The Only Constant Is Change

We trekked back into Packard Sunday morning bright and early. It was good to be back and I got to try out my new and very expensive Ultra-Wide 16-35mm lens.

 

The Pack is on accelerated time; everything that happens there seems to happen very fast. So much has changed since we last tread upon those old floors.

 

I guess the biggest two events since we last visited were the large fire on the North side last June and the filming of big scenes for Transformers 3 in September. Both have left their marks on Packard, in different ways.

 

The fire devastated an area that had already burned previously. It melted the roof of the building going North from the office building in a huge expanse, and I mean HUGE. The roof beams got so hot they deformed and the top of the building fell in, leaving a very unstable wave of tar and steel behind. The structure was different all over that area, and we walked extra carefully there. In the HDR photo of the "Penthouse" here this area would be to the left, just off-camera.

 

The film crew for Trans 3 left an unholy mess behind after their 3-week shoot: hundreds of crates and boxes, drywall sheets they laid down just inside the windows to give them something to stand on for filming, lots of caution tape (really strange to see that here), markings for staging on the walls, and they boarded up many of the windows and doors with plywood. Oh, and a two-liter bottle of orange pop. Someone has spray painted "Keep Hollywood Out" on one wall in yellow.

 

Other notable changes:

 

Huge sections of the steel outbuildings continue to be carried off by scrappers. The photo of the water tower shows just how far this has gone in one area: they took as much structure as was possible without taking out the water tower. I imagine that's next. I took a picture up from below it, which probably wasn't too smart. This area contained a large collapsed section last year and an abandoned car. The collapsed section is gone, and the car is only a car in the academic sense, it's closer to a pulverized metal lump.

 

In the South section we entered the "Camping" room, the one with two boats and a large motor home...well, the motor home was gone, all that was left were a half-dozen tacky vinyl seats and some rust. It didn't take us long to find it though, as we walked down the main hallway. Someone had pushed it (dragged it?) out of the room and a few hundred yards down the hall, and lit it on fire. All that's left of it now is a charred frame and some structural rods. We didn't recognize it until we walked right up to it. And as I made some kind of remark about this being it's "last resting place" I knew I was wrong. There's more story to come for this thing as Brian reminded me. Maybe next time we come it will be up on the roof painted pink...

 

Oh yes, there was more. We saw a "light crew scrapper" picking through the huge piles of debris from the movie shoot, and another photographer who I never saw but Brian did and we all heard him: he made so much noise he was either playing darts with rebar or working a full-bore blacksmithy.

 

We also had one more interesting find, which I'll detail in another post.