Day 29 - Laundry day

Tallahassee, Florida:

Today was driving-laundry day so I don't have much to say...except that...

I realized at the Keys yesterday that most privately owned historic sites are horrible. For instance, the Ernest Hemingway house...the guides herded us in and spent three minutes per room feigning that it was too hot to stay longer, and then another group came in. The furniture is groped, the banisters are unprotected from oil from the hands of sweaty tourists. The guides told us we could roam around unassisted after the tour, thank you very much. Now give me a tip. Mark my word, that house ain't gonna last fifty years with the neglect it's getting from everyone that seemed to be connected to the house - especially the curious, like me.

On another note...remember the Richard Nixon Presidential Library? It used to be run by a private foundation so if you'd visited three years ago or earlier, you would've noticed historical revisionism. Watergate was made into something to be proud of. Something heroic for Tricky Dick. It was a good thing the National Archives took over worked to tell a more balanced story of President I-am-not-a-crook's shameful administration.

AmbassaDoormat

This is the former site of the iconic Ambassador Hotel, where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated after his 1968 win in the California Democratic primary. The steel bones are coming up for an LAUSD elementary school, middle school, and high school. A few token elements of the hotel will be preserved and integrated into the school buildings, like portions of the Cocoanut Grove nightclub and the coffee shop designed by Paul Williams.

Hard to argue with the need for new schools in an area where kids are bused miles out of the neighborhood, but I still find it painful to see the historic buildings leveled. An adaptive reuse of the hotel could've worked, with historic building tax credits and foundation funding paying the slightly higher tab. Too late...but that's Los Angeles for you.

Can you believe that California ended up helping Nixon get elected in '68? (Seems nuts considering he lost the governor race just six years earlier.) We gave that crank a whopping 40 electoral votes. We've come a long way, California.