Mornings now, I get off my #52 bus and walk past this beauty on the way to a new state job I started in April. It's the Jesse M. Unruh State Office Building. Note the memorable motto inscribed across the top. Sexist, yes, but written in 1894 by Eastern poet Sam Walter Foss. It's now home of the State Treasurer among others.
The building dates to just before the Great Depression, and it has a twin on the other side of a plaza - which houses the State Library. Inscribed on that building - now being renovated - is an even greater saying: "Into the Highlands of the Mind Let Me Go."
In the early part of the 2000s, I used to walk there during the lunch hour and sit in the lovely reading room on the second floor. It was just a magnificent high-ceiling, elegant and classical space to sit near a window with a view of giant camphor trees, reading The New York Times and feeling like I owned the world.
