gilman tracks

Berkeley has always struck me as more of a laundry list of projected expectations than an actual place with an identity of its own. A Rorschach blot where people see what they want to see – a progressive experiment in rent control and confusing traffic patterns – a retirement community for Dr. Suess characters – a museum of outdated forms of civil disobedience – that place where they went to college and smoked all that pot.

Live here long enough and with luck you’ll start to notice the stories the city itself tells.

West Berkeley, an industrial area with no remaining industry, has long drawn in the wild dreams of the dissatisfied, lured here by 924 Gilman and the ruins of a postwar East Bay, preserved by the belligerent indifference from the rest of Berkeley and mostly expressed through spray paint and creative destruction.

I ran these streets in my early twenties, punk shows following softball and beer and ending with midnight visits to the now closed Pacific Steel plant.

My daughters ran these streets twenty years later and I’m probably better off not knowing the details of their adventures too well.

It’s changing now. The big tech riot hose of money is finally flooding in, washing out all the bits that make an area different from any other area.

One of the lessons the Bay Area has learned the hard way is that Disruption is great as long as you aren’t the one being disrupted.

I shot these over one afternoon with my GH5 using the 12-60 lens and over mucked with them in Lightroom like I usually do.