Thematic Photographic - on the road

Click to "embiggen" for greater detail

I am re-posting this photo for Carmi's "Thematic Photographic" challenge. The theme is "on the road" and this photo was taken on the road - from the window of a moving car.

We're on Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles. The large building with the mural is the former Olympic Auditorium - once the premier boxing venue on the West Coast, now a Korean Christian Church. It's framed by the trappings of a different kind of King. The sky on that day was so like the sky in the mural it all blends together and adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts - don't you think?

I apologize to those who are seeing it for the second time in recent weeks - but I think it's perfect for Carmi's theme.

Spring?

After two solid days of rain, today the sky was clear and bright. We took a walk out Red Rock Canyon Park.

The creek was full but not overflowing, and everywhere was the sound of running water. Water poured off the sides of the huge rocks and trickled into the stream.


The wildflowers are not yet blooming - at least not many. I found this little yellow mushroom growing up in the grass. It's smaller than my little finger.

Lots of people were out, especially families with small children and dogs - the children in their rubber boots splashing in the puddles and wading in the creek.

Jack's not interested in the water - he prefers to keep his paws dry and clean. But he sure had a nice time.

Is it almost spring?

Pink Saturday - pink umbrella

Pink Saturday - Beverly at the blog "How Sweet the Sound" hosts Pink Saturday. Let the color pink inspire you!


The rains are back. It started raining Friday morning, and now - at 8:51 pm on Friday as I write, it's still raining.

I have an umbrella - one of those compact umbrellas that collapse and fold into something that fits into your handbag. I got it at a drugstore or a discount store, and I don't even remember why I chose this one.

It's pink.

Yes, pink.

Bright shocking pink.

It's easy to find, since it stands out in a dark and cluttered closet. It adds a note of cheerfulness to a gloomy day. It makes me visible on the street when I'm walking with it. At work, when people put their umbrellas out by the loading dock to dry out, I can always recognize mine. And the best part?

I figure that neither my husband nor my son will make off with this one.

Stay warm and dry this Pink Saturday, everyone!

Update, Saturday 6:37 AM: It's still raining!

Thematic Photographic - on the road

Each week Carmi at Written, Inc. has challenged readers with a theme for photographic inspiration. This week the photographic challenge continues with the theme "On the road."

On the road outside of Houston, Texas. I have no idea what's in that tanker, and I'm not sure I want to know. Click to "embiggen" if you need to read the script.

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.

A small gift

A friend visiting from the Pacific Northwest brought a little gift. Wild chanterelle mushrooms, gathered from the Olympic Peninsula. There's only a small handful of them - perhaps 2 dozen small 'shrooms.

What would you do with them?

American Arcades

When I discovered Paris's 19th Century covered shopping arcades this summer, I learned it was a fad that sprang up in other European countries, giving rise to London's Burlington Arcade, the Saint-Hubert Galleries in Brussels, and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, Italy. In St. Petersberg, Russia, a 19th Century glass-roofed arcade called the Passazh is still standing today.

The fad came to America, too. The first American arcade was built in Providence, Rhode Island in 1828. The Westminster Arcade is an imposing building with a facade of six massive Ionic columns facing the street.

Cleveland Arcade - photo from the Library of Congress Historical American Building Survey

There are a few notable arcades in the Midwest, notably the magnificent 5-story Cleveland Arcade still operating in the downtown theatre district today, and others in Dayton and Nashville, Tennessee. They were built a bit later, in the 1890s and 1900s.

By this time, the Parisian arcades were in their decline, but American businesses were booming in downtown districts, and the arcades catered both to leisurely shoppers and office workers alike.

Broadway Arcade Building, 1953 from Los Angeles Public Library

Here in Los Angeles, in 1924, architects Kenneth MacDonald and Maurice Couchot built the Arcade Building at 541 Spring Street between 5th and 6th. There were entrances on both Broadway and Spring.

This elegant candy shop once graced the Broadway entry of the Arcade building, as seen in this 1930 photo from the Los Angeles Public Library.

The Broadway entrance today

Each entrance is marked with a beautiful archway lunette, decorated with ornate Beaux Arts/Spanish Renaissance motifs. It's really two 12 story buildings, one on Spring and one on Broadway, linked by the glass-roofed arcade. The iconic KRKD radio tower still stands on the rooftop today, although the station went off the air in the 1970s.

The arcade itself is three stories high, with a broad curved glass roof. Here in this 1953 photo you can see the storefronts and the broad passageway and upper galleries with planter boxes.

Image from the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris

It's as spacious and elegant a space as the Parisian passages, although by 1927 when it was built the Parisian passages were going into a decline.

Spring Street facade, undated photo from Los Angeles Public Library -
Click to "embiggen" for detail

The Los Angeles City Directories from 1929 through 1956 show offices for attorneys, insurance companies, collection agencies and medical businesses on the upper floors of the building, and the shops in the Arcade were the kind that served office workers. Stationers, shoe repair shops, smoke shops, a barbershop, a branch of the U.S. Post Office, a travel agency. There was a shoe store, and a restaurant called the Arcade Grill on the ground floor, and there was a billiard parlor and bowling alley in the basement.

Los Angeles Public Library, photo by William Reagh

Through the '60s and into the '70s, white businesses began to leave downtown. In this photo from 1963, the Arcade looks quiet and a little deserted.

Today it bustles with activity - though the primary language is Spanish. The displays of merchandise spill beyond the shop fronts, encroaching into into the walkway.

Music and electronic noise fills the air from the stores selling DVDs, electronics, toys,luggage and knockoff attire.

This display is totally kaleidoscopic in its abundance and chaos. I would guess that today's Arcade is perhaps a more vital community than it was as an office building.

Not too far from here, up on North Broadway in Chinatown, there's another crowded shopping passage that show us a another take on arcades - the arcades of today.

This is the narrow and choked passage of Saigon Plaza. You enter past a scrum of food and novelty vendors on the sidewalk, then plunge into a claustrophobic crush of people moving past crowded stall. On some days, it's so crowded you're shoulder-to-shoulder with other shoppers.

It's just a narrow alley between buildings, with vending stalls that raise awnings to shelter their merchandise. T-shirts, bed linens, childrens' toys, hoisery, lingerie, luggage - you name it, it's here.

This is where we go to find ant chalk, after the County inspectors have cracked down on the storefront merchants on Broadway.

As you go deeper into the passage, it turns and suddenly overhead arches a ribbed roof covered with transparent glazing.

PVC pipe and heavy-duty plastic cover the walkway, in an ingenious and perhaps entirely unconscious replica of a 19th century Parisian passage, enclosing it and creating an environment that our old friend Walter Benjamin might well recognize.

Passage Jouffrey, Paris, 1855, Bibliotheque Nationale

If you look carefully in either of these two passages de Los Angeles, I'm sure you will find a flaneur or two strolling about.

Look, there's some now.

Ramshackle

Anyone who's ever owned an old house knows it's a constant chore to repair, update, and replace parts of it.

Whether it's hardware that wears out, machinery that breaks down, or components whose efficiency and purpose have become obsolete in the face of new technology - there's always something.

It's romantic to think of restoring an old, elegant, historic house. When I was little, I loved old Victorian houses, and I loved reading stories that featured deserted old houses, where heroines like Nancy Drew uncovered the mystery within the spooky old-fashioned rooms of Blackwood Hall.

Put in proper context, though, the houses in those books I loved in the 1960s were not, in fact, centuries-old historical masterpieces. They were typical domestic structures perhaps 50 - 70 years old at the time the books were set in.

Bunker Hill house, Library of Congress Historical American Building Survey collection
Click to "embiggen" for wonderful detail

The kids in "Gone Away Lake" were simply seeing the architecture of their grandparents' time. The rambling and deserted house Mary Lennox roamed in the turn-of-the-century "A Secret Garden" was probably only 50 years old, to her.

But fashions in architecture change, and by the mid-Twentieth Century, Victorian houses were considered out of style, embarrassing, and tacky.

House on Bunker Hill, photo from Los Angeles Public Library

By 1940, the fabulous Victorian mansions of turn-of-the-century moguls on L.A.'s Bunker Hill were known as slums and eyesores. City planners intent on real estate development pushed the idea, and it was reinforced in popular culture.

You can see this in film and TV, too. Abbot and Costello's haunted houses had probably been built around the same time Bud and Lou had been born - Abbot's birth was in 1895. But they were pictured as shambling horrors.

Bunker Hill house, 1960. Photo by William Reagh, Los Angeles Public Library

The old house was considered as outmoded and lame as we consider Levittown's ticky-tacky little boxes today. Or a '70s A-Frame with earth-tone tiles and shag carpet.

So here we are in 2010, and my house, built in 1961, is now almost 50 years old itself. Does it look like "This Old House" romantic fantasy I always longed for?

Richard Neutra House, 2300 Silver Lake Blvd., Los Angeles, built in 1940, restored 1963

Well, no. It's a low-slung, flat-roofed split level, with jalousie windows, stuccoed walls, and vertical wood paneling. It style apes the International Style of Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler of a few decades prior to its construction. I will concede it does so gracefully, and the house is pleasing to live in.

But as far as a homeowner's chores go, it might as well be a shambling turretted Victorian wreck. Since we bought the house 13 years ago, we've replaced the kitchen appliances and cabinets. We've replaced some 20 of its windows, but there's another 20 to go. When we moved in, there were still dial telephones hard-wired into the walls - we had to have proper phone jacks put in. We had the wooden railings on the deck rebuilt, since the wood was rotting and becoming dangerous.

Master bathroom, Case Study House No. 22, built in 1960, designed by Pierre Koenig

We also put off more costly system replacements - the '60s-era electric furnace is about as efficient and effective as having a giant toaster in the basement. The bathroom is woefully out of date. And what keeps me awake some nights is thinking about the septic tank - which may fail at any time.

After thirteen years, it's also obvious that a fresh paint job will soon be necessary, but first we should replace some of the wooden siding where woodpeckers have drilled holes - and I guess that indicates a need to check for termites.

Right now those big projects are out of reach, so we keep going on day to day with a sort of triage approach. We repair that which is critical and necessary. Case in point - the stairs to our back deck are the kind made of concrete slabs cantilevered on steel beams.


One day our grown son was thundering down the steps when a chunk of paver broke off beneath his feet. We spent a week or so blocking off access to the stairs while we searched building supply houses for replacement slabs, and the Yellow Pages for a welder who could attach them. We even laid in a supply of spares in case it happened again.

When you think of restoring an old house, you think of painstakingly refinished intricately carved woodwork, not welding exposed-aggregate concrete slabs.

But it's a good thing we did that. Because just this Saturday, I tried to turn the '60s-era brushed aluminum doorknob to open our front door. It stuck fast. It had been sticking a bit lately, annoyingly, so I asked [The Man I Love] to give it a try.

No luck. It won't budge.


We've spent the last three days going up and down the back steps to get in and out of our house. It's no fun with a carload of groceries. Today I'm waiting for a locksmith to come. I warned him we'd probably need a replacement doorknob.

I wonder how much this is going to cost.

And I wonder what's going to break next.

February flowers

Here's an assortment of what's in bloom this February in Topanga. All photos were taken along my morning walk in my neighborhood.

Acacia dealbata, or silver wattle, is native to Southern Australia. That may be why this tree grows in front of the home of one of my neighbors, a once-famous Australian pop star. Or maybe not, since there are many of these beautiful trees growing in Topanga, their bright yellow flower clusters like little silken balls of passementerie.

Hardenbergia violacea is a shrubby vine - or a viney shrub - that, like many of our tender-zone ornamental plants, is another native of Australia. It has drooping racemes of delicate pea-like flowers smaller than a button - they look like wee orchids on a stem. Its common name is Happy Wanderer. This one grows on my neighbor's fence, and contrasts gaudily with the orange of a hummingbird vine behind.

Centrathus ruber - also known as red valerian - is a European perennial that has escaped from gardens and naturalized throughout the U.S. It's very common in the Santa Monica Mountains, including here where it grows on the side of a steep rocky hill.

Abutilon megapotamicum is a native of Brazil, Argentina and Uraguay. It's a tender ornamental shrub, with somewhat lax and leggy growth - which makes it perfect to train against a dark wood fence where the pretty golden flowers with their lipstick-colored calyxes shine like little lanterns. The genus is called "flowering maple" for the shape of their leaves, although they aren't related to maples at all.

Calliandra haematocephala is a Bolivian ornamental shrub that blooms November - April. Calliandra species have these marvelous infloresences, bursting with bright bristly stamens, each tipped with a tiny pollen-dusted anther. They're nicknamed powder puff flowers or fairy-duster flowers.



This one grows in my front yard, in a location with dappled shade from oaks and high eucalyptus, and gets no supplemental watering at all. The plant is a bit lanky and awkward, but its scarlet bristles are cheerful and give us a pretty bit of color in February.