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April 12, 2023 by Kevin

Artlink Phoenix

While visiting Phoenix, I stumbled upon a cool art exhibition at the Park Central shopping center. It was put on by the Artlink organization on a floor of an old office building. (If I’m not mistaken, I think the office building may have also been a department store in an earlier life). The space had been entirely gutted down to concrete floors and exposed utilities. Art installations were spread about the space, with lots of room in between.

I thought it was cool as both a venue for showcasing local artists, as well as making use of a vacant space. This exhibit has been going on for several years now, but for me it was a new discovery.

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April 8, 2023 by Kevin

Revisiting Phoenix

Recently I was in Phoenix for the Modern Phoenix Home Tour. I hadn’t been to Phoenix in a while, and the hotel turned out to be in the neighborhood we had rented a house in fourteen years ago, called Roosevelt Row.

I had a couple of hours on a Saturday morning to walk around the neighborhood, and it was hopping! There were some new buildings, but many were buildings that had been newly built when we lived there. Those buildings had settled in and aged well, and things were looking really cohesive. It was nice to see some good urbanism coming together in Phoenix.

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May 9, 2021 by Kevin

1958 Hallcraft Homes advertising section: “This is Livin’!”

This special advertising section appeared on July 20, 1958 in the Arizona Republic to introduce with the catchphrase “This is Livin’!” The designs featured “Cindarella gables” with sweeping window and entry overhangs, and a “flow of line which introduces to homebuilding in the Valley of the Sun a graceful and distinctive charm of a kind entirely new.”

A pdf of the full section can be downloaded below.

Hallcraft Homes 1958 Advertising SectionDownload

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Posted in Diary, In The News · Tagged Hallcraft, Hallcraft Homes ·

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November 26, 2020 by Kevin

Scottsdale article in a 1960 issue of the Saturday Evening Post

Recently I came across an article in a 1960 issue of the Saturday Evening Post that featured Scottsdale, Arizona. Titled “The Town Millionaires Built,” it had a “lifestyles of the rich and famous” emphasis. Though my experience growing up in Scottsdale was far more modest, I enjoyed the article and the photos.

Download a PDF of the Article (4.6 MB)Download
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February 15, 2020 by Kevin

Long Beach

I recently was in Long Beach for a conference. Downtown Long Beach has lots of cool art deco buildings, and some good examples of newer buildings that draw inspiration from the older deco ones. Here are some photos I took during one of the breaks in the conference.

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Posted in Diary · Tagged Art Deco, Deco, LBC ·

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January 23, 2017 by Kevin

Reykjavik

Once upon a time when people came back from vacations, they’d invite friends and neighbors over to view a slide show of their travels. This could be interesting, but also very tedious – particularly if there was a large quantity of slides.

On the other hand, it could be fun to see some slides. The hard part is deciding how many slides is too many, and how quickly and much detail to provide for the narratives.

The web has provided a tool to deal with this. With a web-based slideshow, friends and neighbors can go through slides at their own pace, and skip through them if the quantity of slides exceeds their interest level. The social element of the slide-viewing party is missing, but the slides themselves are easily sharable.

So I’ve been on a trip to Reykjavik and took some pictures:

View from my hotel room at the Icelandair Hotel Reykjavik Marina – 9 am on Day 1.
More of the Blue Lagoon. Though the air was very chilly the water was nice and warm. A great way to start the trip and get over jet lag.
The Blue Lagoon. The lagoon is a geothermally warmed open air swimming pool created in conjunction with the production of geothermal energy. Super-heated water from far beneath the earth’s surface passes through a heat-exchange process, and the runoff has been captured to create the lagoon. Rich in salt and other minerals, the waters of the lagoon are said to be beneficial for skin conditions.
In hunting for the Northern Lights, all of the various tour buses ended up converging on this historic church. Apparently the site is known to be a good one for viewing the lights.
The hotel we stayed in had a bunch of these art pieces around the lobby, including this guy sitting next to the fire pit.
View of a ship in the harbor from our hotel.
View of the harbor from our hotel.
Bike racks and bikes in the snow, Reykjavik.
In the middle of Reykjavik is a punk rock museum, underground in what was formerly public toilets.
Punk rock museum.
A prevalent architectural style is comprised of vertical metal siding, wood windows and a pitched roof. Here’s it’s starting to snow on Day 2.
The displays had a history of punk rock in Iceland, with text in both English and Icelandic.
No longer public toilets – it’s now the punk rock museum.
Mural.
Birds at Tjornin.
Feeding the birds at Tjornin.
Feeding the birds at Tjornin.
Feeding the birds at Tjornin.
Frozen Tjornin lake.
Sculpture next the Tjornin.
Historical marker in Reykjavik.
Parking garage with a building on top, in central Reykjavik.
A stone building – relatively unusual to see.
Another of the prevalent architectural type. Many of the buildings are painted in bright colors.
Street sign.
View of Reykjavik from the top of Hallgrimskirkja church.
View of Reykjavik from the top of Hallgrimskirkja church.
View of Reykjavik from the top of Hallgrimskirkja church.
View of Reykjavik from the top of Hallgrimskirkja church.
Square in central Reykjavik. Empty now, but apparently it gets very busy here on weekends and in better weather.
A couple of buildings next to our hotel facing the marina.
View from the bus heading back to the airport.
Camera filters make the Northern Lights show up better in photos than what can be seen by the naked eye. This photo was taken by one of the other tourists on the bus using a filter calibrated to show the Northern Lights most optimally.
The Northern Lights can be elusive, I should have known when the tour guide said we’d be “hunting for the Northern Lights.” However we saw a glimpse of them, and this photo was taken from one of the other tourists on the bus.
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July 25, 2015 by Kevin

SOMA

For a time I had two parallel careers: city planning consulting and real estate agent. Though I’d studied city planning, I’d also long had a real estate license so I could help out in my partner’s business on the weekends. In 2005 with the strong local property market I went full time into real estate sales while my planning consulting was fledgling.

During that time I got a listing for a loft that was in the popular South of Market (SOMA) neighborhood. Life in SOMA varies block-to-block, with snazzy new lofts and highrises on one block, and skid row and rescue missions on the next. It is the diversity that makes the neighborhood interesting and provides a place for pretty much everyone, but can provide a challenge for marketing a property depending on which of those blocks it is located. My loft listing was on one of the more troubled blocks, one with more than its share of boarded-up buildings and illicit activity occurring in broad daylight. Yet within two or three blocks were the bars, restaurants and markets that prospective loft-dwellers would be attracted to.

In an effort to encourage prospective buyers to “look there, not here” I took a series of neighborhood photos to accompany the internet property listing. The photos included the various popular hang-outs in SOMA at the time.









A decade later, SOMA is a bit more snazzy and quite a bit less diverse than it was then. And at the time these photos were taken, the neighborhood had already been notable for how much it had changed from previous decades. So in a sense, these photos offer a time capsule of a point in time of an ever-changing neighborhood.

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January 14, 2015 by Kevin

Post Office

IMG_3919

Went to the post office today to mail a birthday card to my sister, and realized this may be the last time I visit this venerable building in its current use. It’s scheduled to close January 17th and move retail operations to a smaller space down the street. Somewhat ironically, the self-serve machine was out of order, so one had to wait in line and engage with a real person at the counter. Perhaps it was the old building’s way of exerting its influence one last time before the doors are shut.

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October 5, 2014 by Kevin

“Unique” Oasis Park in Scottsdale, Arizona

When we were working on the Scottsdale Downtown Plan and renting an apartment in Downtown Scottsdale, we’d often drive down Thomas Road on our treks into Phoenix. On our way we’d pass by an unusual mobile home park featuring mobile homes flanked by permanently-built structures. After driving by countless times, we pulled over one day and took these photos. It’s called Oasis Park and features a fantastic array of mid-century architecture, both factory-built and site-built.

“Unique” is the word Oasis Park uses to describe itself on its website:

The word “unique” is one of the few in the English language that cannot be modified. There is no “very unique” or “a little unique” or “somewhat unique”. It stands alone. Above all else.

So, too, does Oasis Park. From the one-of-a-kind architecture of its homes to the perfect Scottsdale location to its welcoming residents, Oasis Park stands alone as that “unique” place to call home in the Valley of the Sun.

Reading up on the park on the website and other web articles, we learn that Oasis Park was created in the mid-1950s on nearly 15 acres in the midst of cotton fields. A drive-in theater sat across the road, long since replaced with office buildings. The first residents moved arrived in 1957 to find shuffleboard courts, a putting green, a 54-foot heated pool with a rock waterfall, a library inside the clubhouse, an on-site hobby shop for men, and a pink laundry room with matching pink washers and pink dryers. The amenities alone help set the park apart from other mobile home communities. Eventually 95 couples filled the park, maneuvering massive 55-foot mobile homes into their designated lots. Residents were required to add “ramadas” to the existing structures, and some opted to add more than what was required.

According to the reports, most residents were (and still are) winter visitors, maintaining homes elsewhere. Though originally a rental community, residents now own their homes and are shareholders in the Oasis Park Company, the corporation they formed in order to buy the land on which their homes sit. Each resident now 1/95th of the total land and decisions about the park must be approved by the majority.

The community was always intended for older couples whose children were grown, restricted to members 55 years old and older. At one time, Oasis Park would not let in widows; however, many of the homes are now occupied by single women. Prospective buyers are interviewed and must be approved by the Oasis Park membership.

The original mobile home is still part of the structure, as a rule, but each home has a uniqueness of its own. This comes both from the mobile home and the ramada structures, which create interesting compositions. In some examples the original mobile home is a distinctive element unto itself, whereas others are so fully integrated to be nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the structure.

I’m not sure which aspect of these structures I like best. Many (maybe even most) of the mobile homes are midcentury vintage, with cool styling that has come full circle to be very hip. But then the ramadas themselves are pretty great too. The two together are like nothing I’d seen before.

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Posted in Diary, From the Archives, Surreal Suburbs ·

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April 27, 2014 by Kevin

Sunday in Athens

I’m in Atlanta this week for the annual American Planning Association (APA) national conference. I arrived early and had some spare time, so took a quick roadtrip to Athens. The city is well known as the home of bands like R.E.M. and The B-52s, and several long-time indie rock groups, so had been a place I’d long been curious about. So I rented a car, and an hour or so later I was walking around downtown Athens:

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Posted in Diary · Tagged Athens, Georgia ·
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