While wandering the streets of fog-covered Oakland on Wednesday morning in the general neighborhood of Kaiser Hospital, I came across these murals made 25 years ago, surviving (barely) on the side-wall of a freeway underpass.
Unlike San Francisco, Oakland allowed itself to be slashed up with freeways at the height of Urban Renewal. Sinister tunnels like this one are the enduring consequence for the pedestrian. Undoubtedly the freeway-builders of the 1950s and 60s believed pedestrian-ism altogether on the way out or already extinct as an attribute of the human species. Come the 1980s and a new generation of civic worthies began belatedly attempting to perk up these noisy dirty Stygian spaces. As if a few zebras painted in "Danacolor classic oils" could represent Nature somehow blessing its own destruction.