Pasadena Adjacent

Life Lived on the Edge of Pasadena

Month: December, 2011

December 13, 2011

Trash Tuesday #86: Where Getting it Bulldozed is the BEST Part of the Esthetic

enlarge

We at Pasadena Adjacent live on a hillside with a view. It’s not because we enjoy parking with our wheels turned out towards the curb; it’s the view.

Editors Ankle

And it’s not because we enjoy tumbling downhill to a 20,000 dollar medical expense; it’s the view.

Views are worth going to war over. We have, we’d do it again.

Because you do not want to lose….

to an Afghani War Lord whose wandered too far west…

and found an architect to design his narco McMansion. And a city department; whose function is to “preserve, reflect and enhance it’s neighborhood” – only to willing to sign off on it.

then there’s the bank loan to pay for it. And shifty contractors to build it

Turns out, after a year or two of rain, this small hillside lot can’t support the weight of this plopped down concrete behemoth.

Because of shoddy construction – that resulted in code violations – that caused the drug lord to bail on the loan – that caused the bank to foreclose on the property.

This view stopper (ironic implication intended) has been sitting empty for two years. A monument to a city whose desire for economic vitality (code for greed) surpassed it”s responsibility for sustainable development.

All this kitchy shame is in the neighborhood of “Roseville.” A subdivision of Point Loma San Diego.

A bad year for poppies?

Sound familiar?

Enlarge the editors “view” and you will notice a graded hillside ridge. No longer so. Allow fellow Garvanzian and Highland Park preservationists, Tina Gulotta-Miller to explain:

“On the border of Pasadena’s Arroyo View Estates there is a development that they named “Garvanza Villas” that has become a nightmare for us in Garvanza. It sits directly across from the charming Arroyo View Estates enclave on the same street but these are McMansions. Most of the homes are incomplete and they have essentially abandoned the project to date. Many many legal challenges inside this project for sure. This was before the HPOZ was established for Garvanza in October of 2010.”

Editors Note: The first attempt to develop this piece of land occurred with the previous 1980′s real-estate boom. The photo is from the bust period when developers walked away from the site and left the infrastructure to disintegrate. They’ve done so again.

We at Pasadena Adjacent have joined the HPOZ

23 comments
December 7, 2011

Ordered Back to the 99 Percent

When Pasadena Adjacent’s Editor visited the city of Berlin, before Reagan admonished Gorbachev to tear down that wall; there were actually two walls. In between was a buffer zone that hosted guard towers, tragic memories and  a lot of rabbits.

If you go far enough south during low tide, you’ll discover  the buffer zone between Mexico and California. And this is it; a short pier. On the American side are acres of unmolested wet lands. No doubt undeveloped, so we can keep an eye out through our 16 foot high “Friendship” gate. A location where once a week, for a period of four hours, 25 lucky Americanos are allowed to enter the buffer zone and visit Mexicans. Remember Yassar Arafat insisting on Kissing Points for Palestinians? similar principle – longer wait.

The Mexican side is one big party;  a stadium, push cart vendors, beach front hotels, hillside condominiums, a lighthouse and lots of noise.

It looked kind of exciting upon approach. Oz like. Then we discovered something that caught us off guard – NO guards  - so we kept walking. Into Mexico. And Mr V took a hike. And I took his picture.

Now (pause) we TRY not to be the subject of an “International Incident” a description accorded us from an eye witness. But sometimes palm fronds blow downhill. Oz turned out to be on our side. And he looks like Big Brother. And he acts like Big Brother.

And he sent out the troops. And those troops demanded we return to the United States of America. And we were forced to make the treacherous river crossing back to the San Diego Museum of Modern Art.

Mr V says the crowd from the Mexican side was jeering the border patrol. I suspect they were cheering them on.

MVI_0118, originally uploaded by Access Palm 2009.

Senior Smily Face took advantage of our predicament and headed El Norte on a rental pony.

And it wasn’t snowing

True story

.

17 comments
December 6, 2011

Trash(ed) Tuesday #85: Assessing the Damage that Crapped on the Esthetics

I’m a true “Palm Axis.” Every Santa Ana, palm fronds come to me backlit by the light of exploding transformers. Flying projectiles of harm.

This time around they couldn’t be ignored. On the night of shattered nerves, I was out dodging fronds, in a panic to find cover for my curbside finds. At Pasadena Adjacent, object based esthetics rate higher than personal well-being.  And I was 99% successful protecting the wall of terracotta heads, ceramic parrots and capadoccias. My three faced baby was not so lucky.

After the dust had cleared (via dustpan, hose and rake) I discovered another three faced replacement. My long ago 99.9 cent store purchase. Completely unexpected; Laughing Buddha – Dumb luck

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