It's almost phosphorescent

This is Banana Tree. They sell furniture at astoundingly low, low, low prices--so astounding that they must announce this fact with a lime-green hue that shrieks at you from six miles up the road. Just in case that isn't enough to draw your attention, they added garish posters in blue, red, and yellow colors in EVERY window. Whee! Fall sale! Seriously, folks, you don't want to miss these orgasmically great deals.

Now, such a building would no doubt look right at home in, say, Cleveland, Ohio, where I used to live. But this is Prescott, Arizona. Downtown, there are many old buildings and saloons, lots of quaint little antique shops, candy stores, and restaurants, even a 100-year-old building that was once a Masonic temple. Some neighborhoods have gorgeous Victorian-style homes that I would give a left leg for (not mine, but maybe someone else's). There are other neighborhoods where each house appears to have been air-lifted from a different place and plunked down on the roadside.

And then there's THIS thing, this neon-green blunder along Montezuma Street. Although not architecturally interesting, it used to be brown, unobtrusive, and dignified. I can think of plenty of ways they could've dressed it up to make it different in a positive way; this was dressed up in a way that shows complete disrespect for the natives of Prescott, who might not enjoy the big-city strip-mall look in their own town. I'm not even a native, and I hate it. I moved out of Cleveland to get away from that look, only to find that it's ubiquitous.

This seems to be more evidence of the homogenization of America. Everywhere you go, you'll find the same big-box stores, the same fast-food chains, the same gas stations, the same look creeping over the landscape like smut through a corn field. You can't stop it, it's inevitable, I see it every day in Prescott. Sedona, too, is experiencing the same corn-smut blight, but at least they have the decency to insist that buildings meet a certain standard so they don't look too horrible against the magnificent backdrop of red-rock formations. This is called paying attention to context. It is a pity the owner of this building doesn't get it.