Wandering In LA

This Is Probably The Oldest Intact Public School Building In L.A.

2021-10-10T18:01:00.000-07:00

Historic preservationists usually reach the point where, besides taking an interest in historic architecture generally, they become curious about buildings for particular types of institutions and organizations. An example of this is the public school system. How many high schools did L.A. have in 1931? How many of their original buildings are left, and what's the oldest one still standing? How many elementary schools? It stands to reason there must have been many more of the latter, so the oldest one should be significantly older than the oldest high school. As institutions, there are a few elementary schools that date far back into the 19th century, most notably San Pedro Street ES which has occupied the same property for more than 150 years. It hardly needs to be said, though, that none of its original buildings are still standing.

Los Angeles High School: Three Locations and Three Buildings Over 43 Years: 1873, 1890, and 1916

What needs to happen for an old schoolhouse, or any old building, to survive in this city? Not surprisingly, it's really more about what needs not to happen. As an example, there were several developments in the history of Los Angeles High School each of which required a new building, and often a new site as well.

The school's student population must stay constant, because if it grows, a new and larger building will be needed. LAHS needed three different sites and three successively larger buildings in the first forty-three years of its existence.
The neighborhood around the school must stay about the same in terms of residential/commercial mix, types and sizes of businesses, and so on. When neighborhoods change rapidly, the demolition and replacement of buildings becomes endemic. LAHS had to move not only because of its expanding student population, but also because its original neighborhood of widely spaced homes and small commercial buildings had become a densely developed commercial zone, although in the early 20th century there remained a lot of residential property.
The building doesn't stand in the way of any major infrastructure projects, like freeways or rail terminals.
The building should not come under new laws or building codes that requires its demolition and reconstruction. In 1914, the voters of Los Angeles approved a measure requiring that all wood-frame schoolhouses had to be replaced by masonry buildings, so obviously a great many existing school buildings were automatically slated for demolition and replacement that year.
Earthquakes need to not happen (Good luck with this one). After the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, LAHS' 1916 building had to be demolished, only to be replaced by an architectural atrocity of which I won't even include a picture here. Look at it on Google Earth if you must; the address is 4650 West Olympic. Numerous other school buildings around the city likewise had to be replaced after the 1933 Long Beach quake.

LAHS' peripatetic history is quite unusual, as most schools have stayed in place. But even for schools that were never relocated, the replacement of buildings has become almost universal in the case of schools founded before 1933. The 1914 ordinance requiring the replacement of wood frame buildings probably was a contributing factor, because when the 1914 law was enacted masonry's vulnerability to earthquakes was not a consideration as the risk was as yet unrecognized. (LAUSD 2002, p8)

In other words, many of the pre-1914 wooden schoolhouses might have survived the 1933 quake better than their 1915 replacements did. Less commonly, pre-1933 buildings were partially retained but extensively changed, often by the removal of upper stories.

By contrast, there was at least one school building which, although it has long since ceased to be a school, has hardly changed from the day it was built in 1915...

New Macy Street School, from an L.A. Times article published 1915-05-02.

...until today.

New Macy Street School Building, December 2015. This is from Cesar Chavez Avenue, formerly Macy Street, just east of the Union Station tracks.

The school name "New Macy Street" is an inherently confusing one, since "old" Macy Street School was just next door, also on Avila Street. Moreover, for a brief period in the 19th Century, Clara Street was called New Macy Street, and most elementary schools were named for the streets on which they stood. The original school names were usually kept even when the streets were renamed.

New Macy Street School building today, aerial view (Google Earth)

Garibaldi Street was renamed to Clara at some point between 1910 and 1914, as shown by the 1914 Baist Real Estate Survey.

1914 Baist Real Estate Survey Map

Note that this small block also contained a residential tract, which continued to exist even after Union Station was built. This detail of a Sanborn fire insurance map, made shortly after the station opened, shows that the west side of Clara is still lined with houses.

Sanborn fire insurance map, late 1930s

Until the late 1930s the old wood-frame building of the original Macy Street School still existed, as shown in this video taken of the neighborhood when the construction of Union Station was just getting under way.

Here's a closer view from about the same time, where it seems clear that the building was about to be demolished. However, it wasn't in the way of the Union Station project.

These kids are all past 90 now!

When the 1938 film of the neighborhood was made, a camera was mounted on some kind of flatbed conveyance which was driven along Macy Street, now Cesar E. Chavez Avenue. It's possible that it ran on the streetcar tracks, although the tracks are not always visible in the film. The next still shows New Macy Street School to the left; the vantage point is where Chavez Avenue dives under the Union Station tracks.

New Macy Street to the left.

At about the point where we would be coming out the other end of the tunnel, the street looked like this. The New Macy Street building is out of frame to the left. Before the tunnel was in place, Clara, Avila, and Macy/Chavez all intersected at grade. Seen just left of center is a diner offering LUNCH.

The "LUNCH" Restaurant. Somehow this seems very typical of the time.

The camera was able to pan and zoom, so as the vehicle moved further on, it captured this view down Clara Street. The south facade of the New Macy building is visible to the left. The house in the distance is on Vignes Street.

Looking down Clara Street. The LUNCH restaurant is to the right.

And finally, here's the view down Clara Street today. The New Macy Street building, which today houses a bail bond agency, is at left. The house on Vignes Street, as well as the LUNCH restaurant, is long gone.

Clara Street today. Where can we have LUNCH now?

A Couple Of Before-And-Afters That Won't Make You Sad

2016-09-18T21:00:00.002-07:00

From time to time, in this blog and elsewhere, I've criticized the obliteration of the past to "make way for progress", as innumerable articles in the Los Angeles Times used to put it in the postwar decades. The word progress, in this context almost always meant that the old buildings would be replaced by a freeway or parking lot. If not that, then it generally was going to be some civic building that would be surrounded by extensive greenspace and surface parking, thereby imposing a suburban aesthetic on the very center of town.

The Plaza neighborhood has been especially hard hit, as most of the buildings that used to share the west side of Main street with the Plaza Church were eventually razed to make way for parking, as was the entire block to the north (see The Life And Times Of Block 50 and Block 50 In The 20th Century, also in this blog). The opposite side of the Plaza, on Los Angeles Street, fared no better as the last remnant of Old Chinatown was cleared away in the early 1950s to make way for more of the same progress described previously.

The Pico House and the Brunswig Drug Building

Pico House (1869-70) and Brunswig Drugs building (1888), as they appeared in the early 1990s.

I shot the photo above in the early 1990s, when both the Pico House and the Brunswig Building stood empty and, in the case of latter, sadly derelict. Close inspection of the Brunswig reveals boards in some windows, and missing glass in others; since it was last used by the county courts in the 1970s, it had never really been used for anything.

Sometimes, though, miracles do happen. When the Brunswig Building and the adjacent Plaza House were remodeled to become the L.A. Plaza De Culturas Y Artes, the exterior of both buildings was improved beyond all knowledge, as this more recent photo from 2012 shows. The Pico House, too, has been getting some use as an exhibit space, and has been extensively renovated.

Pico House and Brunswig Drug Building, 2012

From a slightly different angle we get a better view of the buildings across Main.


Brunswig Building and Plaza House (1907), now house the L.A. Plaza de Cultura y Artes (Google SV, captured 2016-09-17)

From here, if you turn left around the corner of the Pico House and head a few yards down Main, you can see further evidence of improvement at the Main Street entrance to the former hotel. First, though, consider another photo from the early 1990s.

Dimly visible near the top is one of the niches which were populated by marble statues, in more prosperous times. Curiously, the markings or stains in the niche almost give the impression that a statue still stands there, which wasn't the case. I don't remember exactly why I only got one side of the entry, but the most likely reason is that all the other windows that looked into this space were papered over, as the ones opposite.

Pico House main entry and stairway as it appeared in the early 1990s.

Here is the same entry today.

Pico House main entrance, 2012

Sanchez Street

Sanchez Street, or what's left of it, runs from the southern edge of the Plaza to Arcadia Street, between the Pico House, the Merced Theater, and the Masonic Hall on the right, and the Hellman-Quon Building and the Garnier Building on the left. For most of the latter half of the twentieth century, this narrow way was used for service access to the buildings, as needed for maintenance and occasional spurts of remodeling over the years. Otherwise it was usually closed to the public.

We'll start again with the early 1990s image.

Sanhez Street, early 1990s

The most notable feature here is the pavement of slag blocks; this was very rare in the city twenty-five years ago, and today is even more so. The angled parking spaces must have been left over from the time when Sanchez Street, and the Plaza itself, were still open to motor traffic.

A better view of some of the buildings on the east side of the street:

By 2012 the slag pavement was gone. The loss of such a basic infrastructural relic of an earlier time might dishearten some people, but the improved overall appearance can't be denied. Now that's progress!

Sanchez Street looking SE, 2012. The Garnier Building is visible ot the right, beyond the tree branches.

The Chinese American Museum occupies the Garnier Block today, and in fact this block was once adjacent to Old Chinatown.

To provide further geographical context, here is the SE corner of the Plaza and Sanchez Street.

Southern edge of Plaza, looking SE.

A corner of the Pico House is just visible near the right margin, and the Hellman-Quon building (1900) is across Sanchez, in the middle of the frame. Beyond it is the the old firehouse (1884), with its fire helmet-shpaed weather vane.

Just How Old Is The Capitol Milling Company facility on North Spring? Well, It's Complicated...

2016-09-04T22:59:00.003-07:00

(Nore: For citations not provided in the body the text, please see the annotated bibliography in the Acknowledgments page.)

The tracks always ran by the old mill; or rather they did after those Southern Pacific Railroad people finally showed up and put the tracks there.

If you are reading this blog, there's a good chance that you know the hulking white complex at 1231 North Spring Street, occupied by Capitol Milling Company until 1998. To this day it it lives on as a filming location, casting its afternoon shadows over the Chinatown metro station. You probably know the founding date of 1883, impressively ancient by L.A. standards, proudly emblazoned on several of the exterior walls.

Capitol Milling Company, late 1880s. The tracks have always run right by here.

However, it's plainly evident that large-scale flour milling had already been underway by the time the above photo was taken, and 1883 was merely the date when Herman Levi and Jacob Loew bought the mill and renamed the company. In fact, there has been a grist mill at the Capitol Milling site since long before 1883, and many people believe that significant parts of the existing building date as far back as the 1850s, or even the 1830s. Investigating the truth of such notions is largely what this blog post is about

Before we dive in, here are a couple of recent photos to show how some things never change, or at least not by much.

Capitol Mills in 2013, seen from midway landing of stairway to Metro station platform

From the station platform. Note the different, darker colored roof in the middle distance. The exterior wall there is different as well. This is discussed at some length further on.

In The Beginning

The earliest milling operations on the Capitol site are said to go back as far as the early 1830s, with some going so far as to claim that part of the existing structure dates back to that time. In those days, while the region was still under Mexican rule, some Americans immigrated from the East Coast and eventually became naturalized Mexican citizens. Two of these were Joseph John Chapman and Abel Stearns, both of Massachusetts, and it's one of them who built the first mill here. Given the conflicting accounts of the period, it's unclear which of the two it was. For the most part, it's Abel Stearns who gets the credit, since he undoubtedly did operate the mill some years later, the mill being only one of his numerous business and political interests in and around the city.

The question of whether Stearns or Chapman built the first mill at the Capitol Milling site is a rather complicated and tedious one; those interested are encouraged to read the companion page to this post, Abel Stearns, Joseph Chapman and the Origins of the Capitol Milling Company. Included are biographical sketches of Stearns and Chapman, along with a brief description of the pioneering and surprisingly complex automation technology in American mills of the early 19th century, with links to references on that subject.

1831 - 1874: Founding And Early Period

Most sources agree that the first mill on the Capitol site was built sometime in the 1830s or '40s, whether by Abel Stearns or Joseph Chapman. William Deverell writes that Abel Stearns built the original mill of adobe in the 1840s, adding the interesting fact that there remains an adobe wall within the existing building even today. (Deverell, 2004) This seems to be the view of minority, because most accounts say the mill was constructed from fired bricks which were brought in by sea from Philadelphia. As there was no brick firing kiln in town until well into the 1850s, the "Philadelphia story" seems highly plausible.

Although we don't know what the mill looked like in the early years, some useful clues do exist, beginning with a survey map drawn in the year 1856. This map shows that a mill existed on the Capitol site at that time, comprising two widely separate buildings. Both of these building were much smaller than the building that exists today. Another survey from 1872 is evidently a mere retracing or copy of the 1856 map, since it is virtually identical. The later map shows virtually no new or changed buildings over that fourteen year period. Note the building marked "Mill" at the western edge of the property, which was either very close to the Zanja Madre, if not defined by it. We don't know if the mill had a stereotypical side-mounted water wheel at this point, but there was definitely some kind of water power in use here.
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1856 survey map (detail); Capitol Milling site indicated by circle. Downloaded from Huntington Library; link to entire map is provided on the Acknowledgments page.

To modern day Angelenos, the furnishing of water for the population from the Zanja Madre, much less power to a mill, may seem preposterous, but in the earliest days of the Pueblo, a "toma" or dam was built across the river, forming a small reservoir. This was approximately even with Elysian Park as one goes upriver, and even today this is one of the more reliably watery sections of the river. A waterwheel raised water up to the start of the Zanja Madre. Given the small population through most of the 19th century, this system worked well enough--except when it didn't.

Even as late as the 1850s, by which time some improvements must presumably have been made, Harris Newmark still recalled in 1916 that the flour produced here in the 1850s was of poor quality, but no worse than the product of the other local mills. (Newmark 1916, p87). Faint praise indeed!

From the early 1850s though the late 1870s, the mill was usually known as Eagle Mills. An advertisement appearing in the Los Angeles Star on March 10, 1857 is puzzling, since it gives the address as the "junction of Main and Spring". The name Eagle Mills and the mention of Francis Mellus unambiguously point to the present-day Capitol site, but there has never been a junction of North Spring and North Main to the best of my knowledge. In fact, for most of the 19th century American period what we now know as North Spring Street was called Upper Main, often shortened to simply Main. In other words, Main and North Spring did more than intersect--they were the same street in those days. South Main and South Spring, on the other hand, do meet, where the latter street terminates.

1857 newspaper advertisement. Where was Main and Spring, again? Los Angeles Herald, downloaded from the California Digital Newspaper Collection

F. Weber Leases the Mill, and Then There's A Fire. A Fire? FIRE!!!

Also: Your Humble Author is Flabbergasted, But Only Briefly.

In 1874, one F. Weber took out an advertisement in the Los Angeles Herald announcing his lease of the Eagle Mills, "formerly known as the Stearns mill", newly modernized.

LAH 1874-07-12. F. Weber is here!

The address given in this advertisement is an unusual but nonetheless acceptable alternative for pinpointing the mill site since Alameda ends at North Spring just south of the Capitol site. Only a few months later, on September 15 of the same year, the the Los Angeles Herald reported that the facility--buildings, fixtures, and stock--were a total loss, due to a fire of suspicious origin. We can just imagine what a tinderbox a mill would have been, with empty sacking, filled sacks of highly combustible product, and grain stored in carload lots.

Total loss: L.A.H. article, 1874-09-15 reports catastrophic fire at the Capitol site. (Excerpts)

The article notes that both the mill ditch and the zanja were dry, hampering the efforts to douse the fire. This was one of the times when the city's zanja-based water delivery system was not working.

Whatever suspicions there were must have been resolved shortly thereafter, because on September 25 the Herald reported that the insurance claim had been paid. As much as we would like to believe that significant sections of the existing building are a century-and-a-half old, or older yet, this news item evidently refutes such notions completely. There may be bits and pieces here and there, like that adobe wall, that go back further than the 1880s. But the existing structure, almost entirely, is from the 1880s or later. The Los Angeles County Assessor's property database bears this out. For those who want to hold on to a sliver of hope, bear in mind that the Assessor's database build dates are not 100% accurate; also newspaper reporters have been known to get things wrong too.

Even though this strongly indicates us that the entire building was new in the 1880s, it could still be true that some standing walls that remained after the fire were incorporated into the post-fire rebuild. Comparing the 1856 survey drawing with an overhead view of the building today reveals a striking parallel in the siting of the buildings in both years.

1856 versus 2014.

Like the answer to one of those spatial reasoning questions that ask you to fit one picture over another, the old buildings seems to fit into the new outline perfectly, if you line them up near the right hand edge of the modern building's footprint. When I first noticed this, I was flabbergasted, for it seemed to substantiate the claims from some that a substantial part of the existing building may date back even as far as the 1830s. Moreover, as we'll see when we get to the Sanborn maps in the 1880s and 90s, as long as the company would continue the use of water power, the water wheel and other relevant equipment remained on the western edge of the property, where the 1856 survey is marked "Mill". This alone supports the notion that the complex was expanded around existing structures rather than over where they had once stood--although certainly not conclusively so.

Capitol Milling Company in 2013, seen from just north of Chinatown Station.

Looked at from the street today, the building exhibits a sort of discontinuity that could possibly correspond to the other, more easterly, building in the 1856 map. Just about in the very center of the above photo, note the section of exterior wall that looks vaguely like European half-timber work. It is utterly unlike anything we see in other extant late Victorian industrial buildings around town. But any historian, even an amateur one, must ceaselessly resist the temptation merely to confirm what he or she wants to discover. It seems impossible that the half-timber-like section of facade could be as recent as the 1880s, and yet we have that catastrophic fire in 1874. Possibly the half-timber wall was another piece that the fire left standing.

On closer inspection, the section of wall in question looks more like steel I-beams painted white, with brickwork used to fill up the spaces in between. Even so, it must be unique. Notice particularly how the single second story window in this section was completely disregarded when the I-beams were placed.

Most interesting of all is that the section with the I-beams is parallel to the opposite exterior wall, and may therefore correspond to the more easterly of the two buildings we see in the 1856 survey, and whose opposite exterior walls are shown to be likewise parallel. If we wanted to pretend the fire never happened, we might convince ourselves that this part of the building does go back to the time of the 1856 survey. On the other hand, if we accept that the fire did happen and was just as devastating as the Herald article reported, why would the mill be rebuilt in such a way as to follow the old building's footprint so carefully? Just for the sake of argument--I'm not saying this definitively--that might be due to the fact that the fire was not quite so destructive as reported, and that significant parts of the old building were incorporated into the rebuild, in situ. Or rather, significant portions of the exterior walls were.

The roof over the section with the I-beams is different as well:

What does it mean to say a building is 133 or 165 or 185 years old? What is the qualification? For many, just having some of the original exterior walls is sufficient, regardless of what rebuilding or alterations have taken place in the interior. As an example of this point, the history of the German Reichstag building is instructive. After World War II, its interior was almost entirely gutted and reconstructed, to the extent that the interior floors didn't even approximately line up to the exterior windows. Yet it would have been ridiculous to say the building originated, or was rebuilt, in the late 1940s.

1876-77: The E. S. Glover Map

F. Weber collected the insurance money and rebuilt Eagle Mills. An 1876 bird's eye view map, prepared by E.S. Glover, presents us with a small image of the mill following Weber's improvements and post-fire rebuild.

Mill site shown by circle, Plaza shown by arrow. Pictorial map by E.S. Glover, 1877 (Detail). Downloaded from LAPL Map Collection; link to entire map available on the Acknowledgments page.

The smokestack indicates that the water wheel definitely wasn't the only source of power by this time. There was at least one steam engine, fired almost certainly by petroleum based fuels. We know this because the Sanborn fire insurance maps, beginning a dozen years later. show that supplies of such fuel were kept on hand. Clicking on the picture to enlarge it reveals a fairly substantial building at the Capitol site.

In an archaeological impact report prepared in 2004 for the MTA Gold Line project, the authors refer to the Glover map and inexplicably state that the mill, which "was supposed to be present by 1851", is not shown in this map (Gust 2004. p10) even though it's plainly there, exactly where Capitol is today. It's possible that the authors were were unaware that "Upper Main", in the 1870s, denoted what we know as North Spring Street today. Stranger still is their assertion that this is a view towards the north when that clearly isn't the case.

1879: Deming & Palmer Take Over

According to an 1883 Times article, Deming & Palmer had been operating the Capitol Mills on Aliso Street since 1872, and in 1879 they moved the operation "to Alameda Street" (that is, the Capitol Milling site). Deming & Palmer also ran a Capitol Mill in San Francisco. It has often been recounted that the Capitol Milling site was known as the Deming Mill during this period, but there is little if anything to support this the contemporary newspapers. The mill owners from the late 1870s onward were evidently committed to establishing and reinforcing the Capitol brand in the mind of the public.

Capitol Mills name, used in the 1870s by Deming & Palmer. This ad was for a different Capitol Mills, in San Francisco. But it was Deming & Palmer who would take over the mill in Los Angeles, a few years later..

By 1883, the city directory showed that Deming & Palmer were still connected to Capitol Milling. The excerpt below illustrates the ongoing connection with the firm in San Francisco. Note that Newmark (op. cit.) mentions a J.D. Deming, rather than J.G. I believe that they are probably the same man and that either Newmark or the compiler of the directory was in error.

1883 City Directory excerpt

1883: Jacob Loew and Herman Levi Take Over

After acquiring the mill in 1883, Loew and Levi renamed it the Capitol Milling Company, as reported by the Times on June 9. As we've seen, this rechristening of the business was no great stretch, because it had already been using the name "Capitol Mills" for about four years. By 1883, the Times reported that Capitol Mills was producing 33000 barrels of flour annually, or about two to three carloads per week.

In 1983, the company released a centennial commemorative plate purportedly showing the mill's appearance in 1883.

Capitol Mill's purported appearance in 1883.

This appealing image presents a number of problems. Given that hills are visible behind the building, this view would have to be either from the east (most likely) or the south. In that case, even though the mill's business was probably still too small in 1883 to justify its own freight spur, there should be some evidence of the Southern Pacific railroad, whose main freight depot was just north of here. We can only wonder if the creator of this image, in 1983, intentionally aimed at an effect that was much more bucolic and quaint than was really the case a century before. It is true that a few years after Loew and Levi bought the mill, they embarked on a major building and modernization program. We shouldn't be surprised that the mill in 1883 didn't look exactly like it does today, but I seriously doubt it looked as it did in the centennial picture, either. In my opinion the biggest problem here is this version of Capitol Mills doesn't seem to corroborate with what we know about how its buildings were positioned on the mill property--at any time between 1856 or earlier, and the present. The depiction here is too generic.

In April 1888 the Times reported that, as a result of the new owners' expansion program, the mill's production capacity had been increased almost eight-fold, to about ten carloads daily. The earliest available Sanborn map, from the year 1888, most likely shows the mill before most of the new production capacity had come online. Even allowing for the new capacity, We can infer this because, according to the map, the plant was producing 200 barrels of flour daily, which was barely enough to fill two boxcars at ten tons each. Even allowing for the improvement in capacity, it's possible the Times was inflating the numbers, motivated by the boosterism that was so common at the time. The 1894 Sanborn map gives the production capacity as 500 barrels a day; assuming a standard barrel of flour contains 196 pounds net, it takes slightly over 100 barrels to fill a freight car. So the daily output was enough to fill five, not ten, boxcars. According to this article, the original mill had been founded in 1843 by Abel Stearns.

Sanborn map, 1888. Intake and flow of water to wheel illustrated at top, location of "timber-like" wall with steel I-beams at lower right, indicated by by dashed line.

The details of the water intake are illegible on this map, but can be understood from from later Sanborn editions. After flowing into the culvert under the mill, the water entered a series of pipes which carried it past the water wheel. This was probably a horizontal, rather than vertical wheel, on much the same principle as this example:

Example of a horizontal mill wheel.

In addition to the waterwheel, the mill also used at least one stationary steam engine which was fired by petroleum.

Towards the lower right corner of the above map, the section of facade facing Spring Street showing the half-timber-like construction method is indicated by the label, arrow, and broken lines. It's clear from the map that the interior of the building in no way reflects the different appearance of that section of the exterior. Almost the entire Spring Street frontage is just one large warehouse. Still, it remains possible that the half-timber section was a bit of wall that remained from the 1874 repairs, or may have even survived the 1874 fire and be much older.

The 1890s: Water Disputes With The City

In 1892 came the first hints of Capitol's water dispute with the City. At the core of the dispute was the City's proposal to stop the flow of the zanja that ran underneath the property, because the milling company was partly dependent on this flow to power its machinery. However, the City had made the proposal nearly six years previously, saying that it would at some point be required in order to make necessary repairs.

In 1894 a revised Sanborn map was published, but really shows very little change from the one in 1888. The entry point of the zanja is no longer shown, but we know from contemporary Times articles that water power was still being used. The new map also shows that there was a second petroleum tank, and a second stationary engine (one of two black rectangles just above "Eng Room").

Capitol Milling Company, 1894.

On July 6 of the same year, details of Capitol Milling's suit against the City appeared in the Times. In the late 1880s, Capitol had laid out about $5000 in order to improve and strengthen the conduit running underneath its property, as per City specifications. But now the City was proposing to start charging for the water, and threatening to shut the supply off if Capitol didn't pay. Also mentioned was that Capitol had been using the water's flow for four decades prior to that date, or since 1854. This is only one of several dates reported for the beginning of the mill.

On March 12 of the following year, Judge Lucien Shaw decided in favor of Capitol Milling, and granted the injunction; on the following day the Times published his opinion in full. The most salient points were that, going back to the days of the pueblo, the city water system was held as a public trust, and that the city therefore had no right to charge the mill for its use. Pursuant to an ordinance of 1885, the predecessor Eagle Mills and the city had an arrangement whereby the mill was allowed to use the water as a power source, and the City was permitted to enter the mill premises as required for maintenance and repair of the zanja, but not for the purpose of diverting the water away from the mill's water wheel. This was a case of each side granting the other a license to do certain things, beyond which neither party was permitted to act. Also, the judge pointed out that the mill did not actually consume the the water, but only passed it under its water wheel.

1900s: The End Of Water Power, and The "Eagle" Tower Is Built.

The City decided to abandon the zanja system in 1904, and this was probably when the Capitol Milling Company ended its use of water power. The 1906 Sanborn map no longer shows the zanja entering plant premises, and the power wheel is no longer shown. The use of water power by millers, however, continued for many years after this in regions that were better suited for it.

1906 Sanborn Map, Capitol Milling (partial). Note grain elevator at upper left; this is the famous "eagle" tower.

It's truly unfortunate that we don't have Sanborn maps from before 1888, because without them or other graphic information we really can't know for sure what the mill looked like before the improvements of the mid and late 1880s. However, we can follow its development since that time, and it's on this 1906 map that we see the first significant addition. This is the grain elevator at the upper left of this detail and having the footprint of a narrow, asymmetrical pentagon. The outer wall of this tower features a giant eagle logo above the company name.

The famous "Eagle Tower". Not 1831, not 1851, but around 1900.

A myth has grown up about this tower to the effect that it is the oldest part of the mill, and dates back to 1851, or even 1831, but the evidence of the Sanborn maps refute that utterly. We can only speculate as to why this myth has become so common on the internet, but it likely has something to do with the fact that in earlier days the facility went by the name Eagle Mills. A contributing factor is likely our urbanized society and consequent lack of familiarity with flouring mills, grain elevators, and other artifacts of the agricultural life. The Capitol site strikes us as so unlike anything else in our experience of hunting up the extant remnants of L.A.s Victorian past, that without meaning to we assume it to be far older than it really is.

The 1910s - 1920s: Modernization Continues, and A Death In The Family

As the new century progressed, Capitol Milling continued its modernization program. This really can't have been too different from what other mills and factories were doing in the same period. Surprisingly, there was at this time a significant trend of electric delivery trucks, and in 1914 the Herald featured Capitol Milling in an article on the subject.

Electric powered delivery truck, 1914. LAH 1914-04-18.

The article reported that the truck had been in service for about nine months, and had given great satisfaction. The milling company was reportedly considering the addition of another electric truck, which they in fact did.

The vehicle shown here is remarkable for its buckboard-wagon like construction, absolutely horizontal steering wheel, and utter lack of safety features.

On April 21, 1921 the Times reported the suicide by gunshot of Jacob Loew, one of the original founders of the Capitol Milling Company. He was despondent over his health after two debilitating strokes over the previous seven years, and feared becoming a burden on his family.

The Rest of the 20th Century: The Mill Enjoys More Growth And Continued Praise. The Gold Line Comes in and The Mill Goes Out

From here on out, the Capitol Mills story is much like that of any other pioneer company in the city. Grain was ground, flour was sold. In later years, the company became known as a large player in the business but with a personal touch, and their business was supported and increased by reputation and word-of-mouth. Although the Capitol brand of flour had been once been sold at retail, that had ended many, many years before, and the average consumer forgot all about Capitol Mills, unless they happened to drive past the Chinatown location. But it was well known to local bakers who appreciated Capitol Milling's ability to meet their special needs, particularly as artisan bakeries became popular in the 1990s.

As a 1997 Times article put it:

"We are specialty millers, and we will custom-mill flour to fit every bakery's need for every type of product," says Doug Levi, the president of Capitol Milling and among the third generation of the Levi family that has owned Capitol Milling for the last 114 years.

In the same article, as one happy customer put it:

"Our salesman lives for flour," [Karen Salk, partner in Breadworks, a Fairfax district bakery] continues, praising John London, 70, who started with Capitol in 1949. "Sometimes breads don't come out for some reason, so we call him, and he can tell you, 'Have you checked this, have you tried that, what's your water temperature?' And he'll check to see if there's been any change in his supplier. They're a good resource."

It's always interesting, not to mention inspirational, how those who devote themselves professionally to a staple food product that seems utterly mundane to most of us can become so devoted to and interested in it. Researching this post inspired me to learn something about the technical aspects of milling, which turned out to be a far more intricate and involved process than I had ever thought. And I'd like to learn more about how different kinds of flour bring about different results in different end products.

In 1998, the last sack of flour rolled out of the Capitol Milling downtown plant. Initially, the operation was moved to a new and much larger facility in Colton that was to be shared with two other partner companies, but a year later, Capitol Milling was acquired by Conagra.

Although the old plant has sat empty for eighteen years, it has been acquired by another old Los Angeles business, San Antonio Winery. Rather than devote all that empty space to the making and storing of wine, the Riboli family, owners of San Antonio, plan to convert it into residential lofts.

Steve Riboli, of the San Antonio Winery, stands inside the empty and silent former Capitol Milling Company building. Downloaded from Getty Images.

And this seems like a good place to bring this long story to a close.

Block 50 in the 20th Century: Mike Hammer Detects, Lily Munster Dances, and the Asphalt Tide Swamps All

2016-07-21T00:11:00.003-07:00

(Note #1: This post continues the story of the 600 North Spring neighborhood. "Block 50" was a small, oddly shaped block bounded by North Spring Street, Bellevue Avenue, New High Street, and Sunset Boulevard, and its numeric designation was used on the Sanborn fire insurance maps for nearly eighty years beginning in the 1880s. You can read the first part of the story here.

Note #2: Before we get to Mike Hammer and Lily Munster, the first part of this post deals with some changes in the area's street layout and ethnic composition. Feel free to skip ahead if you don't want to read this first part, although you may miss some of the context further on.)

1901: Parading into the Plaza. Main street is to the right of the building in the background; North Spring to the left. In the middle is the Cobenhoff building, which will be demolished in about thirteen years to widen Sunset Boulevard. (Water And Power Associates photo collection)

As the twentieth century dawned, Block 50 sat in the cross hairs of two major efforts which would radically alter its character and physical layout. One of these these focused on public morals and the promotion of social reform, and will surprise nobody who is at all familiar with the Progressive (large "P") movement of the early twentieth century. This was the passage of the state red light abatement law, which provided for the forfeiture of all hotel, restaurant, and saloon fixtures of any establishment which allowed engagement in prostitution or assignation. This ended the the practice of openly designating certain streets for officially sanctioned and regulated prostitution.

The other impending change greatly altered the area's physical street layout, specifically that of Sunset Boulevard. Sunset Boulevard/Cesar E. Chavez Avenue is one of the city's major thoroughfares, so it's natural to assume that it originally began in the center of town and then, like so many other streets, was gradually extended westward over the decades. This isn't true, however. The earliest section of Sunset was centered in Hollywood near Vine and went no further east than Echo Park. Not until after 1900 did anyone propose to extend it to the Plaza. The initial step in achieving this was a simple matter of changing a few street signs and letting the matter rest there, as shown on the 1906 Sanborn map. Most of Bellevue Avenue was renamed to Sunset Boulevard along with a short block of Marchessault.

1906 Sanborn Map. Parts of Marchessault and Bellevue were renamed Sunset Boulevard, for all the good that would do. (Accessed 2016 on the website of SDPL)

Records in the L.A. Bureau of Engineering show that the renaming happened in 1902.

LABOE record of Sunset renaming, 1902. Arrow added. (Accessed on agency website)

Obviously, just changing some signs accomplished nothing of practical value and pleased hardly anybody. Property owners on either side of Marchessault between San Fernando Road and New High Street might have taken comfort in the fact that the work--by that point--went no further than this, but the writing was already on the wall. The widening of Sunset had already been under discussion for some time, and by September 1912 the demolitions were well underway.

In this view looking west up Marchessault/Sunset, the old street alignment was still discernible from the remaining curb, the row of utility poles, and the Cobenhoff building at the right margin; the wide empty space to the left was previously covered by Aubin Foix' bakery at 543 N Main; his new building to replace it, with only about half of the space, appears further to the left indicating what the new alignment will be. The Cobenhoff building would be razed as well, within a month of this photo being taken.

(For reasons of picture quality, the adobe structure mentioned above is not shown here.)

The side-by-side comparison of the 1910 and 1914 street layouts below illustrates how much of the area had to be bulldozed in order to facilitate the Sunset Boulevard project.

1910 and 1914 layouts of Sunset Boulevard compared

Compared to postwar freeway and urban renewal projects, this extent of demolition and displacement seems minor. But it must have come as a shock in 1913 when the project was completed. Surprisingly, with the exception of the odd older adobe structure, most of the buildings torn down for this project were less than forty years old.

Note the triangle of vacant land just north of Block 50 in the 1914 map. This area had now become a mere intersection of Sunset, Bellevue, New High, and Broadway--and thereby the first spot in the area that would forever after be devoted entirely to the movement and parking of vehicles.

The 1915 picture below shows the northwest corner of North Spring and Sunset, not long after the Sunset Boulevard project was completed.

NW Corner North Spring and Sunset, 1915. Seaver Collection General Photo File GPF_3930

The Daniel Cognanati cigar shop (Bottega di Segari) on the corner was at 601 North Spring, and the Yuen Kee Chinese Laundry is next door at 603; notice the drying racks covering the roof. Campi's Restaurant at the far right was 609. Prior to the widening of Sunset, 601 was a much larger property which was home to a beer hall and a shoemaker's shop.

In a few years the cigar store was taken over by one Peter Pela, who continued its operation for several years. But given the small size and odd shape of the lot, following the Sunset improvement project, it was virtually inevitable that it would soon host a gas station, and it's as the Robert Myers Gas Station that we see it listed in the City Directory for 1930. Into the 1940s, when the picture below was taken, the gas station was still there. It's difficult to see in this picture unless you zoom in, and notice the typical sign with prices for the different grades of fuel.

Intersection Sunset, Broadway, and New High, 1940s. (MTA Photo Archive)

As much time as I've spent looking at these old photographs, it strikes me that this must have been a difficult intersection to navigate, given that it was a three-point crossing. If we include North Spring in the background, then it becomes a five-pointer. Today, New High Street south of Sunset has essentially been obliterated, mostly by parking lots, but when the above shot was taken it still ran from several blocks south of this spot, skirted the back of the Plaza Church, which is partly visible here at the right margin, and continued north into New Chinatown.

The Chinese laundry at number 603, however, showed a good deal more longevity, and was in operation from at least as early as 1888 and ceased operations no earlier than 1925. By 1953 it was evidently home to a sign painting shop, but we don't know when this change occurred.

Today we think of L.A. as a patchwork of distinct ethnic neighborhoods and districts, perhaps superimposed on a substrate of Anglos, African Americans, and Mexican Americans. By contrast, early in the last century the neighborhood of Block 50 was a mix of several different ethnic groups, as shown by these directory listings from the year 1906. (Note, in 1906 San Fernando Road was the street which would later be renamed North Spring.)


South Side of Block 50 (West Sunset addresses)


East Side of Block 50 (North Spring addresses)

North Side of Block 50 (Bellevue Avenue addresses)

Straight off we notice the occurrence of Italian names associated with the addresses listed here, with the odd Anglo-American, Chinese, French, Spanish, or Japanese name accounting for the rest. This whole neighborhood, most of which later became New Chinatown, was once the Little Italy of L.A., and even today there remain still a handful of reminders--Italian Hall at Main and Cesar E. Chavez, Saint Peter's Italian Catholic Church, and San Antonio Winery in Lincoln Heights.

In the late 1930s, the number of Chinese-American residents and business began to increase, undoubtedly due to the demolition of Old Chinatown. From the 1938 directory:

By 1956, when the threat of imminent demolition was hanging over Block 50 like a sword of Damocles, most of the residents and businesses on Block 50 had Spanish names, and the Italian names were gone for the most part. Even so, this was also next door to New Chinatown, and the number of Chinese names had continued to increase gradually since the 1930s. They remained until the area's gradual demolition from the late 1950s through the 1960s.

A Neighborhood For Nightlife

Although it may surprise most of us today, Block 50 was once near the center of a significant late-night amusement zone. Various bars, cafes, and clubs in the area kept the action going until the legal closing hour for alcohol sales, in contrast to today when the neighborhood is practically deserted by ten at night.

Down Olvera Street, El Paseo Inn and La Golondrina, besides functioning as ordinary sit-down restaurants, were also night clubs. You get a hint of this entering La Golondrina today, where to the right of the front door you see a very small cocktail bar. You get the impression that here was where customers would squeeze in a first cocktail of the evening, because there were many more places to hit before the evening was over. The restaurants stayed open late and offered mostly Mexican or Spanish-themed entertainments. In fact, the 1940s were the golden era of Olvera Street nightlife, as A-list celebrities frequented El Paseo and La Golondrina to be entertained by such dancers as Chavela Flores (Estrada, p237).

1949. Dancing it up at El Paseo Inn: Chavela, who was actually Elizabeth Dollbeer Jones, a girl from Brooklyn who went by Chavela Flores for professional purposes. (Estrada, p239).

Around the corner of the Plaza, before they were demolished in the early 1950s, several more restaurants and nightclubs, in particular Jerry's Joynt at Los Angeles and Ferguson Alley, kept it up with an East Asian flair. Wait a minute, you must be asking: Where the heck is Ferguson Alley? Ferguson Alley was part of the last remaining few blocks of Old Chinatown, before they were razed in 1953 to make way for the Hollywood/Santa Ana Freeway. The alley ran east from Los Angeles Street, at the southwest corner of the Plaza, down to Alameda Street.


View up Ferguson Alley from near Alameda. The Montezuma Saloon in the background is in the old Plaza Firehouse. Seaver Collection for Western History Research, cat. no. P-007-W0096

In the next picture, the map inset shows the camera's approximate vantage point, almost certainly on the second story or roof of the Plaza Firehouse. Hey, here's an idea! Why not take her to Jerry's Joynt?

Jerry's Joynt on North Los Angeles St.
Center and right insets show camera FOV over pre-1954 and present day area maps.
(Angeles Match Cover Club, advertisement from L.A Times,
and insets from Baist survey (1921) and Google Earth (2016).)

From the late 1930s onward, there was also New Chinatown to the north of Block 50, which had its own array of restaurants and late night spots; for about fifteen years, New Chinatown and the last remnants of Old Chinatown existed concurrently. Then, in 1953 the entire block was razed, including the historic Lugo House on Los Angeles just south of Marchessault, in the face of vigorous opposition by occupants and preservationists, and despite the fact that it was already nearly 115 years old.

Lily Munster Dances at the Bamba Club...

Postwar Los Angeles was the very forcing ground of film noir, and this neighborhood suited the genre perfectly with its narrow streets, Victorian buildings, and oddly-angled intersections. Just about the first film noir was Criss-Cross, starring Burt Lancaster and a young Yvonne DeCarlo, long before she became more famous to the Baby Boomer generation as Lily Munster. At one point in this film, which happens to be filled from end to end with excellent DTLA location shots, we see her dancing at the Bamba. (Thanks to Michael Ryerson of the Noirish Los Angeles community, for posting this screengrab there. Criss-Cross, Universal-International Pictures, 1949.)


Yvonne DeCarlo dancing at the Bamba Club. Her partner is Tony Curtis in his first ever screen appearance.

The Bamba was located at 626 North Spring.

Bamba Club, looking roughly north. For a surprise, several of the buildings just visible beyond the intersection date from between the 1880s through the 1910s, and are still standing as of 2016. As usual, inset gives camera F.O.V. (Yesterday's Print tumblr page)

...And Mike Hammer Detects

Mike Hammer, that hardest of the hardboiled film-noir detectives, was also no stranger to the 600 North Spring block. In the following night shot, all aglow with neon, we see Hammer, played by Ralph Meeker, pulling away in his convertible Corvette. The building partly visible to the right of the Bamba Club is the back end of the Sentous Block, whose front door was on North Main. This building stood in as the Jalisco Hotel in the same movie, Kiss Me Deadly. As we saw in the previous post, the Sentous had a long history as a lodging house, so it wasn't too much of a stretch.

Mike Hammer hangs a U-turn in front of the Bamba, neon accents. (From Kiss Me Deadly, still from the USC Digital Library)

Our next view was taken from just outside 615 North Spring, looking south towards the Plaza. Notice the two hotels at the end of the block, the Atlantic and the Pacific. In addition to those two hostelries, most of the buildings on Block 50 seem to have sheltered hotels or boarding houses on their upper stories. In fact, the entire neighborhood seems to have bristled with hotels and rooming houses, if we can judge from directory listings and real estate survey maps. Undoubtedly most of the guests were long-term residents whose need for cheap lodgings provided a ready customer base for this modest yet necessary housing stock. Curiously, while the Baist survey maps indicate a half-dozen hotels in the area, far fewer appear as such in the directories. This is only a conjecture, but perhaps the unlisted hotels were boarding houses whose landladies preferred word-of-mouth references for new customers, exclusively.

Looking South from 615 N. Spring. The Pico House appears in the distance. Notice also the hanging number sign "615" which probably lit up at night, judging from the just-visible wires leading to it. The Atlantic and Pacific hotels on the opposite side of Spring date to shortly after the Sunset Boulevard widening.

From the opposite direction, we see the Pacific Hotel standing in place of the Cobenhoff Building, which had been cleared away about twenty years before. Despite its surprisingly modern appearance, the high-rise in the background has an original build date of 1916 in County records, and housed County offices for many years. Today it has been converted into apartments.

Looking North, probably from the Pico House. (YouTube screengrab from Los Angeles:Wonder City Of The West. James A. Fitzpatrick, narrator. MGM Studios, 1935)

The Last Years

In a separate post the area's history as an Italian neighborhood will be discussed specifically, but it would be a shame to finish this post without a couple of Italian-themed shots--especially since they will take us to other vantage points on Block 50. We'll also be looking at two of the last businesses to occupy 227 West Sunset.

By 1934, the former Bouchet & Duenas print shop had become one of several grocery stores operated by the Italian Stores Company, a small chain with several outlets in the DTLA area. This one occupied the westernmost "corner" of Block 50, thus partly facing New High Street.

(LAPL Photo Collection, order number 00104245)

The vantage point of this 1940 photo is well to the west of Block 50, with a clear view looking down Bellevue to the left and Sunset to the right. The ISC store was at 227 Sunset Boulevard, which still followed its old alignment past Spring and Main Streets, then across the north end of the Plaza just south of Olvera Street, and on past Los Angeles and Alameda Streets. At this time, continuing along Sunset from here would take you directly into the main entrance of the Union Station parking lot. The Bamba Club can be seen in the distance, where Bellevue T-boned into North Spring. In the far distance down Sunset, the Fook Wo Lung building--home to the Dragon's Den restaurant--is visible at Marchessault and Los Angeles Street, miniaturized by the gas storage facility behind it. Just the tower tops of Union Station and the Terminal Annex post office can be seen beyond the nearer buildings.

By 1949, the ISC store had moved out and a restaurant called O Sole Mio had moved in.

O Sole Mio! (LAPL Photo Collection Order No. 104246)

Rather than describing the type of food they served at O Sole Mio, we leave that as an exercise for the reader. Everyone is allowed one guess.

Here's another view from the Bellevue Avenue side.

Bellevue Avenue near Sunset, 1940s. (LAPL Photo Collection Order No. 00067274)

We can only wonder what the conversation was about.

Looking at historical aerial photos of the area reveals that most of Block 50, as well as a few buildings on the east side of North Spring, remained standing at least into the mid 1960s. However, the number of occupied addresses in the same area began to fall off sharply, suggesting strongly that the area's impending demolition was in the wind and nobody wanted to sign new leases. In the 1956 street directory, 227 West Sunset no longer appears. By 1968, almost all of the listings for Block 50 are gone.

It goes without saying that the present-day view is radically different, as this Google Earth screengrab shows.

Google Earth screengrab, 2015

Here almost everything we saw in the last picture has been wiped away; on the other hand we do now see the entire front elevation of the Terminal Annex tower and the L.A. Railway Plaza Substation, previously obscured by numerous buildings in between.

Sunset, now renamed to Cesar E. Chavez Avenue, veers off to the left, approximately following the old alignment of Bellevue Avenue. City Bureau of Engineering records indicate this took place in 1965, or at least the work was begun that year. We might well expect such a project to have taken several years. Photographic evidence reveals that the north end of the Plaza was already closed to motor traffic by 1972, although the Bureau of Engineering's card indicates 1973 for that project. Most likely "Old Sunset" remained open to vehicles while the demolitions and realignment along Bellevue were taking place.

Between 1965 and 1973 Sunset was rerouted to the old Bellevue Avenue alignment. (LABOE)

Going, Going, Gone: The Asphalt High Tide Swamps All

By 1972 Block 50 and had become the expanse of white striped asphalt which it remains to this day. North Spring is gone. The last remnant of Old Chinatown was gone by 1954, and as a result of that and the extensive parking lots and roadways that lie between Union Station and the Plaza, the passenger terminal is reminiscent of a big box store in its visual effect.

Lots Of Parking

A Google Street View screengrab just in front of Union Station shows how isolated it seems to be, in contrast to the stations of large cities back east, which are often housed in--or under--seemingly ordinary buildings standing next door and across the street from other ordinary buildings, smack in the middle of town.

Looking West from Union Station: Where the heck is the city?

The Greyhound station is worse still. At 1716 E 7th it's barely in the city at all. Situations like this have arisen partly out of a Western North American habit of siting railroad stations outside the city center. To at least some extent this is noticeable in Los Angeles, Culver City (the new Metro station), Palms (same), Vancouver BC, and especially in San Francisco, whose long-haul passenger rail terminal isn't in the city at all, but in Oakland. In Los Angeles, two additional factors have intensified this trend. First of all, as we noted in the last post, the city's main commercial center had already shifted many blocks to the south by the time Union Station was built. The neighborhoods around the Plaza, while not deserted, became the center for humble business enterprises like second hand stores, cheap cafes, and down-at-heel lodging houses. The low status of the district and its reputation as an eyesore made it a prime candidate for redevelopment of some kind. Even as early as the beginning of the last century, proposals for the new union passenger terminal and a new civic center complex cast the specter of impending demolition and displacement throughout the area, because nobody at first was sure exactly where these new projects would be built. Some of the early proposals called for the demolition of the entire Plaza area to make way for Union Station, a new Civic Center, or both.

The second factor was the mid-20th-century suburbanist aesthetic which may have been the natural result of the gradual re-engineering of the city for private cars. Some of the old buildings had to be cleared away for the Hollywood freeway itself, and for such appurtenances as access ramps which were necessary if the freeway was to have any practical value at all. But the demolitions went further, as if the intention was not just to provide a useful freeway system, but also to use parking lots, surface roads, and green space to eliminate as much of the old neighborhood as possible. In the process, the hills west of north DTLA were leveled, and the downtown thoroughfares were zealously straightened and regularized. It's hard to imagine now, but prior to the second world war the hills on the western edges of north DTLA constricted the area's geography from east to west, as can be seen in many of the photographs above. This caused a number of city blocks in the area to be "squeezed" into slightly odd shapes resulting in oddly-angled intersections and some narrow streets. There was once an almost Altstadt-like character to the area, vaguely reminiscent of lower Manhattan. And like lower Manhattan, northern DTLA was once ideal for working class residents who were dependent on public transportation and on the inexpensive amenities such as lodging houses, bars, cafes, and stores that were to be found throughout the neighborhood. But as more and more people owned cars, the need for parking spaces led to the obliteration of scores of buildings throughout the downtown area.
In the Plaza area and on Bunker Hill the impact was acute, as substandard but usable housing was demolished without being replaced, for the most part, and so the neighborhood became depopulated.

A Ghost In The Pavement, and How This Post Came To Be

Block 50 is long gone, and so are many of the blocks that once stood near it. But in one sense it lives on, because the parcels that made it up, despite having disappeared into a parking lot, are still booked individually in the county assessor's database, as shown by the map:

Like an X-ray, showing where Block 50 used to be.

Just like any other ordinary property in the county, the parcels in Block 50 still have their own AIN numbers. Likewise, the map here shows the long vanished sections of Spring and New High streets, and none of this is shown in better known map services like Google. I didn't know about the existence of Block 50 until I saw this map. From that point, this seemed like a natural subject for a post--or couple of posts--on the history of one small neighborhood in the city of L.A. Like others in the area, this one goes all the way back to the city's bucolic beginnings in the 18th century, after which the successive historical eras of the town left their mark--from the American takeover in 1848, demolition and displacement for an early street widening project a century ago, to the disdainful attentions of suburbanist postwar planners and officials who had no use for dense, urban neighborhoods, or for the working class people who lived there, or for the public transportation they rode, or for the unassuming retail businesses on which they depended for everyday needs.

-Cubes, squares, rectangles. Everything straight, everything even. Clutter has been outlawed. But a little disorder is a good thing. That's where poetry lurks. We never needed promoters to provide us, in their generosity, with 'leisure spaces'. We invented our own. Today there's no question of putting your own space together, the planning commission will shut it down. Spontaneity has been outlawed. People are afraid of life.

- Robert Doisneau

Brass Knuckles, Female Boarding, and Quadruped Chickens: The Life And Times Of Block 50

2016-03-26T14:19:00.002-07:00

To the best of my knowledge, there has never been an official scheme for assigning numbers to the blocks of the city as distinct from the ordinary system of assigning house numbers, but the Sanborn company did have such a scheme for the fire insurance maps they published over many decades. Given the changes in street names and house numbering systems over the years, this made it easier for the company to ensure that their geography stayed consistent from year to year.
.

The small oddly quadrilateral block in the middle is Block 50.

From at least as early as 1888 until 1953, Sanborn consistently used the same block numbers in the older section of the Los Angeles. Here we'll be looking at Block 50, which was located just northwest of the Old Plaza and the historic Church Of Our Lady Queen Of The Angels, or Old Plaza Church. Block 50 existed from the 1860s all the way into the early 1960s , when it finally gave way to the flood tide of stripe-painted asphalt which is otherwise known as the cheapest way to answer the need for ample parking. And yet, as we'll see, in one respect Block 50 lives on, a ghost of its former self.

Spanish colonial towns were typically laid out along rectangular lines, so Block 50's off-kilter placement and outline seem surprising at first. One likely reason is that this spot was one of two early locations of the town's central plaza. The first site, established in 1781 was nearer to the river but exactly where we don't know. After severe flooding, the plaza was moved to the Block 50 site in 1815, and eventually to its present location between Main and Los Angeles Streets (Robinson, 1981, p9). This final move probably was made in 1822, at the same time as the construction of the Old Plaza Church.

A Photo From 1869
Although the city's business and cultural center, such as it was, had been shifting south ever since the American takeover, we are fortunate enough to have a good panoramic photo of Block 50, taken in 1869.

Block 50 in 1869. NHM Seaver Institute Photo Collection, GPF.3381

The squarish two-story building just above the center-right is the Pelanconi House, which was built in 1855, and houses the La Golondrina restaurant today. If you've been to the restaurant and remember the building as being much larger than it seems to be in the photo, there's a simple explanation for that. A warehouse for storing wine was added to the west side of the building in 1910, and when the De Bonzo family, owners of La Golondrina, took over the space in 1930, they had the wall between the original 1855 building and the 1910 warehouse knocked down. This resulted in the rather peculiar and almost cavernous space, rising up and back from the Olvera Street entrance, in which La Golondrina exists today. The Pelanconi House aside, none of the built environment in the above photo exists today.

Almost certainly this photo was taken from Fort Moore Hill, `which is known to very few present day Angelenos, and has been seen by only the a few of the older ones. Fort Moore is one of several hills in the area that have been flattened beyond recognition and then forgotten by future generations.

Except for people like us who read and write blogs like this.

To get the same view of the same ground today, one would need a helicopter, hovering some distance above and to the southwest of the Old Plaza Church. Fortunately, the numerous parking lots in the area provide many places for helicopters to land.

In 1884 a hen belonging to one E.C. Davis, of Short Street (later Bellevue on these maps) hatched a brood of eight quadruped chickens.

Quadruped chickens. LADH, 1884-10-09 p6

That's eight head and 32 feet of chicken, proving that even in 1884 the county was already an agricultural powerhouse. There were plans for one of the overly-leggy chickens to be shown at the New Orleans World's Fair. Strangely enough, though, there appears to be no account of this in surviving reports of the fair.

If a chicken two pairs of legs, does the extra pair replace its wings?

Such are the thoughts that keep me awake at night.

We don't know how close E.C. Davis' chicken coop was to Block 50, but Bellevue Avenue certainly did run through this neighborhood. And evidently,

In September 1887 one Guadelupe Castillo stopped at a North Spring Street saloon for a cold one. After drinking his beer, on his way out, he encountered Mike Nana who was standing just outside; the latter insulted him in some way or other, but the particulars aren't clear.

With Brass Knuckles. LAH 1887-09-10 p12.

When Castillo objected, did Nana apologize? Indeed he did not, but rather added injury to insult by smiting Castillo a good one above the left eye.

The 1888 Sanborn Map

The year 1888 found Block 50 occupied by several businesses which seem to have operated mainly in separate small houses or buildings of their own. Some of the buildings were adobe houses that had been built prior to the American conquest.

Sanborn Map of Block 50, 1888. Downloaded from SDPL

Throughout its history, retail in its broader sense seems to have been the primary activity here. Not just one, but two "Chinese Laundries" were to be found, as well as a number of saloons, marked "Sal" and stores marked "S". A couple of restaurants completed the picture. This was some distance from Old Chinatown, which formed the city's Chinese quarter at this time, but it's evident from the maps that the Chinese-American population was by no means limited only to the area now commonly thought of as Old Chinatown, east of the old Plaza. Some of the building outlines and walls indicated on this Sanborn map are already evident in the 1869 photo, and it's more than likely that some of the businesses were already in operation by the earlier date.

Marchessault Street would eventually become Sunset Boulevard, although the name Marchessault was usually kept east of Main, where it skirted the northern end of the Plaza. Upper Main would go through several name changes and eventually become North Spring, but this section of it no longer exists.


Magnolia Saloon, Sonoratown. Marchessault and New High.

The neighborhood of Block 50 during this time had become known as Sonoratown due to the high population of Mexican Americans. These people were not the descendants of the original Californio residents, but rather represented the first wave of more recent immigrants from that country. On the other hand, much of the built environment in and around Block 50 still consisted of adobe buildings that did go back to the time of Mexican or even Spanish rule. A few of these adobe houses were still in use as late as the 1950s.

In addition to Mexican-Americans, other immigrant communities were establishing a foothold here. Besides Asian-Americans, already noted, the area would shortly be home to L.A.s first Italian neighborhood, of which Italian Hall, the Pelanconi Building, and Saint Peter's Italian Catholic Church serve to remind us. There were also French immigrants, who had already banded together to to form an early HMO-type medical plan, and to establish a hospital at Hill and College Streets. Although French Hospital has ceased to exist as an independent entity, its corporate successor Pacific Alliance continues to operate a large medical center on the site, making it the oldest same-site hospital in the city.

By Herman Schultheiss, 1930s. LAPL Photo Collection, order #00098715

Bozzani Motors occupied this adobe on North Broadway for many years, in addition to the larger structure in the background. The company still exists today, although it is no longer in the neighborhood.

During the 1880s this neighborhood was undoubtedly a tough place, while at the same time attracting Anglo Americans out for an evening's entertainment. The best way to understand this is to consider the fact that in 1880s there were places in and around L.A. that were as placid and stolid as anyone could wish. The early suburbs like Palms and Hollywood were devoted to farming, fruit ranching, and the abstinence from alcohol. But there were also still some districts as rowdy and ribald as any old Western town, with saloons, gambling halls, opium dens, and brothels. You could live in one of those neighborhoods that were all placid and stolid, yet still seek out surreptitious fun in other neighborhoods not nearly so well-behaved and peaceful. But if you weren't careful you could find themselves in a good deal of trouble, as happened one evening late in 1888 when one Tyler, the son of a former captain in the LAPD, died of morphine poisoning after visiting "a low dive" at 365 New High Street, or such was the verdict of the coroner's jury. (Note: This was a year or two before the present day house numbering scheme went into effect, so that address would be about where 661 would be today.) Although he was known to have used morphine occasionally, he did not appear to be "a victim of the habit", according to the attending physician who, through much effort, managed to bring Tyler out of his stupor for a brief spell, before he finally succumbed.

A Strange Case. L.A. Daily Herald,1889-09-06 p8. Downloaded from Chronicling America, a project of the Library Of Congress. Additionally see the previous day's issue, also available on the LOC website. Tyler's first name is uncertain; the same newspaper used the name George in the previous day's issue.

Notwithstanding his occasional opiate use, witnesses stated that he was by all accounts well adjusted and happy and saw no obvious reason why he would have wanted to end his own life. Was it murder or suicide?

As an indicator of the neighborhood, this was not an exceptional incident, judging by contemporary news stories. At this time the Sentous Block, comprising street level storefronts and lodgings upstairs, had recently been built across the street from and just to the east of Block 50. On the morning of Friday, November 19 1887, Alice Hester, manager of the Sentous, observed a man to enter Room 7. Distracted by a second man who had just then approached her to ask about a room, she failed to notice the first man leaving. However, on inspecting Room 7 she found it had been thoroughly "tossed", as the expression goes. When the miscreant was described to a police officer, the latter shortly thereafter returned with the man, whom Mrs Hester unequivocally identified as the burglar. The alleged burglar turned out to be another police officer, John Brady, and was arrested. Notwithstanding the damning testimony of Mrs Hester and Captain Buckles, the room's legitimate occupant, Brady had his supporters including LAPD Chief P.M. Darcy and LAFD Chief Walter S. Moore, both of whom furnished a portion of his bail money. In the end Officer Brady was acquitted, his attorney asserting that Officer Brady was working an investigation, and that the Sentous Block was a notorious haunt of thieves, opium fiends*, burglars and women of ill-fame.

I keep wanting to imagine that its hallways were filled with the sounds of loud revelry and jarringly noirish jazz music emanating from cheap phonographs behind closed doors. But in 1887 there was no such thing as jazz yet, and the phonograph was little more than a laboratory curiosity.

The 1894 Sanborn Map, And a Photo
By 1894 a few of the adobes here had been displaced by new buildings, usually in a style best described as American Small Town Commercial Victorian.

View towards Block 50, SW corner. LAPL Photo Cllection, #00032724

Take a good look at the two bay-windowed commercial buildings in the above photo, because they lasted only two or three decades. During this period in the city's development, it wasn't unusual for a building to have an even shorter lifetime than the dozens that would later be rubbed out in L.A.'s massive postwar redevelopment project.

The next Sanborn for Block 50 gives us a stark clue as to what the building at its southeast corner, here partly obscured by utility poles, was being used for.

Block 50, circa 1894. Sanborn map downloaded from SDPL.

In the late Victorian period, "female boarding" was a euphemism for a brothel. As it happened, there was a similar establishment just up the street at the other end of the block. Both of these buildings rise to two stories, and the second-story wrap-around corner bay window is clearly marked in the map above. There were also some vacancies, possibly the outcome of the recent Panic of 1893. On the Bellevue side of the block is a shop marked "Dress m'k'g". Given the dire state of the economy at that time, this might have represented someone who was desperate to take in whatever small sewing jobs they could get.

Although the neighborhood would remain an entertainment district for several decades to come, and a few standout businesses like Brunswig Drugs would carry on, the town's center of gravity had settled even more firmly to the south. As early as this, the whole neighborhood was beginning to show signs of wear and neglect, although it did continue to be an active commercial area. We've touched on the brothels already, which remained legal until the red light district was closed down early in the next century. Other neighborhood businesses, though not as outrageous to the public's sense of morals, tended to be small scale, utilitarian operations like bakeries, second-hand stores, and inexpensive restaurants.

The neighborhood around Block 50 might have gone on like that forever, but the new century just around the corner was to bring wrenching changes.

This story is continued here.

*During this period virtually all drugs were freely available for medicinal use and sold over the counter. However, raw opium and opium prepared for smoking, in the form traditionally used in some Asian cultures, had already been banned.

That Party Room In The Tower of Los Angeles City Hall

2014-02-12T23:36:00.004-08:00

Los Angeles isn't known for historic skyscrapers the way New York and Chicago are, but its iconic City Hall is an outstanding exception. For many years it was the standard location establishing shot for films set in Los Angeles, at least until this function was taken over by newer and taller buildings, for example the U.S. Bank Tower. Unlike the City Hall of San Francisco,


San Francisco City Hall (Wikimedia Commons)

which impresses immediately with its dome, neoclassical exterior, and gold accents, its cousin to the south, at first sight, seems rather stark in its overall design, consisting of a blocky lower section of six stories--not including basement and attic--surmounted by the famous tower. There is a colonnaded courtyard on the Spring Street side, but little otherwise in the way of emphatically decorative features.

City Hall from the east

Closer up, however, the structure displays a mixture of neoclassical and early art deco elements. The peristyle courtyard on the Spring Street side does add interest and variety, but in terms of design it doesn't truly mesh with the art deco patterns seen elsewhere on the exterior.

From inside the peristyle, looking west

By contrast, the upper stories are free from neoclassical appurtenances, and here the expression of 1920s-era modernity is far less compromised.


City Hall, base of tower

There are no more curved arches, but only straight lines and mostly right angles. To the right of the tower, just the above the tile roof of the lower section of City Hall, the top story of a later annex is visible. This picture was not taken from the best of all vantage points, so it is difficult to tell that we are actually looking at a second building. Strangely, however, the much newer annex building seems to blend right in with the original City Hall building.

Towards the top of the tower, just below the observation deck, we see where the architects began to reduce the width of the tower as one continues to ascend.

Detail, near top of tower

The four sided colonnade is perfectly vertical, like the sides of any ordinary building, but is noticeably narrower than the floors beneath it. Although its Ionic capitals and frieze tell us that neoclassical influences were not entirely abandoned, the inward leaning corner posts seem a clear expression of modernity as they lead the eye towards the pinnacle.

From the observation deck, the stonework of the angled corner post creates a dramatic effect as one looks beyond it to the horizon.

Looking northeast, toward Union Station

This was the view on a late afternoon; the distant tower is the headquarters of the MTA, which also owns Union Station which is visible in the middle ground.

Looking from the opposite side, although the late afternoon sun makes it difficult to see very much detail, it does contribute to a dramatic result.

View to the southwest

It's no civic secret, but most people probably are unaware of the single large hall that exists on the 27th floor, taking up the entire width of the interior.

The Tom Bradley Room

Evidently this space can be rented for events of various kinds; recently Cigar Aficionado held a reception here. About two weeks later, when this picture was taken, caterers were preparing for the farewell to a longtime city worker. Our city sales and license taxes at work? They wouldn't be that blatant. Or could they? Perhaps this bears looking into.

Coffee Shops Then And Now: Part I

2014-01-21T15:24:00.004-08:00

Coffee. Java. Joe. Caffeine. Can't live without it, and...well, there we are. When we're sitting in some restaurant and the server advances with the carafe, I usually say "I believe I will have another cup", and my wife is usually thinking, "Jim never has a ninth cup of coffee at home." OK, well, that's an exaggeration, but not by much.

Pardon me while I let my thoughts wander to something important:

Ahh, that was splendid.

Until about twenty-five years ago, "coffee shops", to most Americans, were what we now call casual dining restaurants--or "family style" as they often bill themselves. Despite the fact that these places primarily sold sit-down meals rather than coffee, you were usually welcome to sit in one for hours while ordering nothing but coffee, and that's probably still true in most of these places today. Although many of these places boasted interesting architecture, the interiors were usually quite bland, and had the lights turned up too high and the thermostat too low.

Former Ship's Restaurant, showing "exhaust vents"

L.A. was where the Googie style was born and became particularly abundant in the form of coffee shops. For some reason, these places often looked like what you'd get if you went to Hanna-Barbera and told them you wanted something designed by whoever drew The Flintstones and The Jetsons. "And make sure you get the artists from both shows to work on this. I mean it, both shows, or no deal!" The extensive neon signage, plate glass windows, and angled ceilings seemed to reflect from a cartoon-inspired vision of the future. Meanwhile, the lettering in the signs seemed almost primitive by contrast, the way it would have been done in Bedrock. The exterior features of these places, like the "exhaust vents" near
the right hand edge of the picture above, often seemed to be devoid of any structural function whatsoever. For all I know, maybe what we're looking at are hollow pipes running the entire length of the roof, thereby making the roof's structural load lighter. But the point is that they look utterly useless.

On the other hand, much like some of that period's best residential designs, there was an appealingly organic quality to the way the interior and exterior spaces seemed to flow into each other, separated by only the plate glass. The orange-shaded hanging lamps hang on their lines like giant fishing lures, calculated to draw in passersby. They were highly effective at night, or on cool foggy mornings. This was typical of how the best of these Googie-esque restaurants ran counter to the stereotypically bland nature of these establishments.

Former Ships location, Culver City

The fact is, they did more than run counter to it: they snapped their fingers under its nose and dared it to do something about it.

By contrast, coffee houses were the hangouts of writers, artists, and musicians, along with others who shared their avant-garde sensibilities. In New York City they were found in Greenwich Village, and L.A. had them in Venice. In San Francisco you could find them in North Beach, and, a few years later, in the Haight-Ashbury. And that's about it. Outside those places there were few if any, with the notable exception of college campuses, where they have always been popular thanks to the typically unstructured nature of student life.

Starbucks began spreading beyond Seattle in the late 1980s, and had reached L.A. by 1991. The company began by selling coffee in higher end grocery stores, alongside museum-like displays that showed off Starbucks coffee beans in various stages of roasting. That same year, L.A.'s first Starbucks coffee shop opened for business at the upscale Beverly Center.


Cacao, the first independent coffeehouse in West L.A. Now it's almost the last.

It would take a few more years before there were Starbucks shops all over town, and the void was filled by independent cafes cropping up, as it sometimes seemed, on every other block. Just about the first of these was Cacao. Occupying the space of a former beauty salon, this pioneering coffee bar aimed for the look and feel of a 1950s coffee hangout. The narrow, cave-like space featured a cement floor and, at the back, a low-to-the-ground postwar Danish style coffee table and chair set, while just behind that was the window through which the very thick 1950s-style ceramic coffee cups, complete with saucers, were passed. Probably around late 1992, the outline of a pistol with angel wings was stenciled onto the cement floor, acknowledging the widespread unease about violent crime which characterized the the city at the time.

The bamboo counter area, featuring hanging lamps with little flying saucers. And behind it all--Astroboy!

In 1993 new owners Bobby Green and Alastair Newbery took over, introducing an alien/flying-saucer/science-fiction motif to the interior. However, only a few months later, they remodeled the place in a Polynesian theme, featuring a bamboo counter and other South Seas inspired objects such as cylindrical Tiki-men carved from dark wood.

The appearance of the place has hardly changed since then, nearly twenty years ago, except they didn't have free wi-fi then. What they did have for many months was this new technology magazine named Wired, featuring articles about this new thing called "the world wide web". This world wide web and the "browsers" on which we would be accessing it were supposedly just around the corner, if you could believe that.

The flying saucer theme wasn't entirely obliterated. To this day you can find a few reminders inside Cacao. A large toy saucer hangs near the front door to greet entering customers, and spacecraft can be seen on the lamps that hang over the counter.

The bamboo-framed photo with a flying saucer buzzing some tropical city boulevard, visible at the lower left of this shot, has been displayed in the bathroom for nearly twenty years.

The tale of other 1990s coffee houses in the immediate neighborhood is a sad one, because they have all long since disappeared. Java Joe, whose siting in the corner unit of a strip mall, at Brockton and Santa Monica, was highly unpromising at first sight, yet a busy schedule of live music and poetry readings made it a popular neighborhood hangout.

Brockton Ave. and Santa Monica Blvd., former site of Java Joe

Java Joe was on the ground level just to the left of the corner. The band House Brew, a brass-heavy ensemble comprising about a half dozen members, packed them in every Sunday night. This band had more types of horns than I knew existed, from small tubas down to what seemed to be a miniature flugelhorn that could be carried in a coat pocket. The sound had a lot of hip-hop to it, and sometimes they invited rappers to stand in front of the band--there was no stage--and do their thing. I couldn't help admire Java Joe's success in establishing and maintaining this vibrant scene.

Former site of the Two-Part Coffeehouse, between Stoner and Granville on Santa Monica Blvd

The Two-Part Coffee House was named for its two distinct seating areas, separated by the counter and service area about midway through the cafe. The overall vibe was modernist and calm, with considerably more interior lighting than usual for a coffee house. Not surprisingly, it was popular with local students as a place to study.

Former site of the Mingle Inn, on Wilshire, west of Brockton Avenue

I love dogs as much as anyone, but the excessively cute cartoon pooches painted on the windows of this pet grooming shop makes it all the sadder that this used to be the Mingle Inn. The fact that words or pictures painted on shop windows inevitably look tacky doesn't help, either. Back when it was the Mingle, it seemed a rather small and bland when you first walked in, but it got better as you kept going. First you encountered secluded patio where you could sip your coffee or order food. Beyond that, in another building, there was a large room full of old couches and armchairs. This was where Loyola Marymount University's radio station KXLU held its 1996 Demolisten CD release party. As far as I could tell, judging by the attendance, it was a huge success, and it was amazing to that all this went on literally around the corner from my home. During more typically quiet periods, this was another popular study haunt as the neighborhood has always been popular with UCLA students who live off campus.

Former site of Lulu's Alibi

Lulu's Alibi was another popular hangout on Sawtelle, just around the corner from the Nuart Theater on Santa Monica Boulevard. People used to stop in on their way to or from the Nuart Theater, in particular the Rocky Horror Picture Show. At some point in the late 1990s it became Lulu's Blue Plate Restaurant, which probably scared away many of the old customers. When a business calls itself a restaurant--and a "Blue Plate" restaurant at that, you don't feel welcome to sit and while away a couple of hours over coffee. Maybe this was why it didn't last very long after this. Eventually it became a Mediterranean themed restaurant.

Former site of the Balconi Cafe. Bring on the siphons! (Bing Maps clip)

The Balconi Cafe, which used to be here where Santa Monica, Rochester, and Centinela meet, has always been famous locally for its siphon coffee. If you've never heard of siphon coffee, click here for a demonstration (YouTube video, which runs a little over two minutes). The Balconi still exists, but some time around 2008 it moved to a boutique mall on the NW corner of Olympic and Sawtelle. Gratifyingly, their space in the mall property is on the ground level and it faces the sidewalk.

Balconi Cafe exterior. The patches of light are coffee drinkers from the spirit realm. Because it really is that good.

They do a little show-and-tell after you order, letting you see (and sniff) the freshly ground coffee from which your cup will be brewed.

Here you see what your cup of coffee is made of.

And here is what the siphon looks like. At this point, the heat has forced most of the water through the filter and up into the upper vessel, where it has steeped the coffee grounds.

Coffee brewing siphon with the coffee almost ready to drink

The barista is about to remove the flame, after which the air in the lower vessel cools and contract, pulling down the freshly brewed coffee, sans grounds. The coffee here costs a buck or two more than a Grande of house brew at Starbucks, but it's worth it.

To be continued.

They Shoot To Kill

2013-12-29T22:45:00.000-08:00

Imagine, if you can, that you are walking through a quiet residential neighborhood in L.A. Although most of the housing supply takes the form of mid-20th-Century dingbat style apartment buildings, there are a few old houses extant, here and there. As these neighborhoods go, it's reasonably peaceful and attractive, not least because of the mature and leafy trees that line the sidewalks. There are few if any outward signs of urban decay, crime, or other social ills. As you read this, imagine peppy-go-lucky 1960s sitcom theme-type music playing in the background.

There's an attractive church in the neighborhood, Saint Mary in Palms.

I like the way it's sited on the gore point of a three-way intersection, giving it a sort of East Coast small-town feel.

If this were New York or Boston, this little intersection might well have some charming appellation like Saint Mary Square; after all, what is Times Square really but the intersection of Broadway and Seventh? But we don't generally name things in this town unless it's either absolutely necessary or someone's generosity is in need of acknowledgement. That's L.A. for you. Instead of Saint Mary Square or Tabor Triangle we have The Intersection Of Watseka Avenue And Faris Avenue Where That Church Is.

Mature broadleaf trees shade the quiet streets...

and many of the extant single-family houses exhibit considerable variety in their design.

You walk further, continuing to hear 1960s sitcom music in your head, and you come across another church, belonging to the Seventh Day Adventist Reform denomination.

There's nothing particularly interesting about the siting or architecture of this house of worship, but around the corner you find this curious holiday display.

Let it flock, let it flock, let it flock!

First of all, the snow. Can I say one thing about it? Fake snow on a sunlight-dappled Southern California Lawn is the sort of thing that gives this city a bad name. Secondly, the characters are worth a closer look. Charlie Brown, Linus, and Snoopy stand forth for the renowned comic strip and animated cartoons, although only Snoopy looks particularly happy--ironically so, as we'll see. I don't think the kid bundled up in the pinkish coat and hat is a Peanuts character--South Park, maybe? And in the background is little Cindy Lou from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, with Frosty The Snowman rounding out the scene. Clearly, this person has issues with plot continuity, and it's even possible that there's some sort of copyright violation here, what with the random juxtaposition of all these characters.

But whatever; whoever lives here certainly seems to be getting into the spirit of the season, we have to admit.

Still imagining the sitcom sound track, now perhaps with Christmas special episode touches included, you stroll further and find this rather foreboding sign.

Dog owners are warned!

In case it's hard to read this on whatever screen you are using, here's the copy:

WARNING!

TO ALL DOG OWNERS

IF I HAVE TO PICK UP

AFTER YOUR ANIMAL

AND I CATCH YOU

YOU'RE NOT GOING TO LIKE
IT.

No wonder Charlie Brown looks so miserable. He's counting the seconds until he can get Snoopy out of here. What do you think will happen to Charlie Brown if the occupant of the house does catch him omitting to clean up after Snoopy? Will the resident come out and shout angrily while waving his fist in the air? Will Charlie Brown get captured on a webcam and reported to the authorities? That could be, but not judging from what we see a few paces further on:

The sign on the lower left is particularly grim, not to mention callous in the disregard it exhibits for the neighbors, for example the church. What's more, Sunday morning -- or in this case I guess it would be Saturday morning--churchgoers have to pass by this as they enter and leave the church grounds.

Y'all can just go rob someone else!

Granted, these signs are addressed to anyone who may be thinking of committing robbery, although those who may be considering mere burglary would be unwise to assume that the occupant of this property is aware of the legal distinction between burglary and robbery. On the other hand, while the householder almost certainly comprehends the difference in magnitude between robbery and canine elimination free-range enabling, he clearly has a temper. "Move along, as quickly as possible" is what Charlie Brown's closest friends would advise.

Just outside the right frame of the picture above is the parking lot for the Adventist church, because its property wraps around the one occupied by the gun aficionados. I had to make sure, by checking the county parcel database, that the two parcels are indeed separate, and this was a good thing. It would have been disheartening to learn that the Adventists had abandoned their pacifist principles.

It turns out that this isn't the end of it. The blocks in this neighborhood are oddly shaped, so only a little further on is yet another corner. On this spot is the house of another firearms expert, proclaimed as follows:

The wording here is considerably more restrained. Be that as it may, here in one small residential block we have multiple signs warning burglars and robbers that they may be shot, and of those, two seem to be aiming the gun at any and all onlookers. I have to wonder what happened at these two houses, almost next door to each other, and next door to a church yet, that these signs are considered necessary. A good security system and burglar alarm would probably be more effective.

Borat, Slack, Tame. And oh yeah, Emily.

2013-08-22T14:34:00.002-07:00

From the last post's footprints in cement, we segue to painted graffiti art.

A few weeks ago I came across this wall-ful of skillfully painted graffiti. I have no idea who created it, nor do I expect to. But it would be nice to know the inspiration behind these tags. These pictures weren't taken in a gang area, so I think we can rule out that as an answer. Nor is it likely to be the work of typical of juvenile taggers, since it's clearly much better done than that. I think what we have here is simply some person or persons unknown who decided to take advantage of a recent demolition. I frequently pass by here myself, and can't remember what used to be here; presumably it was nothing terribly interesting.

As much as anything it was the name BORAT that got my attention. I thought the Sascha Baron Cohen's performance in the film was very funny, rising as it did to heights of surrealistic slapstick lunacy.

Borat

Impressive here are the background color, shadowing, and a great use of yellow and light blue, even though that's hardly my favorite color combination. He's signed it "BORAT 2013" and it wouldn't be surprising to find other examples of his work around town.

Next up is "TAME"...

It's all right, I don't think he's dangerous.

And then "SLACK". I particularly like how the serifs on the S are made to be almost as large as the constituent strokes of the letter itself.

There are a couple more names at the far right.

I haven't been able to decipher the last one--is it QHTM?-- but I have to give a nod to "Emily". Everything else on this wall has been carefully painted with color, background, and shading effects, but apparently Emily just wanted to say...

Her name is Emily

"Hi, my name is Emily and I was here, too!" The plain lettering and the "i" dotted with a heart are endearingly humorous when contrasted with the bold statements made by the other painters. Furthermore, she's almost certainly the only one who used her real name.

The other artists, though, have decided to make new names for themselves.

UPDATE: Emily obscured!

I checked back here a few days ago, and found there was some new work.

SLACK has redone his bit with considerably more flourish, and a few newcomers have been here too--"TOENOSE" or something like that; meanwhile the new, orange writing to the right lies just beyond my ability to decipher it. I suspect otherworldly visitation as a possible provenance. Almost obscured by these bold expressions of -- ah -- whatever it is they are trying to express, is another name which must have been Thunder Prism. I didn't expect Emily to last long on this wall, but now she's been obliterated, all except for the tail of her 'y' and the bottom stroke of her 'E'.

Rancho Park Laetoli

2013-08-05T22:18:00.000-07:00

In the very living wet concrete, a small party of Homo Sapiens left their tracks. Careful analysis of the available evidence places this event definitively in the Early Middle Elvis Epoch. That is, it was after he had left Sun Records for RCA, but before he enlisted in the U.S. Army--which pins it down to 1957.

A few particulars are suggested by the evidence. First of all, we seem to have here a family, comprising the parents and two daughters.

First, the mother:

And little Carol, the youngest:

Older sister Wendy:

and Dad, apparently known to friends and family as Coop:

They stopped here in 1957 and carefully left the impressions of their right feet. One of the youngsters left her right hand print too, just above the date: August 1957.

What does this astonishing discovery tell us about the life of these humans of the remote past, so long ago? Besides their erect posture and the highly evolved structure of their hands, it does seem that both parents have slightly flat feet, possibly due to standing up all day. Possibly they were teachers, although presumably not at the Catholic girls' academy across the street. Bea's foot seems almost as big as Coop's, and wider, but that could just be an accident with regard to how she made the impression in the wet concrete. Or it could have been a later distortion, made before it had set.

The Early Middle Elvis Epoch was in many respects a stultifying one with respect to the mainstream culture. Rock music had gotten rolling, but in the eyes of many it was just a trend already on the wane, and in any case of interest only to teenagers. This was a straitlaced era, in which you did not write graffiti or leave footprints in wet pavement. There was no time for such foolishness, because the Communist threat was everywhere. You didn't want to stand out from the crowd, especially by defacing public property, and most especially as a family, all in one place and at the same time. Just think of the children! What kind of example does that set?

Well, I think it sets an excellent one. There's nothing wrong, in my opinion, with bending the rules a bit in a spirit of innocent fun, especially with one's kids. Bea and Coop could be great-grandparents by this time--or at least grandparents, and it's gratifying to think that today they can bring their grandchildren to this spot and show them that there were some fun loving and free spirited adults--parents, yet--even in the Early Middle Elvis Epoch. On the other hand, whether it's 1957 or 2013, there are always some self-righteous prigs who consider themselves personally affronted by such innocent pranks. They should get a life.

To Bea, Coop, Carol, and Wendy: If you read this, I don't think anyone will come after you for your wet cement graffiti act. And thank you from the bottom of my heart for brightening my day.

The subject of urban sidewalk archaeology also came up a couple of years back, right about here.

P Is For Palms

2013-07-24T22:51:00.000-07:00

Palms Women's Club (detail, showing the unfortunate addition of faux-flagstone siding)

(Note: In the text below there are a number of passages suggesting that one building or another is likely the oldest building in the neighborhood, or close to it. As of 2015-09-14 new information--to me, that is--has come to light regarding a couple of still older buildings. This post will be revised accordingly and republished in the near future, but for now this disclaimer will have to do.)

Today Palms is an area of Los Angeles which is typically defined by what it isn't. It's not Cheviot Hills or Culver City, and it's not Mar Vista. And although its Westside credentials are undisputed, it isn't properly part of West Los Angeles because it's on the wrong side of the 405. For historical reasons its boundaries have always been uncertain, and even today various sources like the L.A. Times and the Palms Neighborhood Council disagree on the exact boundaries--sometimes virtually on a house-by-house basis. Many local place names in Spanish have definite articles--La, El, Los, or Las and that might have inspired the mostly Anglo and Midwestern settlers who named this place The Palms. In English this sort of thing works when the name doesn't otherwise mean anything, like The Bronx or The Dalles. But with common nouns like palm, especially in Southern California, not so much. In researching the LAPL photo database for this blog post the first hits that came up were the palm tree designs that used to grace the walls of the Cocoanut Grove!

Northeast Palms, from the 1910 Sanborn map

Researching the history of L.A. often takes superior dedication when it comes to districts that were once considered remote suburban villages. The maps from different years sometimes show multiple name changes for the same street, for example Cyprus Avenue in the 1910 map

1928 street map from the David Rumsey Collection

which had become Stinson Avenue by 1928, and eventually Palms Boulevard. Palm Ave became Featherstone before eventually becoming Rose Avenue.

Before it was swamped by the spring tide of post WWI urban sprawl, Palms stood in the center of the agricultural district where it had been founded in the 1880s. The early 1900s found it a thriving community of about a thousand inhabitants, boasting the assortment of small businesses typical of farming villages in that era. There was also the Villa or Palms Villa Hotel; the archives of the Los Angeles Times indicate it had been operated by one M.J. Howard, beginning no later than 1890. Again like many small towns, there were no saloons, although some enterprising businesspeople did their best to quench local thirsts by operating just outside the town limits. The local elementary school had already been operating for some years and around this time moved to its present site on the southeast corner of Palms Boulevard and Motor Avenue. It's likely that the little community boasted a telephone exchange as well, but available sources are silent on this. In addition to all these amenities there was the Palms train station, served by both Southern Pacific and Pacific Electric trains--steam and electric traction respectively.

This was one of the very last Pacific Electric routes and passenger service was finally ended altogether in 1953. Ten years later, thanks to local preservation advocates, the old station was moved lock stock and barrel to Heritage Square, near Pasadena, where it lives on as a museum piece. Today the local Metropolitan Transit Authority has already brought passenger service back to the Expo route as far west as Culver City, and by 2015 it is supposed to be in service all the way to Santa Monica. The new Metro station is currently under construction and stands about 100 yards east of where its predecessor stood.

New Palms Station under construction at Palms and National

The old railroad bridge partially visible behind the new eastbound bridge is said to be the only extant one from the old railroad which will be incorporated into the new transit line. In line with the MTA's rather drab standards when it comes to naming stations, plans originally called for this one to be called Palms/National. We can all be grateful for the Palms Neighborhood Council which persuaded the MTA to name it simply Palms. Why should we care? We care because L.A. doesn't tend to be a city of named districts, except for a few formerly independent cities like Hollywood and Palms. A good place name is more than just a label; it simultaneously reflects and reinforces the character of a location.

Palms was annexed by Los Angeles in 1915, but continued to maintain a distinct personality as a community within the city. The Palms Chamber of Commerce continued its activities, and the next few years saw the founding of two Masonic lodges and the Palms Women's Club, which had its clubhouse on Palms Boulevard. Incidentally, the name of this thoroughfare has been changed at least twice: A Sanborn map from 1910 shows it as Cypress Avenue, and on a 1928 street map of L.A. it's Stilson Avenue. In fact, the history of this area is rife with street name changes, sometimes complicating matters with regard to historical research.

Palms Women's Club

The building's front was emblazoned with a large letter 'P' whose style and color have evolved through the years, and still recalls the building's original occupants although it has been vacant for many years. The PWC was active at least into the 1960s, according to available sources. Today it's vacant and it's for sale, and it will be interesting to see what happens. Developers are betting big on the future growth and demand for apartments in this area, but this particular slice of ground doesn't seem too well suited for that. Recently in an apparent effort to spruce the place up, the door was replaced and painted red. For some reason this brings out the private residence-like character of the place; it doesn't really seem like anything else.

Early Commercial Development

Just as it is today, in the beginning the commercial core of Palms was along Motor Avenue (then Fourth Street) particularly near the intersection with National Place. Other important thoroughfares included Overland Avenue and Palms Blvd, which was then called Stilson Avenue. According to public records, 1912 saw the construction of what must be the earliest extant commercial building in Palms. The structure displays a number of architectural features typical for the era, like the transom windows and the decorative exterior touches that seem to emanate from the building's basic fabric of bricks, rather than being merely plastered on. Traditional revivalist details, like classicist pilasters, plinths, or capitals, are entirely absent.

1912 building on Motor Ave., likely the oldest extant business building in Palms

Although currently vacant, the building has recently housed a hairdressing salon. The building next door houses the offices of a consulting structural engineer; one can't help wonder if the 1912 structure has also been used for some sort of engineering or design work. The expansive windows seem calculated to let in the most light possible for the detailed work those fields entail. On inside, the windows have been papered over making it impossible to see how the interior is divided. However, at least the front room is evidently a single-story space with a high ceiling.

3343 Motor, main entrance


Detail of transom windows. The louvered center window is probably a replacement.

Although one would never think so, public records indicate that the next oldest building is probably the Marcus Building at the southeast corner of Motor and National, and it was built in 1915. For many years it was occupied by Norm's Foams and Fabrics, but it is now occupied by a new enterprise doing business as I Love Lucite. Well, who doesn't, after all? My favorite childhood toy was a Lucite molding kit.

No it wasn't.

Around the corner, just beyond the mailbox, there's a highly unusual feature: a small loading door just even with the sidewalk.

Oddly placed loading dock

Given the age of the building, and the fact that the Expo Line/Air Line rail route runs just behind the storage facility, it's plausible that there was once a freight spur here, a very long time ago. In many places along and near the rail line, there are old freight loading doors, now completely disused. In some cases these doors are a considerable distance away from the railroad, indicating that there were obviously freight spurs at one time, long since removed or asphalted over.

But why would the freight door be flush with the sidewalk? Even for trucks it wouldn't make much sense. We can only speculate at this point, but it's possible the ground was raised when the street was laid.

It's not easy to see in the picture, but there is definitely a rise in National Place, just past the intersection; as you keep going around the bend in the distance, the road quickly descends back to its original level. If anyone knows of a detailed spur map for this locale, please feel free to post a link to it in the comments.

UPDATE: In the course of an additional visit we took this photo which lays to rest any notion of this having ever been a freight dock. The track of the sliding aluminum door goes well below sidewalk level to what must have been the original street level.

Thanks to further inquiries with the extraordinary community of L.A. history buffs to be found in the enormous and ongoing Noirish Los Angeles thread in the Skyscraper Page Forum, we are now able to confirm this. In this particular instance I'm indebted especially to a member who provided me with several historic Sanborn maps of the corner in question. In 1910 the lot was partially occupied by a blacksmith's shop (BLSM) as well as what appears to represent a stationary gasoline engine. A century ago stationary gas engines were very commonly used in blacksmith shops, among other things to keep a powerful jet of air blowing into the forge to raise its temperature. (In earlier times this would have been done by one or more apprentices working hand bellows.)

SE Corner Motor Avenue and National Boulevard, 1910. Motor runs along left edge, unmarked.

In these early years of the automobile repair industry, it wasn't at all unusual for blacksmiths to become auto mechanics. Many of them were already familiar with stationary engines and this expertise carried over to auto engines; their metalworking expertise was a plus.

As the 1924 map shows, this became an example of that:

SE Corner Motor/National, 1924 East is up (not according to astronomy, but the street numbering scheme)

1924 finds our building used as a garage for fire engines, and the blacksmith is still there as well. The fire equipment, by this time, would have belonged to the LAFD, which had established Company 43 in the neighborhood the previous year in a nearby building a few doors west.

That same year, Hal Roach Studios used the blacksmith shop as a filming location for the 1924 Little Rascals film Sun Down Limited; here the Rascals are driving their makeshift train into the the rear door of the building, where the blacksmith shop is shown on the map above. This information comes to us through an extraordinary series of filming-location documentaries published on YouTube by one chrisbungostudios.

Credited to chrisbungostudios.

It turns out that numerous early Hal Roach films were shot in and around Palms.

By 1929 this space is being used for general auto repair, and the ceilings have been lowered from 18 to 12 feet.

SE Corner Motor/National, 1929.

Although the seemingly odd placement of the aluminum roll-up door has been explained, the facts concerning when the road was raised and why remain to be discovered.

Across the street from the former fire engine/auto repair facility stands Palms' most distinctive building, 3301 Motor Avenue.

Los Angeles had annexed Palms some eight years before this building was completed, but that didn't stop the owners and architect from following a pattern that was very typical of a small-town main street--small shops downstairs and small apartments upstairs. People definitely live here, and the corner unit was recently offered for rent, but we've never seen anyone go up or come down these steps.

The mysterious steps.

It's a pretty good area. Vegan, Indonesian, and Mexican restaurants, and a barbershop where they use straight razors all jockeying for space in this short block...

...men's hats and a Karate studio that seems to specialize in children's classes, judging from the high pitched shouts to be heard heard from the sidewalk you walk past...

what more could we ask? Plenty--to wit, a place to drink coffee and a place to drink actual drinks. We're covered on the second requirement; there are three pubs within a few blocks of here, including the popular Irish Times just a few steps north of here on Motor. But there aren't any coffeehouses; even a Starbucks or one of the other chains would be better than nothing.

A note about cartographic sources

The Sanborn maps were published for about a century beginning in the mid-1800s, intended for use by insurance underwriters in assessing fire risks. Hazards such as lumberyards, stationary gas engines, milling operations, absence of night security, and so on were shown. Mitigating factors such as nearby firehouses and hydrants were likewise shown, along with details as to the local fire service--paid or volunteer, full time or part time, number of men, and so on. (Of course it was men only--this was a long time ago.) For Palms the Sanborn collection lists only one set published in 1910, presumably because it would soon be annexed by Los Angeles. However, subsequent Sanborn editions group this area with Culver City rather than L.A. For both 1924 and 1929, it can be found on page 22 of the Culver City maps.

Much of Los Angeles and environs is covered in the Baist series of real estate survey maps, published for this area in 1921. Locating the correct plate for such a geographically large city as L.A. can be very difficult, what with changes in street names and realignments, and in some cases the total removal of streets. There are no references to the Baist maps in this blog post, but as an aid those readers who may wish to pursue this further, the map for Palms is found on Plate 38 (recto); this page can be found in the David Rumsey online historical map collection, here.

Greystone Park

2012-10-24T23:24:00.002-07:00

Introduction

The day broke cloudy--no wait. The late afternoon had turned out cloudy and rather dark, and there was a moment's hesitation before setting out for Greystone Park. Writing a blog about Southern California, you would think, would require that all our pictures to be filled with sunlight and, if possible, palm trees. Then again this house was so obviously designed to emulate a Stately Home of England that the deficiency of sunshine only augments the authenticity.

Edward Laurence Doheny commissioned the house as a gift to his son, also Edward Laurence but usually called Ned. In late 1928 Ned, his wife Lucy (nee Smith), and their five children moved in. By the following March Ned and his secretary, Hugh Plunket, had turned up dead as the outcome of an incident which is unclear to this day. The official version is that Plunket murdered his boss in anger stemming from the latter refusing him a raise in salary. On the other hand, it was found that the murder weapon was a gun belonging to Ned, suggesting that it may have been a murder-suicide on Ned's part. It's been suggested that the Roman Catholic church judged him a suicide, accounting for the fact that he was interred at Forest Lawn rather than at New Calvary with the rest of the Doheny family. Ned's widow Lucy remarried and continued to live at Greystone until 1955, when she sold the estate to a Chicago industrialist who began renting it out to film crews. It has been a favorite filming site ever since, beginning in 1965 with The Loved One when it stood in for the Whispering Glades Mortuary, presided over by a funeral salesman portrayed by the surprisingly droll Liberace.

The Dohenys also had a retreat in Franklin Canyon, which we saw in an earlier blog post on Franklin Canyon.

As originally planned, in addition to the present property, Greystone included all of the Trousdale Estates tract, now covered with high-end single-story houses most of which were built in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The visitor no longer enters the grounds by the old gatehouse, but it makes sense to begin there. This gatehouse is quite substantial and looks large enough to have provided quarters for a gatekeeper or security guard and spouse. The style of architecture evident here gives us a foretaste of what we'll see throughout the rest of the grounds. The construction itself is steel reinforced concrete under a surface of Indiana limestone.


Gatehouse and gate

Who among us hasn't thought, at some point: "I don't need to have a mansion, but a little house like this, with its slate roof and working fireplace, would be awesome." Then we learn, eventually, that such distinctive and costly features are almost never found in small houses.

The red brick strips on either side of the long drive can be seen on all the roads in the estate.


Main drive, just inside the gate

Having bought the property some years earlier, the City of Beverly Hills converted it to a public park in 1971. Although the mansion itself is usually closed to the public, much of the character of its Great Hall can be glimpsed through the windows, as we'll show later on. In addition, occasional concerts and other public events provide an opportunity to step inside. Although the visible rooms of the house appear empty, the expansive and carefully tended gardens surrounding it probably appear much as they ever did.

Today, the first thing most visitors see is the view from the parking lot, which sits well above the house and commands views of the entire Los Angeles basin, from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica.

View towards downtown L.A. in distance.

The large high-rise towards the left is a condominium tower only a mile or so away. The downtown skyline is in the center of the frame, looking like a row of distant, jagged teeth.

The Upper Gardens

Starting down the slate-and-sandstone stairs and paths, we come first to this formal lawn, which we might well call the Fountain Glade. Today there are several fountains and other water features on the grounds, but formerly there were also a lake, a waterfall, and babbling brooks. And naturally there was a swimming pool.

Here's a closer view of the fountain.

Below the Fountain Glade is an impressive slate walkway hemmed in by rows of tall Eugenia bushes. Particularly evident here are the subtle variations in color in the slate slabs.

Eugenia Alley

There are fountains here as well; for in addition to this large one...

Main Fountain in the Eugenia Alley

...the north wall features a half dozen semicircular recesses, each one with a waterspout in the form of a carved gargoyle-like face.

Row of wall spouts

Until we looked closer, we thought one of these gargoyles was Old Man Doheny himself--of course it wasn't, and that's a good thing. If you looked like this would you put a relief portrait of your face in your garden? On the other hand, seen from this distance it corresponds perfectly to in the popular image of an industrial tycoon in the 1920s. It's not hard to imagine such a face belonging to a stock-character American millionaire in a P.G. Wodehouse story.

It was a pleasant surprise to see that all of the fountains were working. Some of the gargoyles, like this leonine example, are less anthropomorphic in their appearance.

The abundant fountains and ponds throughout the grounds remind the visitor that water is the main reason why Beverly Hills was never annexed by Los Angeles: it taps all the water it needs from its own wells.

The Main House

The lawns and terraces we've seen up to this point are all well above the house itself, and with respect to the original gatehouse seen at the beginning of this article, behind it.

As we continue our walk down the hill, the lawns give way to slate-paved courtyards and terraces, for we now approach the house itself. Along the way we can get a good view of the gables over the north end of the building.

We pass the porte-cochere on our left.

Porte-Cochere

We pause to take a closer look.

Porte-cochere, interior

Nearly all the exterior lamps on the property have a style similar to this one.

Although the house is closed, as we've mentioned, we can see a bit of the interior through the french doors.

View of hall from porte-cochere

The interior floors are surfaced with differently colored varieties of marble.

Having seen the main entry we come back out, and continue on our way. To the west of the house, we notice a break in a low wall...

...beyond which there is a reflecting pool populated by what appears to be at least half of the world's population of carp.

The solid monumental urn at the far end, almost certainly, does not contain anyone's ashes.

Monumental urn

Now, if we all turn around, we can look back towards the south terrace.

Don't miss the lighted exterior lamp in the corner. With its vaguely Art Nouveau-ish style, it imbues its surroundings with an almost magical quality.

All about the house the architectural details are little short of stunning. The bronzed window grilles, the bay windows, and the brazen exterior lamp add up to an impressive picture. The drainpipe is solid lead, which doesn't sound that great in light of what we now know, but in the 1920s everyone probably though lead pipes were the bee's knees. After all, they weren't going to drink it, or so they thought.


Southwest corner architectural details

Peering into the windows facing the south terrace, we see the other end of the great hall. In the background one can see the french doors leading to the porte-cochere.

Great hall seen from south terrace

From here, if we were to continue southward, we'd come to the great lawn below the house, seen in this picture which was taking from just outside the grounds. This lawn is the first thing a visitor would see on arrival, back when this was a private home; then continuing along the drive he or she would eventually reach the main porte-cochere on the other side of the house.

Xericultural garden and a shy turtle

On an earlier visit we took some views of a small side garden of several drought-tolerant plant varieties. These pictures aren't as good, because of the poorer-quality camera used to take them, but some may find them interesting nonetheless.

Dwarf Bottlebrush

Grevillea

We have already described the rectangular pond filled with carp, but on this earlier occasion it contained a couple of turtles. It wasn't immediately apparent that there were turtles, because in this next shot the one visible turtle resembled an oddly shaped waterspout or some similar fixture.

Once were turtles

In the next photo one turtle seems rather shy, just barely poking his nostrils above the surface.

Bashful turtle

Sepulveda Boulevard's Motel Row

2012-10-23T00:09:00.000-07:00

In the earlier post Left Turn OK, we presented a trio of mid-20th-century motels, with most of their period styling still intact. With the advent of shorter days and earlier sunsets, now offer a few night photographs to show off their signs to the best advantage. But why do we bother? It's simply because, like the motels they adorn, these illuminated signs are utterly evocative of the same postwar commercial aesthetic. In the older cities of the east, pedestrian focal points such as Times Square have long played host to a wild variety of neon-illuminated hucksterism.

Today, neon signs have become less popular as an advertising medium, and when we do see them they usually advertise alcoholic beverages and places in which to consume them. By contrast, in postwar depictions of Times Square, for example, we see elaborately lighted signs touting not only expensive things like air travel to exotic places, or addictive and highly profitable products like tobacco, but also such humbler wares as Planter's Peanuts. With the exception of trucks emblazoned with names like Frito-Lay, when was the last time you saw outdoor advertising for a cheap snack--of any kind, let alone neon?

These motel signs express that same ideal which is now nearly extinct.

We'll start with the Half Moon, holding forth at Sepulveda and Pigott.

We're staying at the Half Moon tonight!

Of all the three motels, this one undoubtedly has the best sign for the simple reason that it is exclusively neon. The intersection of Sepulveda and Pigott is not one of your pulsating and vibrant entertainment districts, but at least there's the Cinema bar across the street.

The Alpine Carpet store to the right seems to go well with a couple of other alpine or Swiss-related features to be seen in the area. In the earlier post we noted the vaguely chalet-like red-and-white decorations on the second floor railing.

But rather like the Swiss Motors garage, the owners of Alpine Carpet have been content to commemorate alpine life by their business name alone, and let it go at that.

There's also the Villa Italian restaurant a couple of doors down. Nothing much to say here, except possibly to mention the neon sign and the brand-new crescent moon floating above. Incidentally, the word neon in this context isn't always accurate; any of the stable inert gases will work in this type of lighting and can be used singly or in various mixtures to get different colors.

Moon Over Villa Italian

We already noted the rather overdone signage of Deano's, just up the street.

Rather overdone? Wildly excessive is more like it, but to really appreciate it in its full, glorious exuberance, you need to see it at night. You can almost hear the jarring background music as the main character in some film-noir drama, no doubt staggering from the effects of the Mickey he just got slipped in his drink, is running along here...running from something...running to someone...running, running, running ... until finally the oblivion of unconsciousness smothers him like a cold dark blanket.

Although they have upgraded COLOR TV to CABLE TV, the sign still touts the presence of TELEPHONES, giving off a decidedly retro vibe in view of the fact that nearly all adults these days carry their own mobile phones. As for the signs' design and arrangement, the daytime shot above betrays a certain cheap feel compared to the all-neon signs at the Half Moon. But after sundown, it shows up quite well indeed, aided by the one bit that actually is neon: namely the green-hued arrowhead. In daylight, you hardly even notice it. Or rather, you can see it, but without the illumination to set it off it looks like it's only there to old up the actual signs.

As for the Astro, we hoped that the Jetsons-like abstract structure upholding the words Astro and Motel would similarly be outlined in neon, but sadly that isn't the case. It was a missed opportunity to be sure.

But at least the horticultural business next door has a herd of dinosaurs. During business hours they can be seen in various places around the grounds, but here we see them penned up for the night, where they must have already fallen asleep by the time this photo was taken.

The dino that looks like a Bactrian camel is a new one to me.

Secret Stairs

2012-10-08T23:48:00.001-07:00

Most Angelenos are probably aware that the city engineering department is responsible for maintaining the roads, sidewalks, and streets, and, of course, such appurtenances as bridges and tunnels.

The present day cityscape makes it easy to miss the fact that not all pedestrian thoroughfares are regular sidewalks. On this page we begin a look at the secret pedestrian stairs of L.A., starting with this one in Palms.

Before going any further an acknowledgement is due to the Google Field Trip smartphone app, without which I'd never have known it was here. These stairs lead northwest from Rose Avenue up to Kingsland Street on top of the hill overlooking Rose Avenue from the north. The stairway was most likely built about 1949, when Palms Middle School was established, in order to allow students living in the hilltop neighborhood to reach the school. Field Trip says the stairs were placed in the 1920s, but that is presumably incorrect because it's unlikely that the stairs were there before the middle school.

There is a website devoted to hidden stairs in Los Angeles. Most of these are much closer to downtown L.A., and recall a time when people didn't rely on cars as much as they do now, going back as far as the early 20th Century. Going back only as far as 1949, this stairway recalls a time when more kids walked farther to and from school. I doubt if any kids at Palms MS still use the stairway, which is understandable given the rough condition of the pavement.

Here we are a little further upstairs. On the right there is a loop of razor wire visible about halfway up the height of the picture frame, somewhat surprising for this mostly quiet and safe neighborhood. Whatever the reason it might have been put there originally, it doesn't seem to be in actual use now, simply hanging uselessly off the fence of an apartment house.

Further up near the top, the apartments give way to detached houses. The flowers seen to the right--geraniums, if we're not mistaken--provide a welcome horticultural accent.

We pause to turn around, seeing how far we've had to climb. It works out to about 75 stairs in all.

And here's the top, on Kingsland.

The path runs in between these two houses, which can't be all that great for those who live in them, particularly the one on the right. Then again, hardly anyone does use the stairway so it's probably not much of an issue.

Update 2012-10-11

We went back today and got a few more pictures, to better capture the overgrown foliage here and there. Overgrowth of foliage is necessary to sustain the characterization of this stairway as "hidden".

In the next photo it's evident that the owner of one adjoining house has gotten into the spirit by letting nature run wild with spiky succulents.

Not far from this is a children's swing set long since disused.

Another view towards Rose Avenue, far below. The luxuriant growth here looks almost tropical.

What Is The Well Dressed No Parking Sign Wearing?

2012-10-08T23:47:00.000-07:00

Climbing ivy accented by morning glory flowers, that's what!

We really don't have much information to offer here. Did the occupants of these houses one day decide to train some foliage to climb up the signposts? I can't imagine that the city engineering department, which normally takes care of the streets and signs, is the responsible party.

Regardless of who was responsible, the signposts themselves are admirably suited to the training of climbing plants, since they are lined with holes all the way up. Morning glory plants do seem to run wild in this neighborhood, so it's possible that this was an act of nature.

On the other hand, the greenery around this stop sign strongly suggests the attention of some loving hand.

Just Plain Palms

2012-09-24T23:12:00.000-07:00

Just as the Himalayas are adjoined by the plains of Northern India, so does the Hillside Dingbat District of Palms have the advantage of neighboring flatlands to set it off. We have already examined a few of the architectural gems belonging to the area on a one-off basis, and now we look at a few more distinctive residences.

Now and Zen

The allusions to India and the Himalayas are admittedly a stretch, but we were more surprised than anyone to happen on this unusual shrine in front of what otherwise is an ordinary dingbat complex.

As it happens, the Buddha here is actually a fountain whose waters drip gently from the spout at the top to a basin below, producing a satisfying contrast with the dry landscaping that surrounds it.

Hedges

When observing the dingbat in its natural habitat, it seems that the standard front garden consists of a four-foot-wide strip of grass and possibly flower beds all along the front of the property. (In spite of this limited square footage, it still requires forty-five minutes of horticultural fine-tuning once or twice a week, said fine-tuning to be administered with various types of extremely noisy implements.)

We therefore tend to notice the dingbat whose builders or owners have gone an extra mile or two in the area of greenery, because they sometimes achieve a kind of modernistic grandeur which is usually not seen in the average detached house. One big reason for that is the fact that, for most of the 20th Century average houses in this region have almost always been single-story. You usually can't grow an imposing ten-foot hedge in front of a ranch house.

Hedged Dingbat

But you can certainly do it in front of your two-story dingbat. This particular specimen displays several features apparently calculated to elevate its class appeal. Beginning with the second story, the tall narrow windows on either side of the corner, posts, and textured wall all suggest an upscale house, or possibly a small mid-century office building such as you might find in Beverly Hills along Wilshire. The tall hedge conveys an above average expectation of privacy.

And that feeling of privacy is enhanced by this curving walk, which is truly unusual in the dingbat domain. We are reminded of Paul Fussell's observation* of upper class houses and the curved driveways that lead to them.

The word "cove" does inspire us to seek out additional allusions to nautical life, or even pirates -- but this quest turns out to be in vain.

* Paul Fussell, 1983. Class. A Guide Through The American Status System. New York: Ballantine, 1983. p80

Tombstones

^{A curious trend in apartment houses has sprung up: stuccoed obelisks that rise up in front of them, presumably intended to attract renters by announcing the amenities of the place.}

^{That seems straightforward enough, yet shown here is the only specimen we know of that actually puts the sign to use. In all the rest, they are completely unadorned with anything that would give them a purpose. They stand starkly like tombstones that still await the engraver's chisel.}

Or like mysterious alien obelisks that still await the enquiring touch of some passing prehistoric hominid.

We can almost hear the music from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Left Turn OK

2012-09-09T14:44:00.000-07:00

Daily driven past by thousands of motorists with scarcely a look, and across from headquarters of the L.A. Weekly alternative biweekly, this West L.A. stretch of Sepulveda boasts a sort of miniature Motel Row. The signage and decorative exterior touches exude a feeling of postwar commercial exuberance, almost reminiscent of the Googie-esque diners that were sprinkled across Greater L.A. when these motels were built.

Our first stop is the Half Moon Motel. Public records indicate that the place was built in the late 1950s, and who are we to question public records? Besides, one look tells us that it couldn't have come from any other time.

The most noteworthy feature here is the neon lighting used in all the signage. The crescent decoration visible on the wall, next to the second story window at the extreme left, further reinforces the semi-lunar theme.

In the picture below you can see the red and white chevron accents along the railing, which seems to add a festive, holiday touch exuding a vaguely Alpine feel. Oddly enough, the Swiss Motors auto repair shop is just across and a few doors up, and is resolutely anti-Alpine in its general appearance.

Remarkably for this busy yet humdrum and utilitarian stretch of Sepulveda Boulevard, hard by the 405, all these motels bring to mind past road trips that included nights in motels that were just like this, except for their surroundings. Whether on remote stretches of old Route 66 or in the middle of West Los Angeles, mid-century motels in this state of preservation are remarkable survivors of their time.

We can't leave the Half Moon without a look at its remarkable lounge/bar. At least, I think it's a bar, assuming all those bottles in view are not merely Torani flavorings for coffee. In this modest yet welcome attempt to provide night life for its guests, this motel reminds us of the larger than life efforts of larger establishments, now long gone, like Wisconsin's famed Gobbler Supper Club and Motel.

It's Happening At The Half-Moon

Although the place dates from the 1950s, this particular room gives off a definite 1970s vibe, the little seating area to the right reminiscent of the miniature on-board lounges the airlines used to hawk in their advertising. And it's hard for anyone who survived the 1970s to take this scene in without imagining the chairs and tables being pushed out of the way before dropping the needle on a Bee Gees album.

Immediately north of here stand two ordinary hostelries of the standard chain motel type, a religious bookstore, and a small office building but this one is merely a generic Best Western in its discrete brown building. But continuing northwards, we now arrive at still another vintage motel, above which floats the cheerful banner "Deano's".

Welcome to Deano's

And after that comes the Astro.

Welcome to the Astro

Both the Astro and Deano's have omitted the evocative neon lighting and opted instead for cheaper illuminated plastic, and this even though Deano's turns out to be the oldest motel on the block. According to public records, it began in 1926 when it had zero bedrooms, zero bathrooms, and twenty-six units. (Translation: it was a bungalow court and none of the units had its own bathroom.)

As it turns out, these two motels seem to be locked in a death struggle expressed by the garishness of their signs. First Deano's...

... where said garishness proclaims proudly the availability of Cable TV and Telephones. The strategy has evidently paid off, since we also learn there is NO Vacancy. Deano's also amuses with this sign, letting us know that we can watch the aforementioned cable connected TV in COLOR.

It's color TV by RCA, to be absolutely accurate.

As for the Astro, here is their sign.

The Jetson-esque shape of the sign stands out here, obviously as pure an expression of early mid-century "space age" style as we'll find anywhere. It's clear that the "Astro" here comes from "astronaut", and by extension from all the optimistic dreams the dawning Space Age inspired. Sure, the Russians might have beaten us to the punch when it came to launching the first artificial satellite. But only in America could you build your own motel and name it the Astro, and trick out your sign with a strange brew of Danish Modern and Tomorrowland-Jetsons.

On the other hand, we can't help but notice undertone of desperation in the LEFT TURN OK sign.

It's almost as if they desperately hope we'll notice and choose their hotel before we notice the others. After all, we can make a left turn into their driveway so, what's stopping us? How can we pass up such an opportunity?

Update 2012-10-22
Earlier sunsets have arrived, so we went back and got some evening shots, which you can see here.

Trompe-l'oeil in Culver City

2012-07-01T23:30:00.000-07:00

Trompe-l'oeil, or "fooling thes eye", denotes paintings or photographs so executed annd placed as to suggest the images are real. After Antiquity, the the first trompe l'oeil paintings were executed by Renaissance Italian painters after the geometric secrets of perspective were rediscovered. Visitors to the churches and palaces on the interior walls of which they painted these illusions could now experience the novel uncertainty that goes with the possibility of having huge potted plants dumped on them.

Ceiling Fresco by Andrea Mantegna, ca. 1470. Camera degli Sposi, Palazzo Ducale, Mantua

Or, they could break their noses walking into doorways that weren't there.

Fresco in the Palazzo Spada in Rome by Francesco Borromini.

The fact is, you don't have to go all the way to Italy to see an example of trompe-l'oeil, because you can do that right here in the City of Culver City City, as we like to call it. If you have recently walked into this signal box...

... then you, too, have become the victim of trompe-l'oeil. To help you avoid traps like this in the future, here's a more revealing view of the signal box's true nature:

While approaching the refurbished Culver Hotel, it's more than possible that a strolling Munchkin, or a small child, has broken his nose walking into this signal box standing directly to the west.

If only he'd approached it from this slightly different direction...

... he would have seen this dangerous illusion for what it was, and averted this near tragedy. Instead of being rushed over to the Brotman ER with a broken nose, this Munchkin or whoever it was would have been able to stroll back to the parking garage, pausing to take in one of the several zoetropes positioned around the area.

Giving this odd cylindrical object a hearty shove, the Munchkin would have been able to enjoy this interesting illusion:

Here's another, with a more up-to-date subject.

And now it's time to go.

Victory Is Sweet, Especially After 45 Years

2012-06-17T17:02:00.001-07:00

Whether you follow the NHL or not, if you live in L.A. you probably have noticed quite a few people around town sporting L.A. Kings attire. This is particularly true in the South Bay, which is where the Kings have their training center, in El Segundo to be exact. Most of the players live in and around Manhattan Beach.

Bringing major league ice hockey to California must have seemed like a stroke of particular boldness back in 1967; it had been only nine years earlier that major league baseball had arrived in the persons of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. And the Lakers had come a year after that. One might have thought that L.A. could never be a city of sports fans in the same way as Boston or New York. A half century later, the Lakers and the Dodgers are civic institutions, as fully identified with this city as beaches, traffic, smog, and Dragnet. And so are the Kings, and that isn't only because they just won the Cup. The Kings have garnered an intensely loyal and devoted following for decades. Kings fans play in their own amateur hockey leagues. Kings fans tend to have life sized posters of The Great One on their office walls. One season ticket holder of 31 years standing, has become well known at Staples Center for his customized jersey emblazoned with the slogan CUP B4 I DIE. That may be the clearest illustration of what a huge deal it is for this city.

He hasn't confided to us whether he will continue wearing the jersey next season.

Over the past four decades, the fans have stuck by their team through thick and thin. They've seen the Kings acquire top notch talent, apparently doing all the right things to win and reach the playoffs, only to have everything go awry. For a long time, Bostonians must have felt the same way about the Red Sox, making their 2004 World Series win one of the biggest things to happen in Boston since the Battle of Bunker Hill, and a classic underdog story to boot.

Did we mention that this is a huge deal? It's brought out swarms of potential new fans who, until last Monday, were indifferent to hockey. But we're sure the long-suffering veterans of L.A. Kings fandom won't mind a few jumpers onto their bandwagon, because they're still savoring the taste of that victory six days ago.

Expo Line station platform, filling up with the fans

We decided to enhance the hell-freezes-over strangeness by taking the train downtown to cover the victory parade. You read that right--we went downtown to cheer our National (Ice) Hockey League team's winning of the league championship, and we took a train to get there. What's the name of this blog, again? Oh, right. Wandering in L.A., the world capital of car culture and ice-free winters.

The parade route, along Figueroa from north of Wilshire down to the Staples Center was lined by a patient crowd. Nobody minded that the motorcade got rolling about a half-hour late.


Waiting Till Kings Come

A few evangelical missionaries didn't miss the opportunity to seek converts. We asked one of the numerous police officers on hand if there was anything they could do, since their signs were blocking the view, and they said no, citing the First Amendment. The sign holders eventually moved on anyway, taking the problem with them.

Missionary Zeal

Meanwhile, a blimp floated serenely overhead. Presumably it was the Goodyear Blimp, but it was impossible to be sure.

Riding majestically over U.S. Bank Tower

The crowd continue to gather, as seen in this unusual shot created by holding the camera overhead and aiming it a little too high.

Finally, the passage of a couple of "unmarked" police cars--as if dark blue Ford Crown Vics could possibly be anything else--heralded the start of the procession.

We already did this, but are unable to resist the urge to share another shot of the Cup being held overhead.

That Cup is the oldest and oddest trophy in professional sports. It hardly resembles a cup at all, what with the numerous bands with which the base has been extended in order to accommodate all the names that have been added to it. This isn't like an Olympic gold medal which the winner gets to take home and keep forever. This is the one Stanley Cup that has been passed around from winning team to winning team over the years. (Well actually, there are two others, one of which is on permanent display at the NHL Hall of Fame.) Moreover, each member of every winning team is entitled to take the Cup home for a few days.

As you might expect, just about everybody along the parade route held up phones or cameras to capture that memorable day. But so did the Kings, as if this were as memorable an event for them.

Getting pictures of the crowd

That last statement may seem to be inanely obvious. But remember, this is the first time ever for this team. Nothing can duplicate the experience.

But nobody in this town will mind if they pull it off again next year.

Partial Solar Eclipse of May 20, 2012

2012-05-21T22:42:00.001-07:00

Yesterday there was an annular solar eclipse--that is, one in which the moon's apparent diameter is not quite large enough to completely block the sun. In contrast to a total solar eclipse, a thin ring of sunlight remains visible at the time of maximum coverage, and we don't get to see the sun's corona. This, in turn, comes from the fact that solar eclipses always occur at the time of the new moon, and this month's new moon is smaller in apparent diameter than usual. And that follows naturally from the fact that at the time of the full moon fifteen days ago, the moon was correspondingly closer with a bigger apparent diameter.

This is one of the key aspects of science. The chain of cause and effect can go on and on.

Here in Los Angeles, we were outside the path of annularity, but still were treated to our finest partial solar eclipse in two generations. The pictures that follow were taken with a 12-megapixel digital camera and at full zoom except where otherwise noted. The location was downtown Culver City for the first several photos, which were taken through a solar filter held in front of the camera lens. This filter is just like the dark yellow-green welding glass astronomers advised people to use, but smaller and designed to fit over a telescope eyepiece.

The Eclipse Begins

About twenty minutes later the next picture was taken.


A Bigger Bite

At this point, the usual late afternoon haze, for which all the Westside is notorious, began to move in. This didn't bode well, so we decided to head home, a few minutes' drive distant, to continue our observations there and see if we could still capture anything worthwhile.

Actually, that thin layer of cloud was the best thing that could have happened, because that made it possible to continue shooting without the filter. Here is the first of these pictures.


Approaching maximum occultation

In the pictures that follow, we can observe two things. First, the crescent-like area of sunlight gets thinner, and secondly that shape swings around counterclockwise, as the moon's position in the sky was slightly higher than the sun's.

Later, a little closer to max occultation

The next photo must have been right around the instant of maximum occultation. It is difficult to be sure, though, because as luck would have it, the camera's calendar-clock was about a day behind. Not a whole, exact, single day, mind you, because that would have been too easy. Instead, we're talking about twenty-three hours "and change", as the expression goes.

At Maximum Occultation

To close this out, we present the following wide shot. As in the previous photographs, the mostly obscured sun is unable to overcome what must have really been a mere thin haze. This also demonstrates clearly how even a partial eclipse can result in a very significant darkening effect, given sufficiently great occultation by the moon. Recalling that this picture was taken without any kind of filter, it is remarkable how wan the light of this remaining sliver of sun is. Under normal circumstances, too, some color in the trees and houses would still be evident, but the light here was too dim for that to register.


Wide Shot, Shortly After Maximum

Also evident here is how the "crescent" has swung around, so to speak, in comparison with earlier views; there the points of the "crescent" were aimed to the observer's right and slightly upward. Here they point nearly straight up, like the bow and stern of some exotic boat.

All these shots were cropped from the originals for inclusion here. Anyone who is interested may see the originals in our Flickr stream here. In addition to the fact that those pictures are un-cropped, there are several more that were omitted from this post.

Addendum 2012-05-24

Although we were unable to see the full effect of annularity, it seems only proper to provide an illustration of it. Our thanks go out to our friend beowulff, of the Straight Dope Message Board community, who did his observing at Sandia Peak, NM, and graciously consented to the use of his photograph, below.

Full Annularity, As Visible from Sandia Peak, NM

We are also indebted to another member of the SDMB, who prefers to remain uncredited but has allowed us the use of the following photo showing what we might as well call the pinhole effect. In the absence of an adequate viewing filter, amateur observers are usually advised to use a pinhole in a sheet of thin cardboard, which projects the partially eclipsed Sun's image onto the ground or another sheet. As it turns out, when the light of the Sun shines through a tree, the apertures between the leaves can also act as pinholes, and result in the projection of hundreds of individual images beyond the tree, as shown in this photograph.

Numerous Projected Images Created By Sunlight Passing Through A Tree

UCLA Series: Boelter Hall and Math Sciences

2011-10-29T16:43:00.001-07:00

We now take a look at a couple of buildings on the UCLA campus. This will most likely turn into a series of architectural posts, each of which will examine a different era of building at UCLA. These installments will not be in any particular order.

If UCLA's buildings have any one unifying theme, it is red brick facing accented by white or off-white columns and pillars or arcades. This is seen in UCLA's most iconic building of all, Royce Hall.

Hall and the connected Engineering and Math Sciences buildings date back to the early 1960s. Regardless of your major, if you completed any degree at UCLA, chances are you took at least one course here.

In addition to Boelter and Math Sciences, the Engineering school occupies additional buildings in this interconnected structure.

Note the white columns. As with the old buildings, white support elements have been used here. Through the years the planners of UCLA have done a good job preserving a sense of cohesion as new buildings have been continually added. Brick facing and white accents are a common thread throughout. Surprisingly for the more modern structures, the columns usually still appear serve a structural purpose, instead of being merely decorative.

Despite appearances, this is the fourth floor entrance. As evident here, the ground is rising towards our viewpoint; when we get up to the Court of Sciences the "ground" floor is the fifth. There's not much on this floor, but in the old days this is where the computer was. Not the "computing center", where students used to check out or use notebooks, but the computer -- an IBM 360 series model. . Students came here to use the word processor WYLBUR and print out their theses and dissertations. In addition to the computer room itself, there was another room nearby with half a dozen keypunch consoles, which didn't go entirely out of use until the 1980s.

I don't know what now occupies the room where the bank of manuals, dumb green screen terminals, and the support techs used to be available.

That big double door that led to this large room has been locked for years.

Two floors above we find the mathematics department. I wasn't a math major myself, but I did frequently walk through here during my student days at UCLA, 1982 - 1984. As long ago as that was, the building's interiors have hardly changed at all since, and likely hadn't changed for decades before that.

The first thing we notice on the sixth floor are the scores of history's great mathematicians depicted in rows of portraits decorating the corridor walls. As an example we offer Leonardo da Pisa, also known as Fibonacci.

Among other things, he is known for the Fibonacci sequence, which starts with the seed values 0 and 1 and forms each successive number by summing the previous two, as follows:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ...

Surprisingly, this series shows up in all sorts of strange places; in plants such as sunflowers and pineapples, the numbers of opposing spirals are usually two adjacent numbers in this series.

Proceeding along the corridor, we look behind us and behold The Eye:

Here's a longer shot.

On the left is the mathematics department office, and the bulletin boards display the same type of announcements and ads you'd see in any university math department. The second display case has contained some department mementos which probably go back to a time before the department moved into this building. There's also a plastic model of a Klein bottle--a sort of 3D version of a Möbius strip. All of these items looks as if they haven't been changed in over fifty years.

The people in the office were unable to shed any light on the origin of The Eye, but it looks like an early computer graphics project.

Continuing east through Math Sciences and turning right into Boelter Hall we come across a couple of odd holdovers of an earlier time. There's a built-in phone booth:

Built In phone booth

Almost directly across the corridor there's a men's restroom--but not just any men, because it was originally intended for faculty men:

Faculty Men only

This seems more suited to a high school campus, and is quite out of place here. Although I doubt it was the case, it suggests there were also Boys' and Girls' rooms, and possibly also a Faculty Smoking Lounge. I doubt if any attempt has been made to restrict the usage of this washroom for at least forty years, but the lock on the door does suggest it was restricted to keyholders at one time.

Down, Down To Munchkinland We Go!

2011-03-30T14:35:00.007-07:00

The Heart Of Screenland, according to the motto that goes with its official seal, is Culver City. Considering that there are three major studios within a short distance of each other, along with one or two important landmarks boasting special connections to the history of film, that claim is justified.

The Culver Studios administration building is featured in the title sequences of numerous films made under the banner of David Selznick.


Culver Studios

As near as I can tell, few if any motion pictures were produced under the Culver Studios label; instead the facilities were leased out to different producers and companies through the years. In the early years RKO and RKO-Pathe were here for many years. This is where Gone With The Wind was produced, entirely on the back lot. In 1956, Desilu Studios move in, and the facility became much more concerned with TV production. The original series pilot episodes for Star Trek were produced here, although the series itself was produced a few miles away at Paramount. Paramount, by the way, is across the street from the Alexander The Great Apartments, which we covered in an earlier post to this blog. Today Culver Studios operates as a full service production facility in a variety of specialties. In addition to the expected emphasis on film, television, and commercial production, they also provide rehearsal space for top flight musicians and bands to perfect their sound before heading out on tour.

The real center of downtown Culver City, however, is where Washington and Culver Boulevards intersect at a narrow angle and thereby form a sort of miniature Times Square. Wedged into one of the resulting wedge-shaped corners is the Culver Hotel, the undisputed centerpiece of the district.

The Culver Hotel

The wider end of the building is where we find the main entrance. Approaching the entrance, there's almost a European feel, which is not accidental. The bare temperate zone trees in this picture, taken in early Spring, heightens this effect.

Culver Hotel Main Entrance

For a number of years before the late 1990s, this hotel was shuttered. Despite the proximity of the studios, and a large residential district in easy walking distance, this commercial section was rather moribund. Around the time new owners took over the building, Culver City's downtown was refurbished as a live theater took over the old Culver Cinema, and a coffeeshop and several restaurants came in. Much of Washington and Culver Boulevard was paved over to turn the entire area into a pedestrian zone; and the overall effort has proved to be fairly successful.

The Culver Hotel is famous for having sheltered some of the cast and crew from the filming of The Wizard Of Oz--most notably, Munchkins. A remembrance of this event can be seen to the right of the entrance.

The Wizard Of Oz

with this informative card explaining everything to us.

Be careful to hold your breath so the poppies won't send you to sleep.

Turning around, we see the statuary group of the Harry Culver, for whom Culver City was named, and his wife and daughter. It seems more like what we would expect to see on the main street of a small Kansas town--which is not surprising since the plaque tells us he was born there in 1880. Harry Culver joined forces with Charlie Chaplin to build the Culver Hotel, which opened in 1924 as the Hotel Hunt.


Harry Culver and Family

Not surprisingly, the hotel's prominence in the local film making scene goes back well before Wizard Of Oz. In numerous, mostly silent, films of the 1920s the hotel appears as a backdrop. Scenes from many of these movies are shown continuously on a large screen in the lobby bar.

Let's take a look inside. Because we're going in by the side door, we first pass through a private banquet room.

A hall for private banquets

Here's a view inside the Lobby Bar. As you can see, they continue to show the movies regardless of the fact that the band is playing.

The band is cooking and Laurel and Hardy are, I don't know, probably making a mess in the kitchen.

Outside again, and continuing to our right, we come to some historical markers.


Historical Markers

Of special interest is the bottom plaque, placed by the Sons Of The Desert, the venerable Laurel and Hardy Fan Club. The name of this club was inspired by their film of the same name. As with the fictional fraternity, the fan club calls its local units "tents." We can thank the association's Way Out West Tent for this tribute.

We pause to admire the building's tricked out cornice decoration...

And the neo-Palladian accents and pilasters near the windows.

The architects who designed this building, Claud Beelman and Alexander Curlett, also designed numerous other local buildings. Many of these, like the Culver Hotel, boast the status of historical landmarks.

Continuing along the south side of the building we come to the hotel's narrow end.


The Narrow End

If this whole area is like a like a miniature version of Times Square, then the Culver Hotel has to be a stand-in for Times Tower at the south end of the Square. While this modest six-story structure is far less impressive than the New York tower shown in my link, it has fared better architecturally. One Times Square still exists, but today is little more than a giant billboard.

While the other, uptown end of the real Times Square doesn't seem to have an iconic building to match Times Tower, at the opposite end of this Culver City district is the Washington Building, home to one of the better Starbucks locations. What makes this Starbucks special is the interesting architecture of the building, which is obvious not only from the outside,

Starbucks in The Washington Building

but is also clearly evident in how the interior has been arranged to take advantage of its odd, triangular shape. Another attractive feature is the fact that much of the floor space is actually occupied by tables and chairs where the customers may sit while consuming coffee on the premises--as opposed to merchandise displays intended to facilitate the consumption of coffee at home.

The interior displays a patterned metal ceiling which seems to have been typical of early 20th Century commercial buildings, although it may be a recent emulation done in the course of restoring the structure.

Patterned metal ceiling

And we'll leave with a final exterior view.

Vergil Must Have Been Here

2011-03-30T13:53:00.001-07:00

Acknowledging a penchant for Classical allusion, we need to mention the Roman Gardens Apartments, which have been very well documented by one of my favorite bloggers, the Dingbatologist.

The Roman Gardens

This place is a few blocks away from my old high school. What the Dingbatologist apparently didn't know was that, so many years ago, the trees in front were a lot smaller and more sparse, and that now they have obscured the awe-inspiring Latin translation of the name.

Romani Hortii

This was as much as I could get without looking like a would-be burglar; you can just make out the letters ROMA_I, or ROMANI. Through painstaking field research, I was able to verify that the HORTII is also still there, concealed by the tree to the right. It must be conceded that the abundantly fruiting Citrus aurantium dulcis tree to the left, with its many aurantii, does give the place a fine Mediterranean flavor. Or at least an orange-y one.

This building isn't far from the Quo Vadis Apartments, also covered by the Dingbatologist. Since they are both near a high school I wonder if there was some Latin teacher there who owned these places in the early 1960s or some time around then.

The Venus de Mentone

2011-03-30T13:41:00.001-07:00

We need not assume that the dingbat must be entirely devoid of classical stylistic elements. Gracing an otherwise nondescript apartment building in Palms we can see the famous Venus of Clarington. Or was it Mentone Avenue?

Nobody expects to find a semi-classical Venus gracing a Palms dingbat.

Stairway To Heaven: Even More Dingbat Paradise In Palms, California

2011-03-20T20:14:00.000-07:00

As you reach the summit of Overland Avenue, northbound, you pass by this stairway on your right. At first I thought it belonged to one of the apartment complexes that line this stretch of Overland.

Stairway To Paradise

But it isn't so. Instead, this is evidently a public stairway presumably built and maintained by the city. It leads up to the end of a short cul-de-sac seen, which looks like this.

Top of the steps

Walking onward and then turning right, we enter a short and steeply descending street of mid 20th-century dingbats. These remind us strongly of the much more posh canyon neighborhoods of Brentwood, Beverly Hills PO, Beverly Hills itself, and the Hollywood Hills--specifically of the single-family houses typically built during the 1950s and 1960s in those areas. However, except for one or two single-family houses, these are all dingbats.

This area is behind a hill to the southwest, sparing it some of the afternoon sun's heat. Not surprisingly it appears appears a bit more lush than the surrounding streets.

And lastly a couple of views towards the way we came...