Dateline>City of Angels

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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

I’d like to say it was a desire to live to be 100 that drove me to spend more time in the garden, but really it was a nasty case of writer’s block.

After gleefully telling the world I’ve finally entered the drafting stage of my book on the Feliz Curse, I got exactly 3,225 words into the prologue, when the real curse — the dreaded Blank Page Syndrome — suddenly struck.

There’s nothing more common (or more insidious) for a writer than those painful periods when the muses fall silent. Go to any writer’s blog, chat group or forum, and you’ll find us idling for hours on the topic as we commiserate and offer each other tips for restarting our engines, all the while ironically avoiding doing just that.

My surefire solution has always been to force myself to jot a single phrase — any phrase, no matter how nonsensical. Most writers find that once they put something down on paper, they can’t stop tinkering with it, and soon one sentence sparks a second, then a third, and so on. (We’re fairly compulsive that way.)

This time the strategy failed. Hitting a difficult transition in the chapter, I just found myself editing and re-editing the same few pages I’d already spewed out and feeling about as productive as a hamster on a wheel… Read more

This just in… There’s oil in these here hills. Black gold. Texas tea. Possibly billions of gallons of it, says a CNN Situation Room report observed by Metblog L.A.’s Dave Markland.

Geez, you think?

Astounding as the news may be to Wolf and the rest of the outside world, it won’t come as a surprise to native Angelenos schooled in the region’s geology. As any old sabertooth or mastodon who ever waded into the La Brea Tar Pits could tell you, that bubbling crude has been shaping the area’s natural history since the Paleogene Era.

In more recent times, Native Americans collected the primordial goo’s byproducts to waterproof their baskets and canoes, while the town’s early pobladores used the brea (tar) to create asphalt roofing for their adobes and even as an alternative fuel for lamps and cooking.

In fact, legend has it that these uses indirectly led to the famous 1892 oil discovery that made one particular Angeleno, Edward L. Doheny, a very wealthy man.

One Astute Businessman

Doheny had come to California as a prospector, but experienced little luck in mining. One day he observed a man wheeling a cart of the tarry substance downtown. Stopping to ask where the man had been, he learned of nearby asphalt deposits in present-day Echo Park. Figuring where there’s tar, there’s crude, he prevailed on Charles Canfield to help him lease several acres of land in the area and immediately set about digging and drilling. After several mishaps, the pair struck black gold a mere 150 feet below what is now the intersection of Colton Street and Glendale Blvd.

Soon there were “hundreds of greasy derricks and puffing engines” dotting the area and encroaching as far as the southern edge of Echo Park Lake. As Norman Klein observes in his book, The History of Forgetting:

“At one time (c. 1905) there were over a thousand working wells in the area from downtown to Vermont Avenue, and even special tours for a nickel. Oil companies had to pay for stains left on clothing during laundry days. Legend has it that Echo Park Lake at its northern edge went on fire at least once (1907).”

Oil’s Well That Ends Well

Of course, those rigs have long since vanished from the lake shore and vicinity. (So much for the notion that oil drilling forever mars an area’s scenery.) But later strikes from Compton to Signal Hill would further secure Southern California a proud place among the world’s great oil fields. In their almanac, Los Angeles A-Z, historians Dale and Leonard Pitt cite production figures of 1,000 wells pumping an estimated 375 million barrels between the 1950s-1980s alone. And, as CNN reports, experts believe we’re far from tapped out.

Even casual lookers can still spot the evidence of our area’s hidden wealth oozing up naturally through sidewalk cracks along Miracle Mile as well as the sands of local beaches. And yes, there are numerous cleverly disguised derricks still pumping, pumping, pumping throughout the city. But like cell phone towers masquerading as palm trees, the oil rigs are never fully hidden from discerning eyes — whether they’re located along Pico Blvd., off the Golden State Freeway, or on a tiny artificial island in the Long Beach channel.

It’s always amusing to try and profile the personalities of your home’s former residents based on the mail they continue to get long after they’ve moved.

Since buying my house three years ago, I’ve learned the previous tenant was a photographer/artist with interests in compost gardening, summer dinner parties, fine wines, delicious but decadent desserts, community activism, and a variety of green friendly causes.

Yeah. No big surprises — until yesterday when this piece showed up from an Indianapolis antique dealer who apparently specializes in “full-bodied” taxidermy. More puzzling yet, it was obviously no random delivery. Based on the information on the backside, the former resident was a registered list member.

So now I’m left scratching my head trying to fit this bizarre little factoid into the overall profiling game I’ve played with a stranger I thought I knew, but never really did — and telling myself there’s gotta be a really good story behind this one.

Lately, I’ve been working to improve my amateur photography, especially with more challenging night shots. In fact, ever since shooting the Vista Theater at dusk last week, it seems I’ve been in a neon mood.

This image was taken last night about 11 p.m., outside Paradise, a stark-white no-tell motel trimmed in fetishy purple neon, that overlooks Sunset Blvd. along Echo Park’s eastern fringes.

My skills definitely need honing: I failed to do justice to the sign’s intense purple lettering, but did manage to pull some interesting hues from other objects in the scene. (I’m a big fan of cartoonish color saturation, if only to fool Firefox browsers into rendering some sort of vibrancy…)

For other amateur shutterbugs who care about these things, this was shot in raw with a Nikon D70s, ISO 320, 3 sec. @ f3.7, 24mm focal length, and processed in Capture One Pro.

[Paradise Lost, 2008, Michael Imlay]

We may not always be consistent about much else here at Dateline>City of Angels, but the one regular feature you can count on is Friday Flix. And now, without further adieu: This week’s choice for the most interesting, offbeat and/or entertaining web video sharing key words or themes with this blog…

Source: LiveVideo
Search Criteria: “Los Angeles + Cemeteries”

The Result: A musical photo montage of many of the city’s more interesting grave markers, courtesy Beneath L.A. and local author/grave hunter Steve Goldstein. The roster of dearly departed includes famous and infamous alike, with epitaphs ranging from understated to over-the-top funny.

Google up web videos with the keyword Los Angeles and what do you get? Mostly a lot of junk. But search hard enough and you’ll also find a few gems. Welcome to Dateline>City of Angel’s new Friday Flix feature, where I offer my picks for some of the most interesting (or unusual) web videos referencing key words or themes shared with this blog.

This week: A well-produced historical-cultural tour of Echo Park by the Echo Park Film Center entitled Echo Park Then and Now — an especially fitting debut clip for Friday Flix, since Echo Park happens to be my hood. Roll ‘em!

Up to now, most local bloggers have approached the draining of Silver Lake from two predictable angles:

(1) The ugly, gaping asphalt crater left behind now that the water’s gone, and

(2) The ongoing controversy between water officials and Silver Lake residents over whether or not the lake should be permanently covered.

Donna Barstow at Griffith Park Interrupted, however, asks a more cogent question: What if the area has another fire like the recent Griffith Park Blaze? Or worse, a major earthquake that knocks out city hydrants?

The answers to her ongoing investigations are definite causes for concern. Read them here and here.

Except for a few rare sightings of her and her famous pink Corvette buzzing up and down the Westside, I thought pseudo billboard icon Angelyne was a pop cultural relic of the past. You know: A has-been. Washed up. A cliche like any other. But according to Curbed L.A., she may yet have some residual cache in Hollywood. Amazing but true: Not only does she have an ongoing need for office space, but she still gets fan mail requesting autographed photos….

This week I had an appointment with some musty old manuscripts in the Rare Books Dept. of the Los Angeles Central Library, located downtown at 5th and Flower. Unlike some respected fellow bloggers who enjoy using mass transit to buzz about the metro area, I’ve always been an unrepentant disciple of Southern California’s automotive cult.

The one exception was a few years ago when I took the daily Metro to a PR job in Orange County. I never could get used to it. All day long, simply knowing my car was 50 miles away in my garage produced roughly the same jitters smokers experience when going cold turkey.

But with my last field trip to the Central Library about a month ago racking up a fairly hefty parking tab, I decided it was time to face my irrational anxieties and give the MTA another try. After all, that’s what any socially conscious Angeleno is expected to do nowadays, right?

Noble intentions notwithstanding, doing my part for a better L.A. turned out to be quite an adventure in true grit. Rather than recount the entire escapade in minute detail, let me simply present the highlights in plus and minus form, starting with the latter…

Read more

Perhaps no site is more historically and culturally significant to Los Angeles than the El Pueblo Monument. As such, you’d expect the city to treat it as the crown jewel of Angeleno landmarks. Instead, it seldom seems to win any more respect than the common chucherias being hocked up and down Olvera Street.

Want proof? Witness this week’s Downtown News piece by city editor Richard Guzman which reports that El Pueblo appears yet again to be falling prey to our civic leaders’ shortsightedness.

For decades the Plaza area — which attracts an estimated 2 million visitors annually — has remained mired in Christine Sterling’s 1930s romantic fantasy of a Mexican bazaar filled with the song and dance of happy campesinos and artisans. Even today, the place screams old-style tourist trap while portraying early L.A.’s flavor about as accurately as Disneyland presents Main Street USA… Read more