How Many Contrasts Can You Find in One City Block?

Old and new, improved and unimproved, residences and businesses exist on the same block in Paso Robles

While my husband was having implant surgery yesterday, I walked the block of the oral surgeon’s office to take pictures while waiting to drive him home. Although I took around eighty photos, I choose these because they show so many contrasts in one block. I took all these photos from an area of about 20 square feet, about 40 feet behind that telephone pole.

Spring Street is the main commercial avenue through Paso Robles downtown. I took these photos from a position on 15th Street. The Bank of America is on the corner of 15th and Spring. It’s on the side of the street that is paved to the end of the block at Oak Street.

Right across the street from the photo above is this one below.

Walking a few steps farther we have this.

The car will show you how the next picture fits into the block.

Now let’s look at the other side of the street south of the bank.

We have reached the end of the block. It’s time to cross the street again and turn the corner on Oak Street as we get ready to return to the oral surgeon’s office.

This is the corner where you can look back. Again the the parked vehicles will help you see where this house fits on the block. As you can see, the homes within a block of Spring Street, the main commercial center of Paso Robles, are old. Many homes are Victorian style on Oak and Vine, the next street west. Yet many of the businesses on Spring are modern. That building on the other side of the car being washed in the alley is the storefront for the car wash. It’s at the back of a small commercial development. There is a gas station on the corner opposite the bank. (I did walk to the corner to take this photo.)

It appears this part of town has developed rather haphazardly. According to Zillow, the homes on this block were probably built in 1920. The Bank of America has been in the building on the corner since 1969, so it’s much more modern. In this part of town, some streets or parts of streets have sidewalks, and some don’t, as you see here. I called the city department that deals with street maintenance and the person I talked to had no idea why this is except that maybe different rules were in place when the houses were built.

Paso Robles, unlike some planned communities that were developed much later, has evolved over time. Many homes were built when people began to settle here in the late 1900s. As more people came and more codes were put in place, some of the older homes were probably grandfathered in. Thus one side of the street in an older part of town can look much different than the other. Walk a block from Oak to Spring Street and it can be like walking from a small town into a city.

The disparity in building codes was most apparent after the earthquake of 2003 which killed two people as one of the historic buildings collapsed, and many others were condemned and had to be rebuilt. This earthquke also affected me.