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NILES
July 7, 2018
During the years when I was doing the Amtrak Capitol
Corridor Line commute down to Silicon Valley, I often
noted an interesting looking town you could see from the
train-- it had a train station, but none of the trains
stop there, not the Amtrak ones at least.
The street was lined with rows of small storefronts in the
style of the older, pre-car towns, and I started researching
what kind of place it was and how you would get there--
This is a town called Niles and it's present-day claim to
fame-- though it took me long enough to realize this-- is
that it was once the location of Charlie Chaplain's
studios.
MODERN_TIMES
In the early days of film, natural
lighting was key, and California,
particularly in-land California, such
as Niles, had an edge with it's Niles has a Silent Movie
perpetually clear skies. It also has museum on it's main drag,
the virtue of being sandwiched which does weekend showings
between hills and the San Francisco at night-- the Stanford
Bay, which provides some variety in Theater in Palo Alto
terraine for movie settings. apparently regards them as
The Competition, though the
folks at the Museum think
that's a little crazy.
There's another reason you might hear
about Niles, in connection to the
history of rail-- it was apparently once
a key connection on the train routes
around the area...
There was an adventure novel set in the
Bay Area that was set back in that era,
where our hero races down a canyon on
horseback to Niles, realizes there's no "Blindfolded" (1907)
train service on Sunday and steals a Earle Ashley Walcott
steam engine to run up to Oakland and
take the Ferry back to San Francisco-- CHINATOWN_BLINDFOLDED
just in time to resume his undercover
role in the financial industry on Monday
morning.
I once pulled off one of my more successful
"mystery dates" with Niles as a DANGERBABY
destination (in a "Mystery Date" I invite
Dangerbaby out somewhere, but keep the
location held back as a surprise):
So there we were traveling down to Niles by
bringing bikes on BART, and riding down to it Niles has quite
from the Union City stop (and just getting a few interesting
off at that stop had her completely little cafe's
bewildered about where we could possibly be coffee shops
going). Then we took a bike route that went and antique
through open fields of yellow flowering stores, including
mustard, by a Thai Temple, and through a a used record
neighborhood of very nicely preserved store and an
Victorian-era houses-- I had us lock up near antique store
where this route emerged on the main drag of specializing in
Niles (parallel to the train tracks-- this is boy-nostalgia:
the area I saw from Amtrak). Then we Mantiques.
immediately stepped into an antique store
that happens to serve High Tea.
Dangerbaby was impressed with that one.
It's not easy finding a place in the Bay
Area she doesn't know already.
The return trip involved biking
through the aquatic park on
the Bay and over to the Fremont
Amtrak train station. If I hung out with a
motorcycle club I
These days that train station probably would've been
area has quite a few really clued in faster.
nice middle-eastern restaurants
and such-- we ducked into one of I know enough guys
them for a quick dinner before in the "British
the train. Death Fleet"...
One of the interesting things about all
this is that I needed to live in the
Bay Area for a quarter of a century
before I even heard about this place.
I escaped from Long Island in the early
80s having become a confirmed urban snob,
and anything outside of the San Francisco
borders was of very little interest to me
for very many years.
Here, on the other side of the Great
Inversion, San Francisco is so overheated
it's in danger of losing it's edge, and
I'm well aware that much of the action
such as it is may be moving to the
outskirts-- you're more likely to find a
cheap, funky ethnic restaurant opening up
in a decaying suburban shopping mall than
in the urban cores, and the modern
equivalent (if any) of the Bay Area's old
twenty-something freaks are pursuing their
dreams in group houses in the depths of
the south bay and beyond the hills of the
east.
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