Our grand architecture

    Olympia is a mill town on the edge of Columbia. For reasons that I can't fathom, it has never been annexed into the city. Many of the mill houses are, as we used to say in England, "quite nice actually." (No, they really are!) But where Olympia really shines as an area of architectural interest, please don't smirk, is the vintage single-wide trailers.
    Just like I don't know why it hasn't been annexed into Columbia, I don't know why so few burned down or otherwise destroyed houses in Olympia are not replaced. Or to be more precise, I don't know if there is any rule or law against building here. It is certainly near a flood plain and it certainly floods easily in heavy rains, but not dangerously so. For all that, the only house I've seen built here in my 5 1/2 years in the neighborhood I blogged about, and mentioned at the time that I guess that means that you can build here if you want to. So it's a matter of supply and demand, apparently.
    Regardless, there are a number of lots where the fallen houses have been replaced with mobile homes, and especially near me, a number where there are several mobile homes on one lot. And they look like they've been there a long, long time. Longer than I've been here. Not longer than I've been in Olympia, but on Earth. Some are pretty stylin', in spite of their long lives. They remind me of a place on the coast, one of the protected areas that had originally been a hunting preserve for rich folks up north and they brought the first mobile home into South Carolina, and it's still there. (They must have been so proud.) Also very stylin', though.
    Thing is, I'm tempted to take pictures, but people still live in most of these places. If you live in mansion, you probably get annoyed with people trying to photograph the place, but there's also a measure of pride. If you live in a 50-year-old mobile home, not so much. So thus far I have resisted the temptation, but who can say? Lately, I've been finding that some of the cool stuff I've photographed in the past few years has gone away, and I was glad I got the pictures. So maybe that rationale will apply again.