Fresno
I strolled from our hotel by Highway 99 to a bridge over a railroad yard and took a picture of the Fresno skyline in golden light. Fresno was something of a puzzle to me. I'd heard of Fresno, as it's one of those nowhere places people talk about when they want to emphasize just how nowhere a place can be. I always mentally equated Fresno with Owensboro, the small city of 50,000 where I used to live in Kentucky. And in a lot of ways, Fresno looks a lot like a damaged version of Owensboro, but it turns out that Fresno is huge. The population inside the city limits is 509,000. The Fresno metropolitan area has a population of 1,081,000. This is a city of a million people. This would be the power center of a lot of states, but Fresno has too many other centers of power standing in its way, so it becomes California's dumping ground. Fresno is a place where bad things happen.
Admittedly, the framing of this photo leaves out one additional skyline building the approximate size of the tallest structure seen here in the distance. But even so, does this look like the center of a city of a million people?
Fresno
I strolled from our hotel by Highway 99 to a bridge over a railroad yard and took a picture of the Fresno skyline in golden light. Fresno was something of a puzzle to me. I'd heard of Fresno, as it's one of those nowhere places people talk about when they want to emphasize just how nowhere a place can be. I always mentally equated Fresno with Owensboro, the small city of 50,000 where I used to live in Kentucky. And in a lot of ways, Fresno looks a lot like a damaged version of Owensboro, but it turns out that Fresno is huge. The population inside the city limits is 509,000. The Fresno metropolitan area has a population of 1,081,000. This is a city of a million people. This would be the power center of a lot of states, but Fresno has too many other centers of power standing in its way, so it becomes California's dumping ground. Fresno is a place where bad things happen.
Admittedly, the framing of this photo leaves out one additional skyline building the approximate size of the tallest structure seen here in the distance. But even so, does this look like the center of a city of a million people?