Category: Life

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Lights strung across an empty walkway past empty windows.

During Wondercon I discovered that Anaheim Garden Walk is even emptier than I remembered it. This used to be the third-floor food court. There’s nothing there anymore.

The outdoor mall had the misfortune to open just before the recession hit, too close to Disneyland to attract locals and too far to attract tourists. It never completely filled in, and as old stores leave, new ones don’t seem to be taking their places. I’ve only been there a few times, mainly when I happen to be in the area for something else (like a convention) and it’s been odd and kind of sad to watch it slowly empty out.

It’s not completely abandoned like, say, the Hawthorne Mall. From the street, you’d never know there was a problem. The front is packed with chain restaurants like California Pizza Kitchen, P.F. Chang’s and Bubba Gump Shrimp, all of which seem to be doing well, or at least they were busy during Wondercon. Behind them, the main floor of the mall only has a handful of stores. There are a few clothing stores and a tourist welcome center. Almost every storefront is walled off.

Here’s a shot from 2010. Note that there’s only one open restaurant in the photo. It’s not there anymore.

Anaheim Garden Walk in 2010. The one restaurant open in this photo isn't there anymore.

The top floor is just eerie, especially at night. When I grabbed lunch during Wizard World’s 2010 Anaheim Comic Con, they had several mid-range restaurants and a half-full food court. That’s all gone. There’s one bar and grill, which seemed to be doing well enough during the convention, but you really have to know it’s there. And then there’s a Johnny Rockets waaaaay at the back, which I imagine is only hanging on by being next to the movie theater. Otherwise, no one would go back there.

What makes it especially eerie is that the place is so well-maintained. It’s clean, well-lit, even decoratively lit. The walls are the same temporary walls put up when any other mall has an empty storefront or two, they’re just everywhere. It reminds me a little of the southernmost part of Irvine Spectrum when that section first opened, before many stores moved in…except that was part of a larger mall that was actually occupied.

It looks a LOT like the outdoor parts of the Del Amo mall…but if you stand up on the walkway outside the theater and look down, instead of a bustling courtyard with people milling around the fountain and walking in and out of stores, you’ll see an empty courtyard with flat walls.

Garden Walk Empty Courtyard

On the plus side, they did build a parking structure big enough for a full mall, which means that it’s available for event parking. Of course, even the parking structure is unfinished. I took this photo four years ago, and the top floor still looks like this — chain link, sandbags, exposed rebar and all.

Unfinished Parking

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Sun Halo Behind a Plant FrameI spotted this great halo yesterday while we were out shopping for plants for a vegetable garden. The bright, colorful upper arc just jumped out, and while I searched for something I could use to block the sun for a photo, I also shaded my son’s eyes with my hand so he could look too.

It was still visible 20 minutes later and a few miles away, when I noticed that the upper arc looked like it split to the left, probably a circular 22° halo with a circumscribed halo around it. That would touch the circle at the top, where it’s brightest, then branch off on tangents to the sides — and it does look like that may be going on even in this shot, on both sides, though I didn’t notice it at the time. Halos like this are caused by reflections in ice crystals, but the ice can be in the upper atmosphere. It was plenty warm down here on the ground, around 80°F.

We did make it out to Mysterious Galaxy for California Bookstore Day (though they only had a few of the exclusives left by the time we arrived — apparently there was a massive rush that morning), but ended up missing Free Comic Book Day. It became clear while we were out running around that J wasn’t going to stand for waiting in line in the heat, and I never quite managed to get back out there myself after the rest of our errands were done. It didn’t really seem that urgent, two weeks after WonderCon (I still need to write that up, but you can check out my convention photos now).

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One of the nice things about a lunar eclipse is how accessible it is. You don’t need binoculars or a telescope (though it helps). You don’t need protective gear. You can see it from a city street with lights on. You don’t need to be in exactly the right spot to see it, since the viewing area is measured in multiple continents rather than a narrow track. And since it lasts longer than a solar eclipse, if the clouds roll in moments before totality (which they did), you can wait a few minutes and you might still be able to see something!

The last time a lunar eclipse was visible in our area, I woke up at ridiculous-o’clock in the morning and went out to watch, first across the street, then trying to find a clear view in the west before sunrise and moonset drowned everything out.

This time I just walked out into the front yard.

Lunar eclipse mosaic
Four stages of the eclipse. I’m not sure what the star next to the moon is. As Sam points out, the star is Spica. The phone line bisecting the second view looked interesting, so I went with that rather than an unobstructed shot. In retrospect, I should have tried to frame it to look like the Death Star trench.

My son is almost 3 1/2 now, just old enough to appreciate this sort of thing, so I spent the last few days talking it up. We went out to look at the full moon early in the evening. We read a kids’ book on stargazing that he likes. I showed him pictures of what to expect, and diagrams showing how an eclipse happens. He’s been wanting to play with a tent ever since I mentioned the phrase “camping stuff” a few days ago, so we found the tent in the garage and set it up in the front yard. He had as much fun playing in the tent as he did watching the earth’s shadow move across the moon.

Katie stayed inside most of the time and came out a few times to check on progress.

At one point, an airplane flew across the sky leaving a sharp, bright contrail just next to Mars.

Moon Mars Power Lines and Contrail

We were all out just before totality around midnight…when a cloud started forming right in front of the moon. Mars, not too far away in the sky, was perfectly clear, but the moon got blurrier, and blurrier, until the razor-sharp sliver of a few minutes before was a blob of white. It reminded me of the time we saw about that much of an eclipse in San Simeon on the way up to (coincidentally) WonderCon when it was in San Francisco.

Fortunately the cloud started breaking up again after a few minutes, and all we had to do was hold up our hands to block the streetlight across the street and we had a clear view of the fully eclipsed moon. (We could see it without blocking the light, but it was a lot clearer without the competition.)

I should probably mention that while the pictures here look red, it looked brown to the naked eye. Maybe it was because the streetlight kept our eyes from adapting to the dark. Maybe the camera is more sensitive to red light. Katie remarked that without the sunlight shining on it, it really does look like what it is: a big ball of rock.

Eclipse Lineup

After a few minutes we went back inside. Neither of us wanted to stay up until two to watch the same thing in reverse…or manage an increasingly tired and distracted three-year-old while doing so.

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Since speculating idly on replacing roadside and median grass with more drought tolerant landscaping, I’ve started noticing spots around town that have done just that — some of them on my daily commute! An office building here, a mini mall there, an island, or the sidewalk strip in front of a single house. Not a sea change, but a beginning, or at least an experiment.

I’ve also spotted a few more houses that have taken out their lawns in favor of wood chips or rocks and a less-thirsty garden. Maybe it’s the variety, maybe it’s just that the people who’ve put in the effort to convert their lawns have actually, you know, put some effort into it, but they actually look better than a lot of the lawns out there. (As renters, we don’t really have the option of replacing the lawn, but we’re trying to be smarter about our patio and the strip we manage alongside a walkway.)

Spiky shrubs, lavender flowers, agave, and tufts of scrub grass are all common. Some of the roadside strips look like well organized chaparral. Birds of Paradise are common too, but I’m not sure how well they handle low-water conditions.

On the other hand, none of that helps if you keep watering like it’s grass, or use sprinklers that water the street and sidewalk as much as the soil around the plants. Just on my lunchtime walks I’ve found patches of grass where the dirt is always on the verge of becoming mud, and driveways that always seem to have puddles below them. Someone didn’t get the memo.

And then there are the strips of bare dirt that remind me why ground cover of one sort or another is necessary: erosion has left concrete plugs sticking up out of the ground around fence posts, or brick walls leaning out toward the street.

I suppose you could go the route I saw along one street: fill the island with concrete and paint it green. But that’s not only uglier than dirt (literally), it has the critical disadvantage that when it does rain, the water doesn’t even have a chance to sink in. And we desperately need to convert that rain to groundwater instead of flushing it all out to sea.

Landscaping

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The city of Los Angeles recently finished replacing all of its streetlights with high-efficiency LED lights. They use less power, last longer, and require less maintenance than even the sodium vapor lights — an all-around win. They also cast a slightly bluish light, eliminating the amber look of sodium. But my first thought was that with all that work, they could have taken the opportunity to combat light pollution. The night sky doesn’t seem any darker than it did when we moved up to this area.

Then I took a good look at these LED street lights near work. The new fixtures actually do aim all the light downward, shielding upward leakage. They’re plenty bright from the ground, but from a few stories up, I couldn’t tell which lights were on without looking below them to see whether there was a pool of light on the ground.

So if the streetlights really are leaking less light into the sky, why is it still so hard to see stars to the north? Seriously, I can see Orion clearly most nights, but the Big Dipper is practically impossible to pick out.

  • It was a city project, not a county one. There are plenty of other cities in the area that either haven’t been converting their lights, or have only converted a few.
  • They didn’t actually convert all the streetlights in town, just the standard, boring ones (141,089 of them). Phase 2 is converting decorative street lights.
  • There are lots of other lamps that leak light upward: Parking lots, building lights, private roads. LAX is to the north, and there’s a reason for the phrase “lit up light a landing strip.” There’s also a park nearby with a baseball field; those lights drown out quite a bit when they’re on.
  • The ongoing drought has caused smog levels to climb, making the skies hazier.

Rain lit up by a car headlight.Speaking of the drought, I found myself wondering: How much water would we save if the city did a similar project to replace all the grass along street medians, parking lot boundaries, etc. with drought tolerant native plants? A home lawn at least has a potential use as a gathering place, or a play area. But a little strip of lawn six feet across? What’s the point?

And what do they do with medians out in the high desert, anyway? I remember driving out to Joshua Tree once and noticing in one of the towns along the way that all the houses were built on a standard suburban lot plan with space for a lawn, but that they used it for rock gardens, or native plants, or just left it empty. But I can’t remember what they put along the sides and middles of city streets.

And that gets me to the other article: It was a summary of a study on the vulnerability to climate change in various parts of the region. Most of LA will handle a rise in sea level fine, except for the beaches, Marina del Rey, and San Pedro…but depending on how the climate changes, most of LA would be vulnerable to severe flooding.

In any given decade in California, you can expect at least one drought and at least one winter of heavy rains and flooding. And sometimes those floods can be spectacular. A flash flood in 1825 changed the course of the Los Angeles River (it used to flow into what’s now Marina del Rey). And then there’s the Great Flood of 1862, which covered huge swathes of California and Oregon with water, including all the lowlands of what are now Los Angeles and and Orange County.

So in addition to planning for drought, the region also plans for the occasional flood — unfortunately, by trying to channel all that water out of the way as quickly as possible, because, as the study pointed out, more than 80% of the ground in the area is covered with impermeable surfaces — you know, asphalt, concrete, buildings, etc.

They do have spreading ponds to replenish groundwater from at least part of the storm drain system, but a lot of that water just goes straight into the ocean, and in heavy rains, the ponds get overwhelmed anyway.

It just seems like there ought to be a better way to capture the rain we do get.

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