Colorado Springs Downtown (south side)

 

There are a few medium-large buildings downtown but this feels like it ought to be the downtown of a midwestern city, pop. circa 50,000. In fact, it the downtown of a city with a population closer to 500,000. There is a lot empty space and the immediate fringe of downtown, at least to the south, feels like a dying or dead zone, with a lot of empty weedy parking lots and ex-businesses. The whole notion of "downtown" is foreign, I think, to much of the population of El Paso County. I've overheard people, including some bulked-up military types, saying they are "afraid" of downtown. Possibly they are afraid in the same way that I am "afraid" of shopping malls: i.e., the spatial, commerical, and cultural arrangement feels like a foreign inhuman environment, hostile, impossible to connect with. 
    There is a large encampment of homeless people in the one big park downtown. There are a lot of homeless generally in COS.  The cost of living and renting around here is not particularly high. I wonder what proportion of the people in the park are ex-military?
    Palmer High School (last photo) is a beautiful building, and a pretty good school apparently.
    Things get greener, a bit livelier, and certainly more prosperous immediately north of the downtown core. There have been a lot of AL posts on the residential neighborhoods in this part of town. Colorado College was founded by the same General Palmer who founded the city, and CC has been physically integrated into the street plan since the beginning. It was from the beginning, and deliberately, not an isolated campus. But somehow this spatial integration hasn't been as dynamic and successful as it might have been. Maybe it's a case of the college and the city not being able to develop planning that accommodates the needs and interests of both.

US 87. Union County, New Mexico

1965 Ford Galaxie 500. Des Moines, New Mexico

Ed Ruscha & John Brinckerhoff Jackson

Driving into work at my windowless office at Colorado College, I heard a good NPR piece on Ed Ruscha. Twenty Six Gasoline Stations was published fifty years ago.  I always have been thrilled by the concept and execution of that book, and will claim it as an influence on the American Houses and The Way We Live Now series that post on AL from time to time. I wonder if Ruscha and John Brinckerhoff Jackson had any influence upon each other. They were both fascinated by their contemporary American landscape, and by the idea of the vernacular landscape.  Jackson as a geographer was interested in patterns of settlement and land use, Ruscha maybe more interested in objects, which happened to be buildings....but there is a lot of overlap between the two.

Blunt: 1969 Ford C-Series & the mortal coil

They are to-the-point, out there on Colorado Avenue. The truck belongs to the Sallie Ann (I think that's a Canadianism, but I'm going to let it stand) and was parked across the street from the straight-talking undertakers' shop.

El Dodge: The 1968 Dodge 100

This was sitting in the driveway of a house for sale in Colorado Springs. House and truck looked original and untouched. I recall a slightly older Dodge 200, the 3/4 ton version, in Marfa. This truck hits all my buttons. Original; plain-jane; not bent out of shape. Looks like a truck. As Ernie Roy might say, there's a lot of rascular density here.

Colorado Springs: Laundry, Houses, Church.