4 ms·
It is sad though, that Cal. Ave, is considered on the most nicer areas of Sillicon Valley. There is nothing really special in it that you can't find in any din
by ardit33 17y ago
It is sad though, that Cal. Ave, is considered on the most nicer areas of Sillicon Valley. There is nothing really special in it that you can't find in any dinky town in the us, minus the charm that small towns have. Compare to any nice areas to Cambridge, or W. D.C. or NYC, or Boulder. With the money flowing in the area, that that's what they can achieve? At least during the gilded age, the rich folks built memorial things, that are part of this country's cultural heritage. Todays' rich, just build bigger pools or planes, and that's it.
Tells you something about rich geeks being really introverted, and just want to keep on themselves.
- natrius 17y agoCalifornia Ave. is notably nice because that pattern of building is now illegal in most parts of the Bay Area and the United States as a whole. People like visiting walkable cities and the walkable enclaves of their own suburbs, but if someone actually proposes building something like that, people raise hell. "Mixed-use is not appropriate for this site," Palmer said. "It impinges on the little residential neighborhood that's been developed." http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/story.php?story_id=10807 http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/story.php?story_id=1080... Read the descriptions of the projects and see how remarkably tiny they are. Then read the comments. It's quite sad.
- HeyLaughingBoy 17y agoReminds me of the parochial mindset that caused me to leave Connecticut: residents on tiny twisty roads in wealthy old towns that didn't want a yellow centerline or white edge markers painted on the road because it "would lose its character." Forget all the automotive deaths attributed to people coming around blind corners too close to the middle of the road. Forget drivers in the rain or fog who can't tell where the road ends and the ditch begins. "It spoils the character" of the roadway, and that's more important than safety. Idiots!
- barrkel 17y agoThen ban cars. Seems like a simple solution to me. :)
- fjabre 17y agoAmen to that. Yeah put up some monuments!
- bkovitz 17y agoWhen I first moved to the Bay Area, I was puzzled by how "blah" Silicon Valley is. The land of innovation is suburbia and strip malls? A cultural desert? My manager at Palm, who had grown up in Cupertino, said that Sunnyvale and Cupertino were "the two most boring towns in America". Did they outside all beauty and culture to San Francisco? Or did they just not care?
- hernan7 17y agoSame here. My biggest whitebread shock was a couple of weeks after my arrival from Argentina. We went to have a coffe after dinner with a friend, and the Starbucks closed on us at 9:00PM! We ended up drinking our coffees in the parking lot. So much for the Silicon Valley bohemian life...
- kevbin 17y agoSilicon Valley does have some of the most beautiful, innovative office parks in the world. They're huge and isolated, however. Maybe the combination of strict zoning and ubiquitous automobiles aggregates retail into malls and strip malls, commercial into office parks, industrial into warehouse districts, etc.? Regardless, it's produced a grand, metropolitan brutalism of inhuman scale, navigable only by automobile, with the humane portions grandfathered-in between the cracks and targeted for extinction by city-planners, bureaucrats, and real estate developers.