About Walnut Creek's Downtown

Hubcaps is located in downtown Walnut Creek, CA. On the morning of November 1, 2008, it was involved in an accident. A vehicle that was in a collision with another vehicle jumped the curb and crashed in to the restaurant. The strange thing is that I was planning to buy breakfast here the same morning but it wasn't open yet when I was in the area.

Here's the story as it was reported by the San Francisco Chronicle:

Car crashes into auto-themed cafe

John King, Chronicle Staff Writer

Saturday, November 1, 2008

15:19 PDT WALNUT CREEK -- A Walnut Creek diner with an automobile theme received a taste of the real thing today when a Honda sedan lurched into the diner's glass entryway.

The accident occurred at around 9:50 a.m. when a Mercedes and a Honda collided outside Hubcaps Diner at the corner of Bonanza and Locust streets in downtown Walnut Creek. The collision sent the Honda onto the sidewalk and through the glass doors of the popular breakfast spot, which is decorated with framed photographs of classic automobiles.

The intersection was cordoned off for the next half-hour while broken glass was cleared and police investigated the accident. There were no injuries. Hubcaps closed for the day as soon as the final breakfast was finished. According to an employee reached by phone Saturday afternoon, it should reopen Sunday morning.

E-mail John King at jking@sfchronicle.com.

Link to the article: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/01/BAOH13SHST.DTL

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My bride and I were discussing the changes in our town, in our neighborhood, and in the way kids grow up these days over our coffee this morning as she bemoaned the fact that Bonanza Books is going out of business. Bonanza-- long the independent new and used book store in downtown Walnut Creek-- is a symbol of our small-town past when people actually went downtown and browsed for goods [like books] instead of browsing for them on their laptops. Unlike some other shopping, the used bookstore phenomenon specialized in that feeling of elation at actually finding something worthy of buying. Browsing for a $4 treasure became an art form for the married and the single crowd alike [though few marrieds gathered for a cup of coffee after bumping into each other in the Saturday evening stacks and deciding time together was better than time alone].

I'm convinced that some master urban planner [in a grey fabric cube somewhere] is secretly plotting to have ALL symbols of our formerly small-town, agrarian, and somewhat "Leave It To Beaver" neighborhood past erased in favor of the homogeneous, franchised, cookie-cutter blandness of Gaps and Starbucks and Chipotles and Barnes and Nobles and, well... you get the idea. But the beauty of a Bonanza Books was really more a testament to how life used to be more interactive in general. We had the Fox Theater when we were kids. One screen and the movie ran until people stopped showing up. Our kids had the 4-screen megaplex that grew into the 16-screen micro box 'theaters' that pass for a movie house today. Soon all our kids' kids likely will have is their 60-inch flat-screen and a NetFlix download. The collective gasps during a horror movie, the laughs of a comedy, and tears of a tear-jerker will simply vanish as people 'see' movies in the privacy of their homes [or cars, or cubes at work] and cease the ritual adjournment for a milkshake to discuss the merits [or their lack] of the last two hours' shared experience in the dark. Strange and a little bit sad to think that "the balcony was closed" basically forever by the time my kids were in high school....

When this summer brings the annual renewal of the local newspaper I'll sit on the bill until the last moment thinking I'll be able to convert my bride into an online reader but I'll end up paying the renewal for another year. There's something calming and magic about her daily ritual of reading day-old [or longer] news on newsprint while sipping a cup of tea on the couch with the dogs cradled in beside her snoring every afternoon until she succumbs and lays the paper down and joins them in a pre-dinner hour nap.

Our neighborhood is two minutes from the core of the downtown. When we moved in, they still had parades running from time to time down Main Street. That doesn't happen anymore. We had mostly independent shops and restaurants and locally-owned services doing business. Most of these are gone-- replaced by corporate America in a well-dressed, pseudo-village facade. Independents simply cannot afford the rents that can be commanded on a well-walked downtown street. Just as young families from a variety of backgrounds cannot afford houses in our neighborhoods. When we moved here it was because there was a diverse-looking ethnic population at the local high school and we thought our kids would benefit from many cultures blending together. That population has become increasingly upscale, increasingly less-diverse ethnically, and increasingly less interesting. Our neighbors next door are a younger couple who have been in their house for almost three years and I can count the number of times I have SEEN them on two hands. They must work 26 hours a day-- they are only occasionally seen walking from front door to car door and they simply don't choose to engage the neighborhood in any neighborly way.

And, apparently, they don't browse for used books downtown either.

Chris Hendricks