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Road Trips : Fresno
I love Fresno. I've grown to love it even more than Sacramento, my old favorite "weekend sanity break" locale. From the amazing collection of roadside architecture to the cheesy queer bars to the semi-abandoned downtown, it's a great antidote to San Francisco. I first visited in about 1994, I think. I left my apartment in San Francisco to do laundry one afternoon. I ended up doing it in a launrdomat in Fresno's Tower District, 184 miles from my partment, and I spent the weekend there (in a motel, not in the laundromat) Eventually, I started making the trip once or twice a year. I grew to love the place, and I seemed to end up having three-ways there fairly often, but that's a whole different story. I chronicled a 1999 trip on the site as well. In 2001, a Fresno native emailed me about my website. Eventually, I drove down to meet him. I started spending upto two weekends a month in Fresno, until the love of my life moved in with me in San Francisco. And I now had family as an excuse to make a couple of trips every year. Now that we've relocated to North Carolina, I only get back to Fresno once a year or so. I still love the place.
Depending on who you ask, Fresno is either the fifth or sixth largest city in California, with more than 400,000 residents. You'd never know it. Fresno feels like a much smaller city. And a rather odd one, at that... To start with, Fresno is the largest American city not served by a single Interstate or U.S. Highway. Until this decade, California 99 (formerly U.S. 99) was the only freeway in town, which is truly unusual in California. In the past year, there has been a small boom in freeway construction with the upgrading of California Highways 41, 168, and 180. It will be interesting to see how this affects the city, which already sprawls for miles in a relentless grid pattern. A giant stucco and plastic shopping area has already sprouted at the end of the CA-41 freeway. The lack of freeways has resulted in a city which just looks different. Among other things, there's none of the clustered development around interchanges and far fewer cookie-cutter hotels from the 1980s. Fresno was effectively bypassed by I-5 in the late 1960s, and many of its roadside establishments and motels from the 1950s are surprisingly intact, if a bit seedy.
Fresno doesn't really seem depressed, despite its agricultural base (and lack of freeways). There are large vacant areas, but they seem more a result of abundant cheap land than economic decline. It was simply cheaper and easier to build new buildings farther out than renovate and reuse existing ones. The upside of this is that it's easy to find unmodified older commercial architecture (old fast food prototypes, supermarkets, etc.) Along the older major commercial strips (Kings Canyon, East Belmont, the inner portion of North Blackstone), you can see an interesting mix of old chain stores and the new, often Latino, businesses which have replaced them. Located between the long, wide major streets, there are miles and miles of low-rise neighborhoods dating from the 1940s to the 1960s, faeturing solid and well-kept (if not always aesthetically appealing) homes. Downtown Fresno is decidedly low-rise. The tallest building is 10 stories. Fulton Street, the main drag downtown, was converted into a pedestrian mall in the 1960s, and it's currently a little bleak, although the area's Latino population seems to be reclaiming the mall and adding a bit of life. There's also a brand new stadium downtown, and plans are afoot to remove the pedestrian mall. Whether this will result in the "upscaling" envisioned by city planners remains to be seen. Another oddity is the fact that Fresno is one of America's only all-UHF television markets. The FCC established a few of these in the 1950s in order to pressure television manufacturers into adding UHF tuners to sets. The channels are as follows: 18, 21, 24, 26, 30, 47, 51, 59, and 61. Now that everyone has cable, it's no big deal, but 20 or 30 years ago, it was pretty odd. Despite these quirks, the most noticeable aspect of Fresno seems to be its normalcy. It's thoroughly middle and working class. It's ethnically diverse. People seem genuinely happy (despite the 100-plus degree temperatures). The food is great. It may not be terribly exciting to the casual observer, but Fresno is pleasant through and through. More:
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