Bakersfield

Our next Broadway store project was also out of town, but not very far…it was in Bakersfield, about 2 hours away from the San Fernando Valley. That made it far enough away that we only stayed overnight one or two nights each week. The rest of the time we would drive back and forth, over the mountain.

And this was a very odd store, not at all like the others we had been building. For one, none of the walls would go all the way to the ceiling. They all stopped short of the ceiling by about a foot. This was a design that some engineer had come up with because of the fact that the building was on a major earthquake fault. The building itself sat on Teflon bearings and could shift up to a foot in any direction.

This unique design prompted a lot of head scratching by Alex and I, as the architect hadn’t really thought through all of the design problems. In fact, we did a lot of the designing in our heads as we drove in early in the morning, each day, hurtling down the “Grapevine” and into the dense fog of the valley. (Note that this was long before Interstate 5 was built…Highway 99 was the only way to get to Bakersfield)

And on the nights when we did stay over, we would usually eat at the Wool Growers restaurant, a local Basque eatery. The food was great and there was lots of it. Steak, lamb, beans, pasta and salad. Plus bottles of red wine, (no labels on the bottles) and water glasses substituted for wine glasses.

Another note on Highway 99; since it was the major north/south artery, truck traffic was hazardous at times, especially where the highway descended into the valley through the “Grapevine”. Early in the morning, the smell of burning brake linings and tires was quite common, as most trucks wanted to cross the mountains while it was cool. Many times we encountered trucks that had lost their brakes and were racing down the last few miles of that twisting downhill road, hoping to reach the flats safely. We just tried to stay out of the way…