerant population in other words.

The University of California is a decidedly mixed blessing for Berkeley. It pays absolutely no taxes on its vast property holdings, and it uses a helluva lot of costly services. On the other hand, student dollars are what keep those small, struggling businesses afloat—at least, for one more year. Then they’re replaced by another small struggling business.

One morning I walked from the city of Piedmont to San Pablo and University. Seven miles or so.

Oakland was only one of many quaint little East Bay towns when the Big One hit San Francisco in 1906.

San Franciscans who could afford to escape the seismic destruction did so by relocating across the Bay. And Oakland, which had received the biggest population boost, began gobbling up the villages around it in much the same manner as the city of Los Angeles did throughout the same time period.

Brooklyn, Montclair, Maxwell Park—all names on street signs and dusty maps, now. Piedmont was the one East Bay town that defied annexation and, as a result, is still its own little city with reasonable zoning laws and great public schools. The landscaping is similarly outstanding.

Couple-a miles outside of Piedmont, everything turns urban and gritty.

This is the part of Oakland that has not changed since I lived there.

Graffiti sharing space with Bad Art:

Feral hippie houses. You can imagine the inhabitants as anachronisms rather like Shakers: ancient and dying out without replacements ‘cause nobody loves hippies anymore:

Those dormer-topped craftsmen cottages are a characteristic Oakland architectural style. Huge numbers of them were constructed to contain the SF earthquake overflow.

One is beginning to see the emergence of backyard entrepreneurism. I'm not exactly what that says about the economy:

I’d bet big money that this guy doesn’t have a business license. The fact that the city isn’t going after him reflects the new transportation paradigm: More and more, people don’t buy bicycles; they rent them off racks for an hour or three or however long they need them. So, this guy is barely eking out a living.

Electric scooters are also for rent everywhere:

I’d never noticed these scooters before my trip to the Bay Area, but as I was journeying from JFK to Grand Central Station the other night, I saw scads of them on the NYC streets, too. So, I guess you only see what you expect to see when you’re looking! At least, for the most part.

For-rent scooters strikes me as a kind of dicey business model because scooters like these need a lot of maintenance—in particular, brake maintenance—and how are you gonna keep up with that when renters don’t even have to return the scooter to the location where they rented it?

So, I’m inclined to see this trend as an evolutionary dead end.

Still. I find the whole trend toward collectivizing transportation units that traditionally have been privately owned very intriguing.

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There are tons of murals in Oakland and Berkeley, too: