Quote:
Originally Posted by malumot
Squirmy - You may want to judge people on other factors besides looks. Personally, I gave that up around age 15.
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Well, if I had formed a judgment about her looks and then condemned her actions because of them, you'd have a stronger point. I read all about her in Estrada's book, and only then came across the portrait.
With the exception of the Olvera merchants, she was very much opposed to any kind of commercial use of any of the Plaza property, which is why all the buildings in the area--that is, all the ones that weren't knocked down for parking lots--decayed over the years. Now that may just be opinion of mine, but I don't think it's a completely unfounded one. The effective decision was to banish the kind of activity that makes a neighborhood live, like shops and cheap restaurants. The whole area might have become something like the French Quarter in New Orleans; instead, it became the biggest ghost town south of Bodie. Just the Placita church and the Olvera Street merchants--often at cross purposes with the original owners of the buildings on that block of Main--was not enough to ensure the ongoing viability of the area as a
living community.
To the best of my memory, for a very long time none of the buildings were really used for anything, not even Park offices. They were padlocked by the State in 1953, and that was that for a very long time.
What was done to the Plaza neighborhood is in many ways the same as what happened a few blocks south. By replacing so many historic buildings not only with parking lots, but also "plazas" and "malls" that seem more than a little sterile like something out of a Di Chirico painting--except between 12 and 2 on weekdays, when the office workers come downstairs to have their brown bag lunches --much of Downtown was really given a suburban feel. There's lots of open space, lots of (expensive) surface parking, lots of green. But there's little in the way of coffeeshops, bookstores, pubs and restaurants. To find those, you have to go to the old financial district which was saved by the developers' and city fathers' preoccupation with "cleaning up" Bunker Hill, the Plaza, and the Civic Center.