USA Sprawl Festival continued: El Paso (with some bonus pics of Juarez)

[James Bond Agent 007]

Link to the first thread in this series.
USA Sprawl Festival

Or, click on the following links to see just individual cities in that thread:

Kansas City
Some northern Denver suburbs
Albuquerque
Seattle
Las Vegas
Dallas-Fort Worth
Some western & southern Minneapolis suburbs
Orange County, California
Philadelphia
Tucson
Orlando
Northern Virginia/DC
Cleveland
Houston
Atlanta
Indianapolis
Long Island, New York
Jacksonville
Boston

And the 2nd round ones:

Phoenix-East
Phoenix-South
Phoenix-North
Phoenix-West
Portland
Silicon Valley
Los Angeles
San Bernardino County
San Diego - south
San Diego - north
Buffalo
Broward County, Florida
Dallas-Fort Worth II
Riverside County, California
Denver - south suburbs
Orange County II
Bergen and Passaic Counties, New Jersey
Milwaukee
Columbus

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EL PASO, TEXAS

El Paso often gets a bad rap for being kind of a dump, but from looking at the bird's-eye views on Windows Live Local, it really wasn't that bad at all -- no different from Albuquerque or Tucson, as far as I could tell.











Some people live really close to the mall.






Close-up of some typical houses.




More on the way.




This looked like some kind of low-income housing project.










UTEP




Another mall.








Big.














Close-up of some older houses.








Not really sprawl. Just for the heck of it.




Plenty of room for more warehouses and businesses.






Must be Sunday morning.

[James Bond Agent 007]

CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO

Juarez is just across the river from El Paso. Windows Live Local's birds-eye coverage of El Paso extended a bit over into Juarez so I thought I'd add them to this thread. Interesting to compare the development patterns in the 2 countries.

This may or may not be representative of the housing stock in Juarez, but Windows Live Local only had partial coverage of the city so that's all I could get.





Looks like a maquiladora.


Looks like a Catholic Church.


Close-up view. This looks like they might have been slums a long time ago but have been fixed up.


Same kind of housing as the pic above, but not a close-up.


Not nearly as fixed-up.


Even less fixed up.


Some nicer stuff.


Denser part of the city.


The border crossing.


Some new slums under construction.

[James Bond Agent 007]

And speaking of Texas, in case anyone's interested I've decided I'm gonna do San Antonio next.

[Diddle E Squat]

I wouldn't want to live below that hillside. Looks like a mudslide waiting to happen.




The always classy parking on the faux-lawn seems to be popular here:

[fflint]

Juarez looks better than El Paso.

[James Bond Agent 007]

^
I was waiting for someone to say that.

[fflint]

Well, I've been to both cities and liked Juarez better from the ground, too.

[Xing]

Juarez is more than twice the size of El Paso.

[Marcu]

Is there an "old texas town" -esque part of el paso or has it all morphed into sprawl?

[James Bond Agent 007]

^
There appeared to be some areas around downtown El Paso that looked *almost* like Juarez but that was a relatively small area. Most of it was sprawl of various sorts.

[dharper6]

El Paso is like just about anywhere else....if you just breeze through on the expressway (I-10 in this case), you're not gonna like it. If you explore, you'll be fascinated. El Paso is a Spanish city in every sense of the word, and the architecture in the neighborhoods and office parks reflects it. Strangely, the UT El Paso campus is Tibetan architecture, and is really stunning. I believe one of the photos above is of the campus. At ground level it's very nice.

[soleri]

I was stationed at Ft Bliss a long time ago. El Paso feels like one of the loneliest places on Earth. It's high and dry with some a few mountains to break the monotony.

Skyscrapers won't redeem this dreariness. Indeed, it will only accentuate the nullity of the place. I agree with fflint about Juarez. It's disturbing in its chaos but it does breathe. El Paso is injected with too much single-family formaldehyde.

[FrancoRey]

[QUOTE=Diddle E Squat]I wouldn't want to live below that hillside. Looks like a mudslide waiting to happen.




Well actually, I remember in August there was a cloudbusrt over the city and the ensuing floods were absolutely devastating to the canal system (what are those called again?) that were around the city. I saw pictures on CNN of the mountains around the metropolis that looked like they were sand dunes when you pour water on them...just all these "supercreeks" corraling down the mountainside to the base. A lot of the canals overflowed and took out the buildings lining them...houses, Blockbusters, whatever. The Rio Grande in the valley got so full I guess they closed the border-bridges because they were afraid of a collapse of a damn, or the bridges themselves. Pretty dangerous when all that dry land suddenly gets pummeled with water and it can't absorb it.

[stax]

Originally Posted by soleri

I was stationed at Ft Bliss a long time ago. El Paso feels like one of the loneliest places on Earth. It's high and dry with some a few mountains to break the monotony.

Skyscrapers won't redeem this dreariness. Indeed, it will only accentuate the nullity of the place. I agree with fflint about Juarez. It's disturbing in its chaos but it does breathe. El Paso is injected with too much single-family formaldehyde.

Amen to that, I was stationed there too (11th ADA). We used to always remark about how it felt like a desert island with no water. There are no suburbs to speak of, and even though Juarez is twice the size, it wears thin rather quickly. As soon as you leave city limits on the US side, that's it.....you won't see another city over 100,000 people for about 4-5 hours.

It's not all bad. The women are hot, and the driving is sweet. And the sunsets are beautiful. There is a giant star on the side of the mountain that you can see from damn near anywhere when it lights up at night.

[KevinFromTexas]

Regarding flooding there, oh yes, El Paso only gets 8.8 inches of rain a year on average. Earlier this year El Paso and much of New Mexico had a lot of rain. It must rained for about 2 weeks. El Paso had a lot of flooding. I remember hearing on the news one woman who moved to El Paso from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina had her house swept away in the flood waters. Her house backed up to a wash and all her stuff was washed out into the desert behind her house. They even showed her washing machine out there. So it must have been bad.

El Paso looks fairly good actually. It could be better of course, but it's not all bad. Some of the neighborhoods just outside of downtown, some of which above I believe are shown, look really nice. I've always heard El Pasoans say they recognize their city as being more Southwestern than Texan.

[hauntedheadnc]

For dry-climate sprawl, this is actually not bad at all. They seem to be doing a lot with a little as far as landscaping goes.