El Sobrante is wack

Last night Meredith and I drove down to El Sobrante to pick up a bunch of parts for my crappy little car. I've never been to El Sobrante, and actually I'm pretty ignorant of most parts of the Bay Area that aren't Oakland, Berkeley, SF, or Marin. I was looking foward to it, beyond just getting the parts I needed to get my car on the road, I like seeing new places. Being a planning/urban form geek I love to try to disect the story of a place from first impressions. Thus: El Sobrante is wack.

It seems to me that this area caught the very end of the paper wealth the dot.com (shouldn't that be simply .com?) boom generated because you have a suprising number of McMansions right next door to completely dilapidated crack-shacks. Houses that are missing steps, and have the windows covered in tin-foil with piles of garbage in the front yard. And almost all the houses (even the decrepit ones) have really odd design features. Hexagonal towers wrapped in fake stone. Roofs that come all the way to the ground, with windows cut into them. Just wack houses.

The Hilltop Mall was clearly designed to be "shopping destination" with regional importance, yet it is definately on the skids. I've never seen so modern a mall look so rundown and empty. The walls are graced with clean spots in the shape of a Macy's sign. The parking lot is almost empty. It was nicely spooky.



That being said, the guy who sold me parts was really nice and helpful.