The Annex
Another Time
Nikon D7000 18-135mm @ 62mm ISO 400 3-bkts f/16 Lr3, HEP1; SEP2
Across Sixth Street from the back side of the hotel, sits the Mission Inn Annex in Riverside, California. As reported in the Riverside Press Enterprise:
The crumbling brick structure behind Riverside’s historic Mission Inn has housed staff and servants, a series of shops, and finally storage, but it has been largely unused for years.
Built in two sections in 1913 and 1926, the annex began as living quarters for first female [which may explain the foot bridge over the street connecting the annex to the hotel and keeping female staff isolated from the street] and then male inn workers. The upper floors were used by the private staff — butlers and maids — of inn guests, said Kevin Hallaran, an archivist for the Riverside Metropolitan Museum.
Now the Mission Inn annex is being considered for a makeover. Riverside city officials are interested in turning the annex into conference space to complement the planned expansion of the nearby convention center.
The building facade is beautiful, however it seems the interior is crumbling and is far from being up to code. The city of Riverside seems to be well attuned to its architectural heritage and I hope they can rehabilitate this structure. Worth noting are the rounded arches creating a colonnade along the front of the building’s perimeter, mimicking the arches in the Spanish/Mission Revival architecture of the Mission Inn across the street. You will find this arch motif in other period structures throughout downtown Riverside.
After initial processing of this image I spent some time working with the color version and tweaking it using Nik’s Color Efex Pro, but in the end decided that it might work better without the full color spectrum and converted it with Nik’s Silver Efex Pro. I darkened the automobiles and brought their clarity down, while simultaneously pushing up the detail in the building facade, applied a sepia tone, added vignetting and added the burned edges of the border, all to bring the image back to its period in time.
