Open note to Larry Gerbrandt Just to move things into the fresh air, OK? Away from being buried deep in a thread. When I heard a new photographer was opening up in town, I was actually kind of excited. Ive been shooting for about 45 years, ever since my dad first put a camera in my hand, and I love photography. Ive shot with Instamatics, box cameras, 35s, 3D and panoramic cameras, view cameras, and everything in between. Ive mixed my own developers and emulsions, taught myself some of the historic processes. I own about 3,000 works on photography and photographers as well as thousands of vintage prints, stereo cards, post cards and such. I love seeing new work, old work, meeting photographers, seeing what I can learn or what I can teach. I learn even from children I mentor who have picked up a camera for the first time.... Ive spoken to you in person twice. I doubt if you would remember -- you had just opened. Both times I was treated with rudeness that bordered on contempt. I lost any interest in knowing you. So when you refer to me as boorish, inconsiderate, ill-informed, intellectually offensive, and unenlightened among other things, is not a surprise and I do my best to let roll off me. But the distortions, hostility, and invective are inappropriate, not useful to the conversation, and not the tone or approach used by anyone else in this group. Please stop. Moving on.... In one of the first things I posted, I said ...you invite the new folks to become about 20% of the vote in the town -- and there is every chance the newer residents will not be as vested in the history of the town. This happened in my hometown, Concord. You referred to this saying I had immediately turned it into a rant against the perceived evils of newcomers who would destroy downtown. This is an amazing distortion of what I said. You further say that I have a wholly unsupported notion that newcomers to this town may not care about the towns history. Where does that bias come from? As I mentioned several times, this bias comes from having watched this process unfurl in my old home town and a couple other towns that grew out of control in the name of generating city income. You can see this locally, in Los Banos and Gilroy, where uncontrolled growth lead to a takeover of the town by chain stores and outlets, leaving the old section of town across the freeway a virtual ghost town. Or in Hollister right now, where the fields on the edge of town are being turned into roughly 200 new homes. These are observable, practical examples, not emotional fantasies. When I first started coming down here, the outlet section of Gilroy was a gas station and open fields. Are the 145 stores an improvement to the city and its culture? Are we allowed to regret the independent stores and mom-and-pop operations that were bankrupted by these stores? I watched all the farm land and orchards in and around Concord get destroyed for housing and strip malls. I watched them tear down the oldest building in town -- one of two adobes left in the area -- while protesters looked on, because the corporate folks wanted a bank there. I watched the last almond orchard -- which had been a fixture in the city for longer than I has been alive -- torn down to put in a Home Depot Design store -- which was shut down and boarded up about a year later. You say my working numbers based on 150 new houses is inflammatory. You say a realistic figure is say 80-100 homes with an average of three individuals per household, that is 240-300 new residents, hardly the invading horde of 600 you conjure up coming to destroy historic downtown SJB. The San Juan Bautista General Plan 2035 suggests an additional 560 housing units to serve the regional housing need.... If realized the expansion of housing would accommodate a population growth of 1,310 residents. That is close to DOUBLING the current population in 20 years. Ive asked how we could do this and also stop full-blown runaway development. And the answer is we cant. And Ill ask again -- how do you support ultimately doubling the population in light of the drought and the very serious depletion of groundwater? And the answer is we dont know. How do we deal with what a town twice as big as this needs to survive -- more gas stations, a big box grocery store, what would ultimately be a new city center away from the towns current center. This is not a fantasy either -- you can see in towns all over California. Larry, you and I are just a couple of guys wandering around taking pictures, trying our best to maybe approach the images of Dr. Ruben Mendoza, the best photographer every to grace the city and a great champion of its exploration and preservation. All three of us want to hold fast an image of the town. But in two hundred years, a few of our photos may still be around. By that time we will be dead and nobody is going to care who took what picture or why. We will return to the dust and I would hope as well that whatever damage we might have done to the place in our lifetimes will also fade and vanish. It fits in to the first part of the old Boy Scout preservation motto -- take nothing but pictures. But the second part of that is leave nothing but foot prints. 560 new housing units is a pretty big footprint. 560 new housing units means that Historic San Juan Bautista is dead. Fortify the town, rebuild the broken parts and fill in the blanks. Help the existing businesses and find a way to bring in new ones. Bring back the chickens. Do what we can to help the renewed San Juan Inn become a destination hotel. Celebrate whenever possible. Capitalize on the history -- as Luis Valdez says, all San Juan has to sell is its history. Be righteous stewards of the land, not vultures. Respect the bones and ruins we build over. We are all just passing through here, passing through a very small town that has been here a long time. Some day soon, small towns like this will not exist any more. Can we try to keep this one as the last to be ruined by encroachment and expansion? Robt.
Posted on: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 23:14:29 +0000
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