College Terrace

I added a bunch of pictures today, most of which are from my Saturday walk through the College Terrace neighborhood and Stanford Avenue. I love that neighborhood, because it's wealthy as hell but you wouldn't really know it (except, ironically, for Princeton Avenue on which all the houses are worth more than a million dollars, according to Zillow.com, and are expertly mowed and manicured and all recently redone and all personality-less). It's sort of falling apart in places, there's rampant overgrowth, some of the houses are sagging a bit on their foundations, and in general I feel like it's a cross between Uptown Whittier and the bayous of Louisiana. The houses would be equally at home in LA Confidential and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

The other day as I walked around, the air was full of the smells of springtime in California - poppies and roses and wildflowers and eucalyptus and oak pollen - and I got the feeling that nature was still hanging onto this neighborhood (except, as I said, for Princeton Ave.) and keeping it to itself for its own pleasure - dappled with shadows, quiet except for the occasional bird, and a nice little place for someone like me to walk.

Make sure to scroll down (or check the archives) since I posted quite a lot of pictures but also posted a few real entries today and yesterday, so don't miss them!