Picture This Dead End

Alan Radecki

Sometimes - maybe more often than not - the opportunity to shoot a unique scene happens totally by accident...or by taking a dead-end road when you think you’re actually going somewhere. It was on of those “doh-” moments. We had just gassed up the car in Salinas, and were heading for Capitola, and Alan thought he knew a) where the highway was and b) that the back road we were on would connect up with it. Watch out for men who aren’t using maps!

As we came around one corner, there was a cool-looking, ramshackle old house...perfect for the kind of photography we like to do sometimes, so of course we had to stop. It turns out that the house is a part of the Monterey County Historical Society's Boronda Adobe museum complex. We’d just started shooting away when we were approached by James Perry, the museum’s Curator as well as one of the docents, who offered to give us a personal tour of the place.

Rebecca Amber

Alan Radecki

The yellow victorian turns out to have been the personal home of the well-known central California architect William H. Weeks. Active in the late 1890s and early 1900s in the San Francisco and Monterey Bay area, Weeks is responsible for having designed hundreds of buildings, many in his signature neoclassical, Greek revival style, including many libraries and schools, throughout California, Nevada and Oregon. In 1898, Weeks built this house for himself and his family, and it is noted for some of the unique architectural features, including the witch’s hat roof over the elliptical porch.

The museum grounds also included a number of vintage tractors and trucks, including one tractor that holds the distinction of having been used in the first strawberry planting in the whole Salinas Valley, a crop which today is one of the area’s most lucrative.

Rebecca Amber

Rebecca Amber

Alan Radecki

The irony is that the central feature of the museum is the Boronda Adobe, the first house built in the area, back in 1842. Though we were given a fascinating personal tour of this place by Perry, neither Alan nor I shot anything of it...it had been fully restored, and thus just didn’t have that “character” that makes for an intriguing image.

The docent asked how we’d found the museum, since it’s a bit out-of-the-way. Alan mentioned that we were just passing by on the road and saw it. She looked puzzled. Why would we even be going down that road, she asked. It doesn’t go anywhere. Just dead ends a little past the museum. Yup, be careful of men who don’t use maps. Until next exposure - remember to be ready to shoot when that dead-end street leads something unexpectedly cool.

Alan Radecki