We used to ride bikes past the "New Oakland market" in Chinatown and make jokes about how we were now in New Oakland, a different city. Someone told me there's actually an Old Oakland someplace in China. People came from there and ended up building New Oakland. I guess to them it really is a different city. It looked different today. Naked, bathed in grey winter gloom. Bright enough. The colors weren't gone, they were different. A translation--not just toward grey--into a different era. Some photoshop effect I can't name, which makes everything look like it's been dulled, then enhanced. Empty lots with garbage that looks like a sculputure from far away, then just looks like garbage when you get up close. If you get close enough you can see tiny drawings on it, inhabiting the void between intentional art and insane doodling, making some kind of profound statement about this place. You can see a chain link fence dramatically sheared into a permanent shadow of the car accident that must have happened there. You can see the new condos popping up like weeds, everywhere.
I know why I moved here. We craved the opportunity to live next door to a decaying, abandonded victorian on the last street in town. We couldn't wait to live across the street from an empty lot that used to be a junk yard guarded by dogs. We wanted to be close to the history of a dead industrial district. We wanted to wander up and down streets without streelights where only big rigs go and marvel at the cracked ruins of the oldest buildings we could find. Leaky warehouses and factories that find themselves un-self-consciously obsolete. We wanted to tread up and down the stairs at the old train station and feel the crowds brush past us, hear what it must have sounded like when these empty decaying platforms were busy with the excitement of people experiencing train travel for the first time. We came here to get away from everyone else who was always complaining about us. The neighbors who were always calling the cops because we were too loud, the cops for driving around waiting for us to do something they could stop us from doing. We came for the quiet, the noise, and the ghosts.
So why are they here? Who wants to live in these new condos, anyway? There's nothing here but liquor stores and gunshots at night. Sometimes during the day. Most people live here because they have to--because they can't go anywhere else. The city built them into an isolated box to keep them away from everyone else.
Now, somebody comes and knocks down the old warehouses and builds these new modular gated communities? With the cement, stucco, and corrugated metal, they look like an uneasy union of a parking garage and a shanty town. Stucco waiting to get wet, crack, and discolor. Metal paneling waiting to rust. It looks worse than temporary.
Formatted?: Not yet.
Edited?: Yep.
Do we need to do something before it's finished?: Ready!
