Does being within smelling range count?
I live within smelling range of both a major sewage-treatment plant and a large commercial bakery. Occasionally either or both of these will have ‘odour events’. Sometimes I walk out of my apartment and smell chocolate-chip cookies. Sometimes I smell something else.
Come to think of it, the sewage-treatment plant is directly across the street from, and upwind of, the largest and newest food store in the area.
A few years back, they put up a senior retirement center across the road from a cemetary here.
Hell’s bells, we rent space in our church to a belly dancing studio. On purpose.
But everybody’s there a hippy but me.
Makes sense, what better place to go after a hard day of AA meetings!
Right outside of River Falls, WI there’s a large sign proclaiming “Taxidermy and Cheese”. Stuff yourself while getting something stuffed, I guess.
One instance of incongruous adjacent places that was intentional, and logical once you think about it, is in Canton, NY, where the buffer for the sewage treatment plant is a golf course. I was involved with the funding effort to build this, and so can speak to the logic used by the village board and the engineers. The village residents had septic tanks and a small untreated sewer system dumping raw sewage into the river. The feds and state mandated a new, multi-million-dollar sewage treatment plant, for which the only reasonable location was on the river at the edge of town where rapid expansion was happening. I think it’s relatively obvious that nobody particularly wants to live or run a business next door to a sewage treatment plant; a buffer area was therefore needed. Rather than open space that would add to the project cost and tie up valuable land somewhat purposelessly, they came up with the idea of putting a golf course in the buffer area. Greens fees and the like helped subsidize the project, paying off part of the debt incurred to build the plant and put in new sewers. So it made sense – but the Municipal Sewage Plant and Golf Course always gets a doubletake from anyone who doesn’t know the history.
I was always slightly nervous about the fact that less than 200m from where I lived there was a fireworks wholesaler just across a very narrow street from a large gasoline station.
The thing is, a couple of years ago there was a spectacular gas explosion in the mall next door to the gas station which killed one person, a maintenance worker. It happened at 6am - had it happened when the mall was open, it would have been far worse, and I immediately thought of an even worse case scenario where the explosion ignited the gas station and the fireworks dealer.
Tragic. But what a finale!
The Living Room coffeehouse in the College Area here is right across the street from a mortuary. That pairing became all too congruous when I almost died on too much caffeine while working for another coffeeshop!
My ex worked at an animal hospital that was right next door to a pest-killer guy. The name of his business? License to Kill.
In Dave Barry Does Japan he talks about the utter lack of planning or sense in the locations of businesses in Japanese cities, including Tokyo. They’ll have anything next to anything else, he says, then reels off a list of stores and institutions located next to each other, without any sort of districting, or rhyme or reason. At one point her indicates one pair in particular, including in his list
It seems such a conflict of interest to me that, in my home town, the same family owns the funeral parlour and the ambulance company.
One of our local AA clubs is sandwiched between a bar and a small factory that produces hemp clothing.
To be fair, anyone who smokes the hemp there is only going to get a headache.
You just described my dentist’s office, in Downey, CA.
in College Station, Texas, on the corner of University Drive and Texas Avenue, there used to be a rather shady establishment called “The Adult Video Store” (Creative, no?), next door to it, seperated by a rather tall fence, was a Denny’s.
That said, a much nicer (and still fairly shady) establishment called “Woody’s Gags and Gifts” opened up a few miles away in Bryan, and that, along with the IRS noticing that the owner of the Adult Video Store had never paid taxes, quickly put the College Station place out of business. I think it might be a U-Haul now.
When I lived in Tokyo, 1986-1988, the Tokyo American Club was a members-only kind of place where members (who didn’t have to be American) could get a cheeseburger, go swimming, borrow English-language books, go bowling, etc.
It was right next door–as in adjacent–to the Soviet Embassy.