My town is undergoing a major upheaval for reasons I haven't quite fathomed yet - it's demolishing the freeway access (to the I5) and the bridge over the freeway, in order to build about 67 more lanes of freeway access and about twice as much bridge.
A crow is watching from the world famous Twin Streetlights
of McDonalds.
The redevelopment has ripped out the buildings and trees that were center of the town - luckily the major business in the area, a motel and restaurant, fled years ago - and replaced it with acres and acres of asphalt, as far as the eye can see. It's not finished yet - we're currently in the era of major road closures and the consequent traffic issues - but we walked through the area yesterday to see how it was going. I don't have my own pictures as you can't really get a good idea of what's going on from ground level, so here are OCTA's own pictures from this site.
Old interchanges
Proposed (rendering)
The dead area of asphalt that makes up the traffic interchange is just huge on the west (bottom of each picture) side, and it looks like the one on the east (top) is going to be just as large. There's also now a weird clawhammer-shaped thingy to the right of the west interchange. That is a gigantic plain of asphalt surrounding a Del Taco. The fast-food joint now has the highest elevation in the district as well as about 94 lanes of traffic heading straight for it. It's quite amazing up close. (In the top photo, you can see another fast food restaurant used to be at the top of the hill near the road - this was closed down and demolished to make way.)
The building that you can see next to the clawhammer of the Del Taco is a McDonald's. They've been planning to modernize it for years, the city finally granted them permission to do so, and it's just being rebuilt right now. According to the workers, it's McDonald's job to do the flood abatement from being downhill - they said they're putting in a giant storage tank for runoff water. McDonalds also had to make room for a "loop", which is apparently city-speak for if you get lost in the drive-in and have to go back around, you have to be given room to do it on McDonalds' property, to discourage lost and angry people driving on to Del Obispo Street and back into the Micky D's.
Yes, there are a lot of fast food restaurants on Del Obispo. There's also a Carl's Junior and a Marie Callenders. One - Arby's I think - disappeared above Del Taco, there was another one - I think a Jack in the Box - that was off to the right of the pictures above. There was a Burger King as well. The Taco Bell is still there, one of those all-you-can-stuff-down-your-neck places that I liked, Sizzler's, disappeared years ago and is now an auto parts store, and on the other side of the freeway, my fave rave Denny's was wiped out. RIP Denny's :(
We locals used to call it Cholesterol Alley, but now it's more Asphalt Parkway.
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