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February 14, 2011

Photo Essay: Bottle Village (Updated for 2016)

Folk art is pretty common in California, but it's more common out in the desert (see: Salvation Mountain).


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But up in Simi Valley, there's a place made nearly entirely of bottles...


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...an entire campus constructed of soda bottles: Chlorox bottles, blue bottles, green bottles, brown bottles, and various ephemera...


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...all held together with mortar.


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I've now had a couple of rare opportunities to visit...


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...though its public tours and open houses are few and far between.


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There's the sense that it may not be long for this world—and you've got to experience it now, before it disappears completely.


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During my first visit in 2011, you could actually go inside of the buildings.


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But they sustained a lot of damage in the 1994 Northridge earthquake...


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...before which everything was intact.


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Now, however, entering most of the buildings—the schoolhouse, the shell house, the pencil house—is verboten.


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There are really only two structures that have close to their original four walls. The rest have been reduced down to facades...


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...or never had any walls at all.


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And you've not only got to step around the broken shards of glass underfoot...


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...but you've also got to wear soft-soled shoes to make sure you don't break any of the bottles further.


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At the time, bottles were cheap building materials...


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...mostly because they could be collected from the local dump for free.


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That means that what Grandma Prisbrey—the creator of Bottle Village—found was generally bottles of beer, wine, and other liquor.


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But once people knew that she collected something specific—say, baby doll heads...


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...they'd start bringing those with them to gift to her.


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After all, from the beginning, Bottle Village was always a tourist attraction.


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And as creepy as it was (and is)...


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...kids love(d) it.


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A lot of people—even in the neighborhood—know Bottle Village is almost never open, so they clamor to get in if they see the gate open.


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But, of course, the more we visit it, the more our footsteps take a little something away from it.

Related post:
Photo Essay: Bottle Tree Ranch
Photo Essay: Low Tide at Dead Horse Bay

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