A Tale of Two Long Beaches

This is a photo/word essay (mostly photos with commentary) about the two Long Beaches that Corrie and I inhabit. I suppose on one hand there could be two Long Beaches, the Real and the Fake, with the Fake being the touristy zone sandwiched between the Port, which is definitely Real, and the city-at-large, but that's not the direction I went with this.

I'm talking about the dueling identities of the Long Beach we see everyday. Instead of "Real" and "Fake", I'm going with Shiny and Gritty.

For Shiny, there are plenty of new condos like this one, one we've already seen on this blog:



And while there are many expensive new condos like that, there are still plenty of these (just right of center), decrepit looking Motels that actually serve as SROs. I don't mean standing Room Only, I mean Single Room Occupancy. This, the City Center Motel, and many others nearby act as apartments for folks who can't afford a monthly lease. These serve as the living quarters for a class of folks that use the various churches as resource centers. They are either the hard-working poor, or, from my own observations, hollowed out husks of humans, destroyed by decades of heroin or cocaine abuse.



Down this same street we begin to see decrepit and crumbling places of business, closed for good...



Abandoned at some point recently, Acres of Books was almost broken into by me (I could see boxes of books that I wanted to sift through, and the door was breachable)...



Just a stones throw away is Ocean Blvd, and the parade of beach front condos...



And at the end of the Shiny and the beginning of the Fake (the touristy area), the anchor buildings before you get to the Pike pier set of themed establishments are the Westin and Comerica Bank, highlighted with this weird bronze glass:



That's all very attention-getting, and it seems like they're trying to draw your attention away from these abandoned storefronts, seen in a row from behind, highlighting their nineteenth-century brick construction. Is their a place in Shiny Long Beach for these Gritty storefronts? Some do hope, anyway...



Here we see from above, if we use our eagle-eye, a set of brick constructed storefronts in the close foreground, where the one on the left is old and abandoned, and the one on the right has new Shiny things for sale; looks like chic clothing. I like this scene of the two right next to each other:



While there's still plenty of old money...



...and new money...



...the Shiny idealists still have work to do to scrub the Gritty-ness from Long Beach.




I hope that some of the character of the city is kept, and it helps me to know that the sanitizing will take plenty of time to fully accomplish.

This is our little West Coast Brooklyn on the Beach, and that's how we like it.