WEST: 5 Sites

What:
Boeing Assembly Plant

Where:
Everett, WA.

Why:
The world’s largest building. Forty acres under one mostly free-span roof where Boeing assembles its wide-body passenger planes (747, 757, 777).

You walk into this enormous, brightly lighted space filled with equipment and people. Far away in one corner you see what looks like three toy airplanes. You blink and realize they are three 747s nearing completion. The tour, which is not free but is cheap, is informative, with a minimum of yea-Boeing quality to it.

Surprise No. 1:
If you want to buy one of these toys, Boeing requires 50% down, 50% on delivery. When delivered, the planes are ready for use. A new plane, already thoroughly flight-tested, is generally flown by the buyer directly to a commercial hub where it immediately begins taking on passengers.

Surprise No. 2:
You may (or may not) be consoled to observe to what extent these huge complex machines that we fly around in are painstakingly assembled... mostly by hand.

Internet site:
http://www.boeing.com/companyoffices/aboutus/tours/direct.html

What:
Golden Spike National Historic Site.

Where:
Near Brigham City, UT.

Why:
The place where so-called Manifest Destiny became a reality, truly in the middle of a vast nowhere, where the two railroads, one from the east and one from the west, met, forming the first transcontinental route.

Surprise:
To be accurate, the resulting railroad should have been called not the Union Pacific, but the China Pacific. It would not have been completed so quickly without the tens of thousands of indentured Chinese workers imported from Fujian Province who with the crudest tools and the loss of uncounted lives built impossible grades, bridges, and tunnels through the Sierras.

Internet site:
http://www.nps.gov/gosp/

What:
Red mountains.

Where:
Sedona, AZ

Why:
Rocks, from pebble-size to mountain-size, in a million shades of red. Sedona itself is nestled into a series of ravines at the south end of Oak Creek Canyon, in such a way that its yuppification is not as apparent as in places like Taos. See our previous publishled panoramic photo here.

Surprise:
The ubiquity of native ruins and petroglyphs. In few other places in the United States are you reminded so frequently and so naturally of who was here first.

Internet site:
http://www.sedona.net/

What:
People’s Park

Where:
Berkeley, CA.

Why:
If any place encapsulates the spirit of the 1960s, this place does. Hippies, beads, be-ins, dope, LSD, the Free Speech Movement, acid rock, folk rock, on and on, it all started here or not far from here.

Surprise:
The park, though occasionally used for commemorative, nostalgia-inducing events, is very much a living community center.

Internet site:
http://www.dnai.com/~hi_there/people's_park.html

What:
Getty Villa

Where:
Malibu, CA.

Why:
Before the Getty, the world’s richest museum, built its enormous white castle on a mountain overlooking the L.A. basin, it occupied a more modest but outrageously beautiful site called the Getty Villa, a full-scale reproduction of the Villa dei Papiri just outside of Herculaneum. Now most of the less than first-rate collection has moved up the mountain. The best part, the Greek and Roman antiquities, is here. So many of the simulacra that define California are just that: fakes, entertaining but still obvious fakes. The Getty Villa is a lovely, totally convincing fake.

Surprise:
It is built above an enormous, invisible underground parking garage.

Internet site:
http://www.getty.edu/museum/villa.html

END

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