fair skies in v-ho.

[duccio]

This building on City Park is the Veteran's Memorial Building. It's been abandoned and condemned since 2005 - the year I moved here. It's only about a block away from my house and before the doors were boarded up it looked pretty nice inside, although it looked like some squatters had gotten in because I could see clothes and stuff scattered around in the lobby. It's all boarded up now. There is a crack in the far corner in the back running intermittently up the whole height of the building. The vets have another building somewhere else. I wonder how the angry national debate about the wars and everything else plays out in that place.

I took a walk around town today. The weather is clear again the rest of the week and through the weekend. That's why this picture is here: to show that there is no wet cold rain - not like some places that even have rain with ice mixed in I've been told. "It comes down in little wet cubes, duccio," she said. Isn't that amazing?

Comments

[shinsetsu]

That's a nice building to just be abandoned. How old is it? What will they do with it? Look how tall that palm tree is! Isn't it amazing they can stay up like that? I wonder how far into the ground their roots go?

[duccio]

I don't know how old that building is. It is reinforced concrete, so maybe it post dates the great earthquake of 1906. Perhaps it was for the Vets of WW1, c. 1918-20.

That is a magnificent palm that I have photographed a few times. I believe they have a fairly small root ball as I saw very large mature palms planted along Market Street and the Embarcadero in SF. They were trucked in and lifted up and the root balls were placed into the holes dug for them. I'd say the big palms I saw were about 3, maybe 4 feet in diameter at the ground, and the root balls were about 8 feet in diameter. Maybe a little more. These seemed to be full grown trees. Some varieties get very very tall, towering above everything else.