3988
The city center of Depoe Bay is a delightful place, really; a few blocks of charming tchotchke shops, souvenir shops with an artistic bent, and placed to get food and candy
There's been changes, of course. The most notable is the aquarium that used t be there. In the middle of that block of storefronts is one with two gabled details, and for many years it was an aquarium. It was faced in rock stucco, all the passages inside were faced in the same, and it had windows to small aquaria that let you look salt water fauna both common and a few uncommon, but the big draw were the resident pinnipeds at the back. They were loud and smelt like you think they would, and they'd sell us little bags of cut-up fish and we'd all throw it to them.
The other thing I remember the most about it is the salt-water taffy we'd always get specifically there. Naturally, we stopped by Ainslee's, which has been killing it the taffy department since before I was alive. We're going through it piece-by-piece now; it's just as nifty as I remember.
Ainslee's have a taffy-pulling and -wrapping machine in the front window but they were done with the day's manufacture by the time we stopped by. But it's still there, which is a plus.
Just a bit of historical fact to drop here: Depoe Bay was named for an indigenous resident who our history remembers as one Charley Depoe. He was a Siletz indian (part of the Tututni tribe from southwest Oregon) who was given land allotments under the Dawes Act of 1887, and some of that allotment got sold and became the land that became Depoe Bay. Cutler City, the neighborhood at the south end of Lincoln City, also sprang from one of Depoe's allotments.
No comments:
Post a Comment