Dingbats

Fascinating! These things are all over California.

It is always interesting to see how different regions build mass amounts of housing for the lower-to-middle classes. In Philadelphia and Baltimore, they tend to be very small, two-story brick row houses. In Boston you have the wooden triple-decker duplexes. San Francisco has the small, modular suburban-style home that span hundreds of blocks in the Sunset and the Richmond. New York... I'm not sure what the New York equivalent is. The older big tenement buildings of lower Manhattan are kind of the equivalent, I suppose, but the more direct correllation might be those ugly brick houses in Queens. (Think of where George Constanza's parents live on Seinfeld.) Washington, D.C. never had an industrial base, so it doesn't really have these working class habitats. Instead Northeast and Southeast DC have lots of dreadful post-war housing projects and apartment complexes that started decaying about a month after they were built.

Incidentally, I arrived safely in Nashville. Jet lag is unfortunately having its way with me, hence me blogging instead of sleeping. Wish me luck for tomorrow!