Growing up beneath the shadow of Mount Diablo in the 1960s, photographer Mimi Plumb witnessed the explosion of strip malls and tract homes with raw dirt yards lining treeless streets of Walnut Creek, a suburb of Berkeley, California.
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“To me and my teenage friends, they were the blandest, saddest homes in the world,” Plumb recalls of the predominantly white middle-class hamlet set amid the rolling hills and valleys of Northern California. “The town had a mixture of conservative to liberal adults. My parents were progressive, but I often felt like we were outsiders – tolerated but not embraced by the community. I never understood why we lived there.”
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With the Haight Ashbury counterculture scene flourishing less than 20 miles away, Plumb decamped for San Francisco in 1971 at the age of 17. “By then, the idealism of the early to mid-60s was eroding, particularly with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968. There was no longer the belief within the youth movement that we could change the world.”
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