If You Lived Here, You’d Be Crapi Now

This is the Intertunnel, so let me first assure you that the picture has not been altered. My nephew took the picture on his way home in Venice, CA.

When I was young, my Father would take us to visit our relatives in Boston, and we’d drive by an apartment building that was essentially built in the median strip of Storrow Drive. It featured an enormous billboard:

Dad’s a wag, so he’d have a different version of it ready every time we drove by it.

If you lived here, you’d be run over by a truck now.
If you lived here, you would have taken your own life by now.
If you lived here, there’s no way you could read this sign because you’d be inside.
If you lived here, you’d be bankrupt now.
If you lived here, you’d be watching you drive by now.

Anyway, naming your buildings, and the neighborhoods they’re in, is an American art form. There’s a list of only a dozen or so words allowed for naming tract-house neighborhoods, which can be used in any combination of pairs to differentiate your cul-de-sac slice of heaven from the benighted troglodytes that live two streets away.

Woods
Stone
Ledge
Brook
Harbor
Park
Hills
Lake
Valley
View
Heights
River
Acres
Crest
Gate

You can get an extra four grand at closing if you’re a developer if you add “Old” at the front of your two word head fake, and “Village” at the end. Little known fact.

The same urge for gibberish that brings us terms like: “Person of Color” has crept into the proceedings now, so developers that name the streets after their children now tart up the process by calling the whole shebang:

The first blank is increasingly filled in with “Preserve,” instead of “Homes,” to pay homage to the dual gods of agoraphobia and environmentalism while you’re bulldozing a wetland full of snail darters and bald eagles to fill it up with snouthouses. You can stick “Estates,” or “Residences,” or “Homestead” in there; doesn’t matter, really. “Village” seems to crop up here again. I see many more people put “Plantation” in there, lately, which conjures up all sorts of imagery, doesn’t it? I guess it’s OK, as everyone that tends to the crops outside (the lawn) is Central American now. I can’t picture the aforementioned person of color being too enthusiastic about moving back to something called The Plantation. Maybe it’s just me.

For the second blank, you just ram any combination of any two words from our list in any order and you’re golden.

The Preserve at Woodstone
The Village at Stonewoods.
The Preserve at Woodstone Village
The Village at Stonecrest
The Preserve at Woodcrest Plantation

When you get old and need a diaper again, you can always call it: “The place at the thingie, there,” and everyone will know what you’re talking about anyway.

So the Crapi isn’t so strange, really, is it? It could be just some horrible mistake at the Capri sign shop, but who knows? Venice, CA is named for Venice, Italy, of course. I lived right down the street in Culver City for a while, a long time ago, and I noticed the similarity between Venice, Italy’s storied canals and the drainage ditches filled with flies, dead dogs, and puddles that adorn the American version. And watching rollerskaters roll by wearing thong bikinis over their pneumatic boobs is just like feeding pigeons in front of St. Marks Cathedral. So maybe the fellow that built the Crapi knew exactly what he wanted to name his building after: The Italian word for more than one female goat.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.