Thomas Locke Hobbs

Hi! Thanks for visiting. I'm an American photographer living in Buenos Aires. These are photos from the blog I kept on my site from 2003 to 2009. I now have redesigned the home page to just show a portfolio of my current work. I also blog at BuenosAiresPhotographer.com where I post my baires snapshots.

Sunnyvale Town Center, a dead mall currently awaiting demolition. In the 1970s Sunnyvale foolishly tore up their old downtown and stuck a mall there. It never took off. Even as a kid in the 1980s I remember this place as a dreary cousin to Vallco and Valley Fair. After several changes of ownership, the mall finally shut down in 2003. Plans are to restore the street grid with a mixed use development.

Sunnyvale Ghost Mall is a flickr set taken of the mall in its dying days. I like this photo of the mall directory. Little swatches of black tape cover the vacant stores. RIP Sunnyvale Town Center is a blog post from 2003 which, thanks to a good Google rank, gets comments even to this day of people reminiscing about the mall and links to the current development plans. This Atlanta company called The Forum is in charge of the redev. The site page says the grand opening will be summer of 2006. Obviously plans are delayed. The parking structure has been demolished but the mall in all its 1970s beige brick & tile roof glory still stands in tact.

Here's a view of the parking lot. I dialed down the saturation on these photos because, well, I felt like it. It was a hot afternoon with blinding sun—horrible light for photos. I wanted these pictures to reflect that. I'll have to come back on a cloudy day and risk the wrath of security goons and actually step on the property.

Sunnyvale hasn't learned its urban design lessons. This is Plaza Del Sol, a few blocks from the mall and just across from the Caltrain station. It was deserted & sunbaked. A Quizno's Sub would be a better use for this space.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Hi. I'm a 33 year-old American currently living in Buenos Aires. Before that I lived in California, Sao Paulo and New York and if you browse through the archives below you can see photos of all those places. Currently I'm posting most of my pictures on BuenosAiresPhotographer.com. I also have an old geocities page with some outdated information but also more photos of Buenos Aires, friends and my 9/11 pictures.