The town directly south of my own home of Palo Alto is called Mountain View. It is a similarly-sized town, and although these days it seems like governments are capable of nothing but losing money, Mountain View has proved itself quite different:
That was no fluke, by the way. The year prior, the town threw off a profit of over $100 million. Not a bad business! But I think those days are over.
The “main drag” in Mountain View is called Castro Street (not to be confused with the gay mecca of the same-named street in San Francisco). Castro is packed from end to end with all kinds of restaurants and retail stores. Until Covid, it was reliably one of the most vivacious places to go in the Bay Area.
I took a stroll down the street on Sunday morning, which I hadn’t done in many months, and my jaw dropped. Allow me to share some pictures from just one side of the street in the span of just one block.
Some V-shaped recovery, right? And keep in mind, the mild, pleasant, zero-rain weather is about to end for several months. It’s hard for me to imagine what places like this are going to look like a year from now.
