Thursday, March 11, 2004

MISSHAPEN IDENTITY

Why, it’s a South Bay kind of a week. In an odd bit of coincidence, there’s a story in today’s New York Times about those monstrous McMansions springing up in Manhattan Beach.

But it’s the namesake of my hometown the Times is writing about, meaning Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn, not my hometown of Manhattan Beach, Calif., although it would be easy to mistake the two in this context.

“Two years ago, [Alex Puzaitzer] bought a run-down stucco house in Manhattan Beach, tore it down, and built himself a stately beige Mediterranean -- with a veranda, tall metal gates and terra cotta-colored roof tiles -- a house that reminded him of houses he had seen on visits to the Riviera,” the Times article says. “The new houses that Mr. Puzaitzer and other prospering immigrants have put up are at odds with their neighborhood's unassuming character -- bulkier, ritzier and sometimes considerably more flamboyant than surrounding houses.”

It goes on. And it’s be downright eerie, if it weren’t that exactly the same thing is going on throughout the United States.

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