Oldie but goodie

She was born in 1956, a good year. It's hard to know the life she led, but it's clear that she had a roof over her head. She has lived a sheltered life since, as rumors go in the neighborhood, the 1960s. But the other day, she was finally brought out of her garage, and taken away.

The house, a single shotgun on Dauphine Street, is being remodeled now. There are still signs of the 2005 Flood on the front by the door, and the place looks shabby and down at heel, but there are workers in there now, revitalizing the place.

But it's no longer her home. The garage in the back is crumbling apart. It's time for her to go. This 1956 Dodge Coronet is saying farewell to Dauphine Street, at last.

We'll miss her pretty face.

A stop for rest along the way

Click any photo to "embiggen"

Highway 111 in the town of Thermal, California typically has the right of way through the crossroads that intersect it, but at Avenue 62 there's a four-way stop.

This change-up in traffic control may be one reason the roadside shrine caught our eyes when we slowed down to stop in the southbound lane.

A farewell

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 Only the luckiest of people are given the opportunity to make a public farewell when a transition occurs. I am lucky.

Some 4 or so years ago, a colleague retired. He had, all by his ownself, started a newsletter, which had a good following, and which I admired greatly. So....when he left the office, I asked our boss if I could carry it on in his stead. She agreed, and I spent perhaps four months editing his newsletter while they were recruiting his replacement. 

It was a lot of work, but it was really rewarding for me. When the new person was hired, I helped to train her and when she took over she made the newsletter her own.

Fast forward to now, and my job duties began winding down in the face of closure. At the same time, the newsletter editor's duties were ramping up on a new project. I volunteered to take the newsletter over again, temporarily.

My last edition went out Wednesday. There are only a few elements of the newsletter that allow the editor some creative input - other than choosing which items to feature. But of the purely creative choices, one is the photo shown at the top. The other is the quote that appears under the title.

This is my farewell edition of the newsletter.  It's a collaboration between me and the next editor, who I helped train, again, just this week.

I got some nice comments from work colleagues about it today. It made me feel good. It's a goodbye to an historic institution You can read more about it here. We're closing the old girl down, and it's nice to see that people care.

Gone - The Lyceum Theatre

Lyceum Theatre, Main Street Los Angeles, 1941. Photo from Los Angeles Public Library
Click to "embiggen" for detail

A commenter posted a question in a post below asking why downtown Los Angeles appeared so dangerous and run down, when in most cities, the central core is usually vibrant and quite posh. It made me think, and I started looking through the photo collection at the Los Angeles Public Libray.

I ran some searches on a few random terms, one of which was "parking lot." And among the results, I found a photo of this amazing building that once stood in downtown Los Angeles.

It's the Lyceum Theatre, that once stood at 227 Spring Street. Built in 1898 as the Los Angeles Theatre, it became L.A.'s second Orpheum Theatre (there would be four), it was renamed the Lyceum before being torn down in 1941.

What hauled it into the search engine's net was that the caption said it had been demolished to make way for a parking lot.

Gone.