earthquake
Apr. 18th, 2006 03:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vaznettiToday is the 100th anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (and fire, but that went on for abut three days). It's been nice to be back here for it, even though we haven't been to any of the memorials; I don't have thinky thoughts about it, but it was one of the events that shaped the city so profoundly that it was always part of my mental landscape as I grew up -- the place the fire stopped, the buildings which fell and the buildings which didn't fall (ours, for example). It's the kind of thing that makes it difficult for me to understand how people can think that history doesn't matter. And of course the earthquake, fire and subsequent rebuilding were much in my mind last year when watching the coverage of hurricane Katrina; the Chronicle has been rerunning stories about the earthquake and aftermath and there have been some interesting similarities.
In honor of the day, Muni (the local bus company) is offering free travel today, as my parents and I discovered when we caught the bus to go to the park to see the new De Young Museum, which is one of the ugliest buildings I have ever seen in my life. Really. It might look all right in Berlin or Texas, but sitting in the middle of Golden Gate Park it looks like a 1970s-style rusty airport terminal covered in chicken wire. I thought that the tower was still under construction when I first saw it, because I couldn't imagine that anyone would build such a monstrously out-of-place structure there on purpose. (It manages to look both very ugly and very expensive, which is probably not as hard as I'd imagine). The collection is probably very good, although we never went to see it, since it was such a nice day -- instead, we walked around the botanic gardens, which are lovely.
Technically, going to the park is kind of a commemorative exercise, since that's where everyone had to live when their houses collapsed or burnt down.
In honor of the day, Muni (the local bus company) is offering free travel today, as my parents and I discovered when we caught the bus to go to the park to see the new De Young Museum, which is one of the ugliest buildings I have ever seen in my life. Really. It might look all right in Berlin or Texas, but sitting in the middle of Golden Gate Park it looks like a 1970s-style rusty airport terminal covered in chicken wire. I thought that the tower was still under construction when I first saw it, because I couldn't imagine that anyone would build such a monstrously out-of-place structure there on purpose. (It manages to look both very ugly and very expensive, which is probably not as hard as I'd imagine). The collection is probably very good, although we never went to see it, since it was such a nice day -- instead, we walked around the botanic gardens, which are lovely.
Technically, going to the park is kind of a commemorative exercise, since that's where everyone had to live when their houses collapsed or burnt down.
