dawn at Lake Ella

2/2/2023 – Thursday

For some reason I woke up a bit after 1:00 am and then could not fall back asleep for a couple of hours! Ugh! Which means that today I slept in and we did not get out for a walk until nearly 8:00 am. Keely was very confused and dragged me on our normal Saturday route, I guess because that is the direction she is programed to go in when the sun is up!

As we passed the old O’Hara’s Electric location, which is now called Midtown Exchange, I realized a lot of changes have happened. First off, the big fence on the north side of the parking lot is just gone. Looks like since the posts were embedded into the asphalt they just cut the posts off at the ground level (you can see how this fence looked on this google maps image). Further, the large shipping containers being used as storage are also gone, which critically opened up the whole lot to expose this mural in its entirety on the south side of the parking lot:

photo of colorful mural painted on a black fence.

Note that this is a panoramic shot, and the fence is actually straight and not curved (you can play with the panorama here). The gravel in front of the sidewalk is where the shipping containers were placed.

This location has been curious to me for years now. A decade ago it was the home of a blueprints printing shop, then it was empty for years, then O’Hara’s moved in and put up the fences and the murals and the very-out-of-place shipping containers, and now it’s…something? Nothing? There is a an architectural rendering of a proposed building from 2018 for a “Midtown Exchange” but that’s a far cry from what is there now. I wonder if the owner of the property just can’t make up their mind as to what they want to do with it?