Amazon cancelled its plan to locate its new headquarters in New York’s Long Island City last February but continued with its plan to locate a headquarters in Northern Virginia’s Arlington County at Crystal City. It has apparently not announced that it will build another national headquarters in some other location. That it would locate in the Washington, DC area makes sense since Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s owner, converted The Textile Museum in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood a few years ago into The District of Columbia’s largest house and reportedly spent $23 million for it. The Textile Museum has since reopened on the campus of George Washington University on Washington’s 21st St NW. Amazon is in the process of building a new distribution center in Bakersfield, CA and is currently hiring staff for an opening between January, 2020, and the following September. Ruth and I spent a night in Bakersfield on our last trip of 2019. We will return to Paso Robles when we check out the about-to-open new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles that is scheduled for 2020, but we will not be spending another night in Bakersfield. We went to see what is perceived to be its best attraction called CALM and judged it interesting but not sensational. Locals, however, seemed to love this zoo.
While in this inland California city I did photograph 2 places. That’s The Big Shoe on Chester Avenue up top. A repair shop, this 30 feet long and 20 feet high white shoe is a hoot built in 1947. The Fox Theater on H Street downtown has been converted from a movie venue into a live-performance theater. It opened on Christmas Day in 1930 as a movie theater and reopened as a saved and much loved local landmark in 1994. Upcoming early in 2020 are Joey Diaz, Wynonna Judd, and Travis Tritt.
Hank