Hiro’s U-Stor-It

In the book Snow Crash, Hiro Protagonist (the protagonist, of course) lives in a U-Stor-It, a storage facility. There’s a building in Oakland, right next to Interstate 880, right at a curve positioned in a way that made it very visible from either direction.

This building was a storage facility that fit my mental picture of Hiro’s U-Stor-It: run down, in a gritty area next to a highway. This brick building had missing windows and a generally decrepit air to it, in addition to being directly next to a highway. The building was owned by a different storage company, not U-Stor-It (which really exists, something I didn’t know until years after I first read the book), but I always thought of it as “the U-Stor-It”.

Today, I drove down 880 and the building is cleaned up, its windows repaired, and a new sign: lofts for rent.

Oakland is changing.