Modesto: Two Views from the Same Window

Modesto is a city of houses with porches on quiet tree-lined streets. It has an immaculate downtown business district with a handful of fine restaurants, and a great big brand new arts center coming sometime next year. In the evening you can watch the sun set in a spectacular blaze of color behind the distant ridgeline of the Diablo Range.

Modesto is a city of unrelenting ugliness, a smog-choked agribusiness-driven wasteland that smells of livestock when the wind is wrong (which is most of the time), its endless streets lined with muffler shops and salvage yards. It's a dying city, its old downtown boarded up and abandoned except for the bail bond shops (which are thriving), its sparkling new downtown empty in the evenings.

[That's all, folks]