Dateline>City of Angels

I feel soooo left out. I missed Tuesday’s “big” seismic event.

No, I wasn’t out of town, but rather on the road with the Daring Doberman Duo in my Jeep, which is seldom a smooth ride to begin with. Thanks to all the shakes, rattles and wind noises of open-top driving, I and the dogs remained blissfully ignorant of any earth moving under our wheels.

Not that there weren’t clues. Cruising along Riverside Drive I passed a few businesses where people were rushing out the doors with weird looks on their faces and wondered what the commotion was.

Then the radio began blaring the news of a 5.8 quake centered in the Chino Hills. (Later downgraded to a 5.4.) I rushed home to check the house, but not a knick-knack was disturbed.

Damn, I thought. Another missed blogging opportunity. After all, who could possibly care about a relatively minor quake and/or my non-experience of it? Certainly nothing to write home (or blog) about.

Shows how much I know.

This morning my writer pal from Atlanta contacted me asking if I was OK. She’d called yesterday, but the lines were jammed, leaving her a little concerned.

I had to explain that the switchboards always get tied up after light quakes if only because the first thing we Angelenos do is call everyone we know and ask, “Did you feel it?”

“No damage, nothing toppled,” I reported, joking that “while a 5.4 may seem big, here in L.A., it’s just a minor annoyance. We don’t usually start panicking until they hit a least a 6.0 on the Richter Scale.”

“I think it’s kinda funny that a 5-something doesn’t hardly rate in L.A.,” she replied. “I experienced a minor quake while visiting L.A. back in 1989 or ‘90 and I didn’t like it one bit.” Plus, she added, images from the temblor were still all over the news.

I rushed to the TV to survey the cable-news channels. Sure enough, a full day later, our little jolt was still the talk of the Global Village.

Hardly a Shocker by Comparison…

I have to admit to some surprise. California has seen more than its share of powerful temblors: Northridge in 1994 (6.7), Loma Prieta in 1989 (6.9), Whittier Narrows in 1987 (5.9), and the 1971 Sylmar Quake (6.6), for starters. Of course, the one that really made history was San Francisco’s Great Earthquake of 1906 (photo, left). A whopping 8.25 on the Richter Scale, the quake and subsequent fires left as many as 700 dead and 250,000 homeless. And before that, in 1812, a series of Southern California quakes (one reaching 7.1 in magnitude) devastated a number of California missions, and (according to legend) caused a small tsunami in the Ventura-Santa Barbara region.

Those are what I’d call BIG quakes. By comparison, yesterday’s officially “moderate quake” hardly rated. Was it really worth this much media attention?

And that’s when it dawned on me how complacent I’ve become. In many parts of the world, where structures are substandard, a 5.4 would be a big deal, killing hundreds. Here, it’s just fodder for meaningless water cooler banter. Most of us will laugh about the odd places we were when it hit, what we did or didn’t feel, the embarrassing reactions we had, and then forget the whole thing in a few days. Briefly shaken, but not the least bit stirred, we’ll put off quake preparation for another weekend, another month, another year.

We natives can always spot the transplants during mild tremors. They’re the ones whose faces still register shock long after the seismographs return to normal. But this is one area where we may want to take a cue from the newbies and stand in awe of Mother Nature: She sent us a playful wake-up call yesterday. We all know she’s got The Big One brewing on the back burner.

When she finally serves it up, I doubt any of us will find ourselves blithely cruising through it feeling left out.

My amateur quest for interesting neon scenes recently led me to Echo Park’s House of Spirits liquor store. Always hopping on weekends, the thriving business caters to an extremely “eclectic” crowd ranging from the area’s Old Guard to retro-hipsters, gentrifiers and prerequisite vagrants. Yet despite its unruly appearance and traffic patterns, the store is surprisingly clean, safe and friendly. (A uniformed security guy helps see to that.) More ‘hoods should be so lucky as to have a quickie-booze stop like this.

[Shutterbug Details: Nikon D70s, 3 sec. @ f22, 46mm, ISO 200.]

They say you never really appreciate what you have until it’s gone.

Moving into the neighborhood three years ago, I was at first mildly intrigued by this old shell of a gas station along Echo Park Avenue (left).

Over time, I came to view it as just another languishing eyesore and wondered when gentrification would finally rid us of its ugliness.

Only now that it’s “finally” being torn down (below) have I learned that it actually boasts a unique claim to fame: On this spot in 1956, the go-kart phenomenon was born.

According to a former property owner (who still lives and works in the neighborhood), the lot once belonged to Art Ingels, who built his prototype “little car” in a shop behind the station. A 2006 Los Angeles Times article picks up the story from there:

“Ingels invented ‘the little car,’ which he dubbed the Caretta kart, but it was Duffy Livingstone who popularized the ‘go-kart’… According to Livingstone, Ingels told him that lawn mower manufacturer McCullough had recalled many of its lawn mowers because of a patent infringement. ‘So they had piles of engines sitting around for $25 apiece,’ said Livingston, who had the machinery to shape the metal tubing to build a frame. ‘Art put one on this little car. I thought that was right up my alley.’

Livingstone then teamed with other backers to build and promote Ingels’ clever contraptions for racing at the Rose Bowl and other venues. Today it’s estimated that there are more than 125,000 competitive go-kart racers across America and a million worldwide.

The Legacy Lives On

In recent years, a new off-road variant known as the Trophy Kart has also hit the market. Replicas of fullsize dessert-racing trucks, the Trophy Karts have become a popular way of introducing kids to off-road motorsports — so much so that sanctioning bodies like SCORE International have formed a competitive class around them.

And to think that it all began right here at a humble service station just a few blocks from my house.

Nowhere near a busy intersection, this quiet residential corner is among the last places you’d even expect to find a service station. Still, when a 1953 fire burned down the first structure that occupied the lot, the current shack was brought here from Venice as a replacement. It continued to serve the Echo Park community through the 1970s.

Thankfully, while it’s about to say goodbye to Echo Park, the station is by no means disappearing forever. Workers are painstakingly labeling its bits and pieces for reassembly at the San Diego Automotive Museum, where it will be fully restored as part of a historical display.

Now that I’m aware of its past, I’m going to miss the old relic. To me it’s become a reminder that you just never know the history behind even the most mundane of structures in your neighborhood.

Congrats to writing pal and fellow blogger Rebecca J. Lacko, author of the weblog Motherhood, Marriage and Other Wild Rides.

Loathe as most bloggers may be to admit it, blogging is a passion, not a profession. The vast majority of us pound our prose out in relative obscurity. If we’re lucky, we’ll manage to attract a small but loyal following of readers who enjoy our wordsmithing. If we’re really lucky, someone in the traditional media will stumble across us, like what they see, and hand us that elusive Big Break: Exposure to a mass audience.

Well, Rebecca has indeed landed such a golden opportunity in the form of a guest spot on a new CBS TV daytime talk show, The Doctors, to premiere September 2008. According to network officials, the show aims to present viewers “reliable and fascinating medical and health advice, dispensed daily by a distinguished panel of five professionals. Rebecca will appear in a segment focusing on the pros and cons of early potty training.

My single male readers are likely smirking right now. Young mothers, on the other hand, are probably nodding to themselves with knowing approval. Weening a kid off diapers is no easy task — and no small achievement for either a kid or a parent. Not only is successful potty training an important developmental milestone, it’s the cornerstone of polite society. Without it, civilization would come to a screeching halt, and it wouldn’t be pretty.

OK, I exaggerate, but you get the idea. Parenting is important stuff, and if anyone can speak to the joy and fulfillment that comes from doing the “world’s toughest job,” it’s Ms. Lacko.

Rebecca has been a trusted friend and colleague ever since we first worked together in the trenches of Advanstar Communications. I’ve always been impressed with the quality of her parenting essays. She manages to personalize what she writes, balancing research, conviction and humor without appearing dull, preachy or contrived.

So much of what you read in parenting magazines nowadays seems fired by the narcissistic drive to prove oneself a good mommy or daddy. By contrast, Rebecca’s family-oriented pieces celebrate the child and the “little things in life” that make their world truly wonderful, happy and empowering. It was only a matter of time before the media discovered her.

Hopefully, this Big Break will lead many more to discover and enjoy her work as well.

This week’s pick for most interesting, offbeat and/or entertaining web video sharing themes with this blog…

Searching: Daily Motion
Keywords: “Los Angeles + History”

The Result: Daily Motion’s search engine must be broken. As noted above, I entered “Los Angeles + History” and this is what popped up. Do they mean to imply that this is a traditional Angeleno pastime? Likely not, since there’s no mention of the City of Angels anywhere in the video. (Although I personally maintain that L.A. bars do serve up the world’s best Margaritas.)

Whatever the case, it’s a fun change of pace — and an especially appropriate suggestion for Friday happy-houring after a very long week. Salud!

An old gnarled trunk forms an eerie arch in the so-called “Badlands” of Elysian Park.

Originally part of El Pueblo de Los Angeles’ common lands, the 600-acre tract was officially established as the city’s first public park in April 1886. Today the green space offers stunning city views and is home to the Police Academy, Dodger Stadium, Grace Simons Lodge, and a former Navy / Marine Armory now used as an LAFD training center. Yet long before their appearance, the locale had already witnessed plenty of history and lore.

You might even say that Los Angeles owes its very existence to this place.

The historic Portola Expedition encamped near the park’s present-day Broadway entrance in 1769. Greatly impressed by the area’s natural beauty, they recommended it as the ideal site for the future City of Angels.

The town’s first Zanja Madre was also fed by a massive wooden water wheel situated along the L.A. riverbank nearby, and eventually by a small reservoir constructed in the park’s canyons.

Moreover, for decades treasure-seekers have believed that early pobladores like the Avilas and Picos buried their valuables in the park to safeguard them from raiding privateers and advancing American troops. No one has yet been able to prove the legend, which may also be connected to the story of a shrieking White Lady said to haunt the trails and hillsides. Some assert she keeps a lonely vigil over the lost belongings, while others claim she was the victim of a brutal post-World War II murder.

Then again, perhaps she’s an errant spirit from L.A.’s first Jewish cemetery, which once stood somewhere near Chavez Ravine.

Unfortunately, there were no signs of treasure, ghosts or gravestones when I snapped this photo with my trusty Nikon D70s just around sunset the other evening [1/50 sec. @ f10, 18-70mm lens]. With darkness — and the park’s curfew — closing in, I reluctantly hopped back in my Jeep and put it in gear, leaving exploration of these unsolved Elysian Mysteries for another day.

Famous as the film capital of the world and home to L.A.’s mythic “Boulevard of Dreams,” Hollywood has come a long way since its founding in 1886. Carved from lands that once belonged to Ranchos La Brea and Los Feliz, the area was known to the region’s Californios as “La Nopalera” because of the huge cactus patches that grew there.

So here’s this week’s question: Why the change in monikers? How did modern Hollywood get its name? Click the continuation link for the answer… Read more

Don’t call ‘em a rehash. Think of ‘em as Summer Reruns — or better yet, “encore presentations.”

One of the downsides of blogging is posting an item you’re really proud of, only to watch it slowly creep down your homepage and eventually disappear into the Twilight Zone of your site’s archives, never to be seen again.

So why not resurrect a few oldies but goodies every now and then? (Especially during a busy week that makes researching and writing fresh content extra difficult?) The posts below rank among my personal all-time favorites and coincidentally all appeared a year ago this month.

If you’re a return visitor who caught them the last time around, enjoy reliving the adventure. If you’re part of a newer audience viewing them for the first time, all the better…

• Tarts and Misdemeanors — A glimpse at a deliciously sordid tidbit of history surrounding L.A.’s Hall of Justice.
• No Bull, The Ring Was Here — Uncovering a buried piece of L.A.’s Spanish-Mexican heritage in modern-day Chinatown — a post that will have you shouting Olé!
  
• Things to See and Tear Down in L.A. — Believe it or not, some readers missed the tongue-in-cheek tone of this post and thought I was really suggesting we bulldoze these landmarks.
• Parker Mystery House — Site of a particularly gruesome episode in our region’s history of sensational crime, murder and scandal.
• History, Murder and Intrigue in the 90201 — More murder and grave scandal, this time from the wood-paneled halls of Beverly Hills’ famous Greystone (aka Doheny) Mansion.

Postings to this blog may be light again this week as I focus attention on a number of pressing projects. First, cracking the code to add tagging features and a dynamic Blogroll page are proving more difficult than I thought. Looks like I’ll be spending a lot of time in WordPress support forums consulting CSS/PHP experts…

Next, I’ve finally completed the first chapter in my new book on the Feliz Curse. (Who knew that spewing 3,000 words could be so laborious?) Now it’s onto the next, which I figure I’ll have to tackle in two weeks’ time to stay on schedule.

Finally, I’m also wrapping up a few assignments for the off-roading section of Styling and Performance magazine, an automotive trade publication. (Something’s gotta pay the bills while I write and blog my little heart out…)

Meanwhile, all this comes in a week that Dateline>City of Angels has been accepted by BlogBurst for feed to newsrooms and media outlets across the U.S. This post isn’t exactly the auspicious, attention-grabbing first impression I’d hoped to make, but I guess that’s life in the blogosphere…

This week’s pick for most interesting, offbeat and/or entertaining web video sharing themes with this blog…

Searching: YouTube!
Keywords: “Los Angeles + Landmarks”

The Result: How times have changed! Modern downtowners fret about hailing a cab to get from place to place. Nineteenth century Angelenos had to hoof it in every sense of the phrase, as evidenced in the above 28-second clip captured by Edison’s newly invented Kinetoscope.

The Backstory…

During the 1880s and 1890s, L.A.’s population swelled rapidly to more than 50,000, severely taxing its cowtown-era infrastructure. In his online book, Letters From the People, former history professor Ralph E. Shaffer describes the hue and cry over downtown shabbiness routinely found in the city’s editorial pages during this period:

“Throughout the 1880s letter writers, many of them acknowledging that they were recent arrivals in the city, decried traffic congestion, unpaved streets, roadways blocked by piles of building supplies, inadequate street lighting, the lack of sidewalks or of clutter on those that did exist, the need for bridges across the river and for roads to neighboring cities.”

Shaffer adds that these “intolerable” conditions continued well into the early 1900s, with frequent accidents involving horses, trains and streetcars.

Hmmm. On second thought, maybe times haven’t changed all that much.

Talk about art imitating life! When Echo Park’s famous lotus flowers mysteriously vanished from the lake this year, a local photographer came up with a quaint solution: replace them with pictures. Which also promptly began (gasp!) disappearing. Honestly, neighbors, what did you think would happen?

And in Other News…

… I may have been too hasty recently in branding East Coast transplants as a bunch of whiners. Here’s one who actually has found good things to say about his newly adopted City of Angels.

… Meanwhile, the OC’s Coast magazine has been caught red-handed mimicking (perhaps parodying?) an Easterner publication. Did Coast’s editors think New York is so far away that such blatant copy-catting would go unnoticed?

… Don’t you just love celebrities continually reinforcing La La Land stereotypes? This time it’s Anne Hathaway, star of the new Get Smart movie, placing herself into the gentle, guiding hands of a “psychic masseuse.” Still, she insists she’s just your typical girl next door in every other way.

… I can’t stand Starbucks coffee. And I especially can’t stomach the chain’s snooty baristas who inevitably respond to requests for a simple “small coffee” with a smug, “We don’t have small, medium or large. We have tall, vente and grande.” Apparently I’m not not alone in my disdain. Turns out a whole lot of people are expressing glee in the company’s brewing financial woes.

… Looking for unusual summer vacation destinations that save on gas? Consider Nevada, where you can take advantage of this rather novel pump promotion, courtesy the Shady Lady Ranch, which is offering $50 toward your next fill-up.

… Of course, many are opting to stay at home, fix up the garden, and maybe even add that new deck they’ve been contemplating for summer entertaining. Not a bad idea, as long as you don’t wake the dead…

The Film: Sunset Blvd., the 1950 film noir classic co-written/directed by Billy Wilder and starring Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Erich von Stroheim and Nancy Olson.

The Scene: After leading two repo men on a high-speed car chase along a winding stretch of Sunset Blvd., down-on-his-luck screenwriter Joe Gillis (Holden) ditches them with a quick turn into an old, rundown estate. Mistaken for a “pet mortician” by the mansion’s bizarre owner (Swanson), Gillis tries to explain his intrusion into her reclusive world as her identity begins to dawn on him…

“You’re Norma Desmond… You used to be in silent pictures… You used to be big.”

“I am big! It’s the pictures that got small!”

The Question: What was the address for this legendary exchange, (a) in the film, and (b) in real life? (Again, no fair Googling up hints.) Click the Read More link to see the answer… Read more

Well, the blog (and the world) survived the weekend as Dateline>City of Angels began some remodeling to update its look and feel. For now, most of the work is taking place in the background, so regular visitors will notice only minor changes.

• First off, I’ve added a detailed archive page that supports expanded views of post titles, dates and comment stats. (Take a browse… Even I’d forgotten some of the interesting stuff that’s been filed away and lost to time.)

• Regular visitors will also notice a new “Tag Index” to the right. Bloggers like to use tags in different ways, but here the plan is to complement my Categories. Think of the Categories as big file drawers and the tags as flags to help zero in on specific types of content within those drawers. As the week goes forward, I’ll be refining and expanding the index while adding visible tag coding to posts.

• The blogroll will also soon relocate from the sidebar to a page of its own. This will leave the right column looking a little barren in the short term, but will free it up for new items to be added down the line.

All these changes are the first steps in making Dateline>City of Angels content and navigation more accessible (and intelligible) from the homepage. This in turn will support new features and a broader redesign planned for later this year. In the meantime, thanks for your patience with any quirks and annoyances that pop up during the “construction phase.”

The 4th of July holiday just isn’t the same when the Dodgers are on the road. It’s not that I enjoy taking in a good ol’ fashion American ballgame on the 4th — I never do. Rather, unlike some of my Echo Park neighbors, I can’t get enough of the stadium’s post-game aerial bombardments exploding practically right over my rooftop.

With Team Blue in San Francisco this holiday — and their 50th Birthday pyrotechnics being relegated to the Hollywood Bowl — I’m left searching for substitutes. In past years, there were some impressive illegal (I prefer the term “undocumented”) fireworks in the surrounding canyon that rivaled the official displays, but with gentrification and LAFD crackdowns, I’m not counting on any home-grown “shock and awe” to wow my backyard BBQ guests this time around.

So where to go? While living in Silver Lake, my annual tradition was to join a small but intrepid band of hikers to the Mt. Hollywood peak above the Griffith Observatory. That vista offered birds-eye views of practically every aerial display in the L.A. basin. However, since the 2007 fire (which, I should again point out had nothing to do with BBQs or fireworks), access and hours have been greatly curtailed.

Of course, there are similar sights to be had from certain stretches of Mulholland Drive, but the crowd factor can make finding the perfect vantage point tough.

And then there’s always this extensive list of official fireworks shows around the Southland.

Decisions, decisions.

One thing I do know… You won’t be finding me anywhere near a display like this.

Happy 4th!

Just a housekeeping note to advise readers that Dateline>City of Angels will take a short hiatus over this week’s 4th of July holiday while I attempt several upgrades to the PHP code. Considering my feeble tech skills, this is always dangerous. For all I know, I could either crash my entire blog or, in a worse-case scenario, create an artificial singularity that swallows the planet. Either way, try to ignore any strange blips here over the weekend. Hopefully, we’ll all be safe and the blog will be up and running again by Monday.

According to Angelenic and other downtown blogs, the denizens at the heart of L.A. are growing restless. They want Hail-a-Cab, and they want it now.

The plan, which would allow taxis to pull over and pick up fares outside of currently specified zones, sounds like a good idea on paper — and downtowners are probably justified in their impatience to see it implemented. Still, I don’t begrudge city leaders for taking their time to fully consider the plan’s longterm effects on safety and congestion.

No matter how much urban boosters may wish for it, L.A. is not like any other city, nor can we merely snap our fingers and make it so. Taxis and public transportation may reign supreme in Chicago, New York, Boston or even San Francisco, but those cities have always been more geographically compact and were never built for and around the automobile as this place was. (Freeways, “Miracle Miles,” big, street-front department store windows and backlot parking malls were, after all, Angeleno innovations.)

Rushing to copy other metropolitan templates isn’t necessarily “farsighted.” Our region’s transit woes call for distinct, imaginative solutions that honor our unique character — not to mention the creativity and “out of the box” thinking that have traditionally demarcated the Angeleno “sense of place.”

That said, I’m not against the plan, except that judging from most of the comments on the local blogosphere, its biggest proponents seem to be: (a) cabbies who stand to make a profit, (b) tourism officials, and (c) transplants who come to L.A. to live its dream and then do nothing but complain about how it’s not the place they escaped from.

The cabbies and visitor bureaus I can get behind. The transplant whining is just getting old.

Question: Ask someone where you’ll find California’s steepest streets and they’ll likely guess San Francisco, where roadways like Filbert and 22nd sport a 31.5-percent grade. Hilly as the City by the Bay may be, however, it’s got nothing on the City of Angels, which actually lays claim to not one, but five of the state’s meanest climbs. Can you name them and the neighborhoods in which they’re found? Hit the “Read More” link to jump to the answer. And no fair peeking or Googling for hints… Read more