The murder site today. Photo: M. Imlay.

Today it’s a Ross parking lot, but on the evening of Feb. 1, 1922, the tract at 404. S. Alvarado was a Mediterranean bungalow court — and the setting for Movieland’s first real-life murder mystery.

Taylor, LAPL Digital Archives

Sometime before midnight, two shots rang out, killing famed actor-turned-Paramount-director William Desmond Taylor from behind. Neighbors shrugged off the noise as a car backfiring. The next morning, however, Taylor’s personal valet Henry Peavey arrived to find his boss stiff, wide-eyed and staring at the living-room ceiling.

Peavy’s frantic screams soon had everyone in the bungalow court and beyond on tenterhooks: “Who killed William Desmond Taylor?”

The Lineup

As in every good Hollywood whodunit there was an enticing cast of suspects with deep, closely held secrets:

• Mabel Normand: The last to see Taylor the evening of his death, Keystone’s cocaine-addicted Queen of Comedy was having zany adventures between the sheets with the director, who was in the meantime trying to help her kick her not-so-funny drug habit.

• Edward Sands: Taylor’s valet before Peavy, Sands had recently helped himself to the director’s car, jewelry and checkbook before disappearing forever.

• Mary Miles Minter: A 19-year-old “virginal” starlet with a psychotic crush on Taylor, 30 years her senior.

• Charlotte Shelby: Minter’s overbearing stage mother, rumored to have a competitive lust for Taylor — or at least a killer hatred of her daughter’s delusions of marriage to the man.

• Henry Peavy: Although not a golfer, Peavy reportedly loved the togs — not to mention crocheting doilies. Never a serious suspect, the fact he was black, gay, flamboyant and facing morals charges set tongues wagging anyway.

• An Unknown Drug Thug: Some theorized a shady underworld hit man shot Taylor to end his tattling to authorities about Normand’s suppliers.

The Bungalow Back Then

Investigators at Taylor's home. LAPL Digital Archives.

Unfortunately, the killer was never revealed because the first calls reporting the crime went not to the police, but to Charles Eyton, general manager of Paramount Pictures.

By the time L.A.’s men in blue arrived, the scene resembled something out of the Keystone Cops, with neighbors traipsing about, contaminating the scene, and Paramount bigwigs ransacking and sanitizing it of incriminating evidence. Accounts differ as to who was actually involved in the madcap chaos, but suffice it to say Normand, Eyton, and a studio “cleaning crew” contrived to nab Taylor’s bootleg liquor, numerous love letters from Normand, Minter and others, and correspondence from Taylor’s daughter betraying the “bachelor” director’s hidden past, abandoned wife and all. Eventually Adolph Zukor himself reportedly joined in hampering detectives.

Still, despite their best efforts, Hollywood’s vultures missed some juicy morsels. Homicide investigators uncovered an assortment of ladies’ undergarments, including a pink lingerie item apparently belonging to Minter, along with some titillating letters and papers Taylor had tucked away. Predictably, the press swarmed in and joined the feeding frenzy.

The Scandalous Legacy

The disgraced Normand. Wikimedia Image.

The fallout from Taylor’s death rocked young Hollywood to its core, essentially killing both Normand’s and Minter’s careers. His secret exposed to the world, Peavy succumbed to syphilitic dementia years later in a Bay Area asylum. Sands’ lifeless body eventually turned up in the Sacramento River in the early 1930s.

In an odd footnote, former silent actress Margaret Gibson — who’d never featured in any of the investigations — allegedly copped a deathbed confession to the shooting in 1964. Although she had some connection with Taylor in the early 1900s, many murder-mystery fans still find her storyline less than compelling.

Coming on the heals of the Fatty Arbuckle incident and several silent-star drug scandals, the Taylor murder helped force fledgling Hollywood to “clean up its act” for a horrified public. Studios added morals clauses to contracts and enacted self-imposed industry censorship standards — along with stepped up charm offensives through their publicity mills.

Of course, Tinseltown went on to see a cattle call of enigmatic killings over the decades. But William Desmond Taylor was the first and most sensational — a dubious distinction that ensured his Hollywood immortality more than any of his films.

Sources:

• The Hollywood Book of Scandals
• Hollywood Babylon
• This Is Hollywood
• William Desmond Taylor, Wikipedia
• Who Killed William Desmond Taylor?

L.A.'s Famous Bradbury Building. Photo: Michael Imlay

“Take Bradbury Building. It will make you famous…” That was the message George Wyman supposedly received from his dead brother, courtesy a Ouija board.

Interior. LAPL Digital Archives.

A mere draftsman, Wyman had been approached by millionaire Lewis Bradbury, who desired a structural marvel bearing his name in the downtown Los Angeles area. Wyman fretted over the assignment, but the Ouija’s prediction came true: Executed in iron, marble and glass, and featuring a futuristic, airy center-court design, the Bradbury made Wyman an instant sensation. Moreover, thanks to film and other media, the Bradbury remains one of the City of Angels’ most famous architectural gems.

Unfortunately, it also proved to be Wyman’s only significant design. Try as he might on later projects, he never again equaled the talent, genius and promise he first showed in his Ouija-inspired brainchild.

Even worse, Lewis Bradbury never got to see his namesake edifice completed. In an ironic twist of fate, he died just months before the building’s 1893 grand opening — proving the Ouija board really does have a demonic sense of humor.

Call me a sucker for GEICO commercials. As a MarCom professional myself, I  not only admire the auto insurer’s inventiveness, but also have to confess to a tinge of jealousy at all the fun the company’s creatives must be having behind the scenes. After all, who wouldn’t want to work for a corporation with a  sense of humor so off the wall as to come up with the above spot satirizing Honest Abe and a very perturbed Mary Todd Lincoln?

An intriguing primer on American Spiritualism. (Photo: Amazon.com)

From time to time your humble blogger likes to share some of his library finds with Dateline>City of Angels visitors. This week I finished The Haunting of America, a fascinating look at our nation’s ongoing obsession with the paranormal, from the Salem Witch Trials to Harry Houdini’s attempts to unmask modern Spiritualism.

It’s a strangely perfect Independence Day recommendation: According to authors William J. Birnes and Joel Martin, alleged encounters with the Great Beyond have shaped American history more than any political science professor would ever care to admit.

For instance, while every schoolchild (excluding maybe those in the LAUSD) can recite the tragic legacy of the Salem Witch Trials, how many of us know the story of a late-night psychic vision that supposedly inspired a beleaguered George Washington to persevere at Valley Forge?

Or that prior to his presidency, Andrew Jackson personally witnessed phenomena surrounding Tennessee’s famous Bell Witch, one of the most bizarre demonic hauntings in U.S. history?

Or that President Lincoln and Mary Todd frequently welcomed a favorite clairvoyant into the White House for sittings and seances to not only contact their deceased son but to help advise Civil War strategy?

Indeed, by the late 19th Century, Spiritualism had so permeated American culture that leading scientists rushed to develop research methodologies to alternately prove or disprove the claims of an ever-increasing army of mediums, mesmerizers and psychic charlatans. These efforts continued into the early 20th Century. At his death in 1931, none other than Thomas Edison was rumored to be at work on a “spirit phone” designed to investigate communication with the dead.

For their part, the book’s authors are clear believers in the occult. Birnes is star of The History Channel’s UFO Hunters, while Martin is a well-known paranormal expert famous for exposing the Amityville Horror. Still, they’ve managed to turn out a moderately objective and even humorous tome presenting a mix of intriguing facts, little-known references and thoughtful speculation.

Whether you’re a supernatural devotee yourself, or an avowed skeptic scratching your head over how an otherwise enlightened society can fall for the “cold-reading” chicanery of Crossing Over’s John Edwards, The Haunting of America is a must-read primer on American Spiritualism.

Hollywoodland gates, 1923. Source: LAPL Digital Archives

Brand spanking new 87 years ago, the Hollywoodland real estate development welcomes a handful of vintage automobiles through its Beachwood Canyon gates in this 1923 Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) digital archives photo. Likely carrying property buyers, the cars are parked outside the new neighborhood’s sales headquarters.

Although not visible, the world-famous “Hollywoodland” Sign loomed over the new development atop Mt. Lee. Erected as a sales gimmick the same year as the above photo, its 50-foot letters were festooned with 5,000 electric bulbs that blinked like a Christmas tree each night. (In 1949 neglect led to the sign’s last four letters getting lopped off.)

The Same Gates Now…

Night shot of the gates today. Photo: M. Imlay

Today the castle-like gates witness a constant flood of autos, as I discovered while attempting numerous time-elaspsed images this past Saturday night. Shooting between the hours of  8 to 9:30 p.m., it was impossible to manage a single photo without multiple cars streaming through the scene.

Predictably, daytime traffic is even busier, with tourists arriving by the bike, car and busload every few minutes to snap their pics in the shadow of the Hollywood Sign and the gateway arches. Although a little difficult to discern in this photo, the Hollywoodland Real Estate offices also stand virtually unchanged — and all lit up for the evening — to the right of the large white house near the intersection.

Bronson Cave in Griffith Park. Photo: M. Imlay.

Recognize this gaping oriface in the Hollywood Hills? If you don’t, you obviously weren’t a fan of the 1960s Batman television series or numerous other Hollywood productions hearkening back to the Silent Era.

This is one of a handful of man-made excavations at the southwestern corner of Griffith Park known as the Bronson Caves. Featured prominently in the Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, Bonanza and many other Western TV series, the cavities also boast numerous Sci-Fi credits, including the Star Trek franchise (both TV and movies), the first Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie, and countless trivial flicks like Teenagers From Outer Space. (A more extensive filmography can be found at Wikipedia. See the video below for the caves’ cameo appearance in Batman.)

One urban legend says the caves were originally carved out for the 1922 silent version of Robin Hood starring Douglas Fairbanks. Actually, they were part of a Union Rock Co. quarry that supplied crushed stone for Hollywood street paving from 1903 to the late 1920s.

Reaching the caves is easy. Simply take either Canyon Drive or Bronson Ave. north from Franklin Ave. into Griffith Park. At road’s end, park and take the 1/4-mile trail from the gravel parking lot. Follow the left fork to the caves. Along the way you’ll also get some terrific views of the Hollywood Sign, which overlooks the canyon further up in the hills.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

This past weekend, crowds lined up at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, wanting to catch a glimpse of a flower known both for its humongous size (6 to 10 feet tall!) and its stench. The plant producing this startling, malodorous bloom is known by botanists as Amorphophallus titanum and by laypeople as the titan arum – or, more descriptively, as the corpse flower, because its scent resembles rotting flesh.

Corpse flower was discovered in Sumatra in 1878 at the height of the Victorian plant hunting craze, by an Italian botanist named Odoardo Beccari. His sensational descriptions of the huge flower were met with disbelief by many scientists until 1889, when the seeds he’d collected in the wild produced a plant that bloomed, at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, England. Since then, a corpse flower in bloom anywhere in the world has usually made headlines, as cultivated plants can bloom as infrequently as once a decade.

Let me backtrack and explain that I live in Atlanta, so I have no local connection to this auspicious horticultural event at the Huntington – though it does show you how fast, far, and wide the word spreads among plant lovers when an Amorphophallus specimen shows signs of imminent bloom. (I first heard of this plant back in 1998, when the Atlanta Botanical Garden put a blooming corpse flower on display for excited crowds.)

Online Instant Replay

And the display is a short one, lasting only a day or two. As the flower unfurled last weekend, I was able to follow its progress, thanks to the Huntington staff members that helpfully posted pictures and updates on its Stinky Blog. If you also missed the chance to see one of the world’s largest flowers in person, you can go back and review the entire process in this 1999 YouTube video.

Here’s what the blog reported last Friday, June 4, as the flower began to open:

Botanical staff noticed that the petal-like outer spathe was beginning to pull away from the tall spadix at around 2 p.m. Friday afternoon. But flies had already begun to appear, clearly sensing something in the air. The bloom takes approximately 7 hours to open fully. The odor is at its strongest during the first 12 hours or so, when the plant is receptive to pollination.

Did you get that last sentence? The one linking the plant’s malodorous tendencies to pollination? Because that’s the really fascinating part…

Life size! Source: Wikimedia Commons

It turns out that as Amorphophallus was evolving in the rain forests of equatorial Sumatra, it came to rely on a certain family of insects to pollinate it, so it could set seed and ensure survival of its own species – and those insects are carrion beetles, which feed on the decaying flesh of dead animals. So what we have here is a brilliant example of biological adaptation, by which corpse flower came to emit the fetid smell most likely to attract the beetles that would do the work of carrying pollen to other plants.

But you know what really stinks, at least if you’re a beetle? The whole thing is a hoax, because corpse flower has nothing to offer its pollinators in return for their services – unlike sweeter smelling plants that provide pollinators with a meal of nectar in exchange for help with producing offspring.

– Hilda Brucker

• Editor’s Note: Special thanks to Hilda Brucker, a writing colleague and gardening expert based in Atlanta. Hilda was so intrigued by the Huntington Library’s blooming “corpse flower” that she offered Dateline>City of Angels the above guest post. You can visit Hilda’s regular gardening blog at GadAbout Media.

Pentecostalism's Home Sweet Home. Photo: M.Imlay.

Believe it or not, this little Victorian in Los Angeles’ historic Filipino Town is widely recognized as the birthplace of Pentecostalism.

Yes, before Aimee Semple McPherson’s celebrity revivalism, the Spirit took hold of a small band of fervent religionists here at 216 N. Bonnie Brae in 1906, allegedly inspiring them to speak in tongues not heard since Apostolic Times. That, in turn, sparked a fiery Christian Charismatic movement that eventually swept the globe. (Today Pentecostals are thought to number more than 500 million worldwide.)

Azusa Street Revival Marker.

Back then the humble wooden house was situated in a neighborhood of saloons, liveries and train yards. Now the property of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), the structure remains open to the public for prayer and tours by appointment. Tipped off about the shrine by Prose Parade blogger Linnea Hunt-Stewart, I decided to make my pilgrimage armed with only my camera and a 2006 article detailing the place, courtesy the now-defunct Los Angeles Times Magazine.

And a Brush With Celebrity…

By sheer coincidence, while I was snapping my dusk photos, up pulled a big Lincoln Town Car driven by TV’s former Divorce Court personality Judge Mablean Ephriam.

Source: Judge Mablean's MySpace

It’s been a few years, but I used to live several doors down from her in Silver Lake. As we reminisced about the old neighborhood, the judge explained that she and her two passengers were making a pilgrimage of their own. Turns out the COGIC is holding a massive Pentecostal women’s crusade at the Los Angeles Convention Center this week. In anticipation of the event, the three ladies felt impelled to spend a moment gazing upon the house where it all began.

Even this former Roman Catholic seminarian turned blogger could appreciate that. As far removed as my own religious experiences may be from Pentecostal fervor, as twilight settled on the tiny yellow house, I couldn’t help but feel at least a few stirrings of the historical spirit contained within its walls myself.

• Bonnie Brae House, visitations by appointment 10 a.m. – 3 p.m., Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, (323) 733-8300 ext. 2326.

Think pink!

Muffler sculptures are a staple of auto garages everywhere, but thanks to our Car Culture, they’re especially ubiquitous here in Southern California.

As an art form, more often than not they lack imagination, frequently resembling uninspired robots or clunky mechanical aliens. When you come across one that’s truly whimsical — like this Pink Panther near the corner of Lincoln and Howard in Pasadena — it’s well worth stopping for a photo and applauding the artistry.

Personally, I think the Flowmaster welding visor perfectly completes our  friend’s pink grease-monkey ensemble.

Photo: StockXchng

From the Temple Theater, to the Brown Derby, to the Garden of Allah, Southern California seems to boast more bulldozed landmarks than living historical structures. (Joni Mitchell’s 1970 pop lyrics, “They paved paradise to put up a parking lot” make a really apropos Angeleno theme song.)

Starting today, I’d like to introduce a new Friday Forum feature — and what better way to kick it off than a discussion of much-missed victims of our region’s evil developers?

So, if you’re a Southern California native, what favorite childhood landmark do you miss most? It doesn’t have to be famous to qualify — an obscure mom-and-pop soda fountain or pizza parlor now gone forever can evoke just as much nostalgic yearning as, say, Marine Land or the Pan Pacific Park.

And if you’re from another region, don’t feel left out. Perhaps you’ve come to L.A. expecting to see a famous house, hotel or Hollywood icon that’s no longer here. Or better yet, are there any landmarks from your own hometown whose passing you mourn?

Use the Comments feature to add your two cents and keep the discussion rolling…

Source: LAPL Digital Archives

Opened circa 1940 and named for land developer and Temple City founder Walter P. Temple, this proud single-screen theater once stood on the corner of Rosemead and Las Tunas Blvds. Seating 750, it was designed by S. Charles Lee, a prolific Southern California architect with more than 70 movie houses to his credit, almost all of them now closed or razed.

Having grown up in Temple City, I personally have many fond memories of the movie house. In fact, ask any “old-timer” about the place and they’ll happily recall its unique wagon-wheel fence, creaky balcony and 12-cent Saturday matinees featuring plenty of cartoons for restless kidlet audiences throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

The Theater’s Final Curtain

Sadly, however, by the late 1970s the Temple had become better known for its sticky floors, sagging seats and second-rate movie experiences. Purchased by the Edwards Cinema chain, the Streamline Moderne building was demolished in 1982 and replaced with a contemporary four-screen cineplex —  quite an innovation at the time for the sleepy little San Gabriel Valley hamlet.

The same place now.

But the relentless decades marched on, and within 25 years the four-theater bigbox had itself become obsolete, thanks mainly to even bigger movie megaplexes in nearby Pasadena, Alhambra and Arcadia, along with the advent of Netflix and Internet videos. Leveled in 2006, its former site now remains a vacant dirt lot awaiting yet another undetermined redevelopment project. (A number of locals continue to lobby for a new theater.)

With or without a theater to call its own, my childhood hometown nevertheless celebrates 50 years of incorporation May 30. For additional historic Temple City photos, visit its Chamber of Commerce website.

Our Lady of the Lake. Photo: M. Imlay

Though locals call her “Our Lady of the Lake,” this WPA-commissioned statue overlooking Echo Park Lake was actually entitled Nuestra Reina de Los Angeles (Our Queen of the Angels) when designed in 1934 by Ada Mae Sharpless.

In this Art Deco depiction, our city’s patroness stands atop a pedestal featuring iconic reliefs of the harbor, City Hall, Hollywood Bowl and San Gabriel Mountains, among other well-known Los Angeles landmarks. Originally, Sharpless had intended her 14-foot Queen of Angels to be cast in bronze. The actual monument ended up as cast stone, tying La Reina more naturally to her surroundings.

Neglected, tagged and damaged, the statue was removed from the lake and stored for “restoration” in 1986. It took 13 years and a good deal of neighborhood activism to finally secure her safe return from exile in 1999.

Disfigured.

Then, in 2008, Our Lady’s left fingers broke off (inset). Two years and numerous neighborhood council discussions later, she’s still greeting her public sans digits. (See Jenny Burman’s Chicken Corner blog post for the sordid backstory.)

Let’s just hope it doesn’t take another 13-year “vacation” to remedy this latest disfigurement.

Meanwhile, while we’re waiting to find out, here’s an interesting factoid about Our Lady’s neighborhood: Echo Park was established in 1892 by carriage maker Thomas Kelly, who first called his real estate development Edendale. According to legend, however, the name was changed when builders’ voices bounced annoyingly off the canyon walls.

Diablo, age 1.

Back in August this blog introduced Diablo, “my cute little puppy from hell.”

Mischievous and troublesome from the moment he arrived home, the black-and-tan Dobie was a replacement for my irreplaceable red Doberman, Ramses, who died much too young this past summer. (To this day, I still miss him.)

“Little Diablo” hailed from a European sire who weighed in at 110 pounds, so the new pup was destined to become the new Big Dog of the house. Sure enough, here he is pausing from a first-birthday training romp at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl Park, already pushing 90 pounds. Huge as he is, though, Diablo still hasn’t filled out his paws — much to the chagrin of Isis, my demur little 70-pound black-and-tan female, age 7.

Happy first birthday, my big demon pup! Here’s to the many more life adventures that lay ahead!

Source: Kino International

Seeking 2 hours and 45 minutes of golden silence on the silver screen? You can’t do any better than Fritz Lang’s historic 1927 film masterpiece Metropolis, now playing on the Laemmle’s Theatre circuit.

Set in the 21st Century, the silent classic envisions a futuristic world in which a seductive female android goads subterranean proletariat workers to rise up against their surface-dwelling capitalist overlords. It’s a seminal work featuring amazingly elaborate sets, art and costumes; a good deal of theological and scientific reflection; lots of over-the-top melodramatic acting common to the Silent Era; and a sumptuous original score by Gottfried Huppertz.

In fact, the New York Times has hailed the particular Kino International release screening at Laemmle’s as the film’s “definitive reconstruction.” It includes 25 minutes of recently rediscovered footage, making it the most accurate approximation of the film’s 1927 Berlin premiere currently in existence.

But be warned: Metropolis is not your typical date-night flick. It’s ponderously long, alternately engrossing and plodding, and at a few points even laughably campy — more a piece for film students, true movie buffs and the historically curious.

The upside? Metropolis is, after all, an epic within Filmdom’s Pantheon, and even the casual viewer will enjoy spotting the origins of numerous movie cliches stolen for rehash in later Hollywood works.

Your Humble Blogger

I swear this blog has more lives than a danged alley cat.

Yes, since Dateline>City of Angels was launched a few years back, it’s suffered more B-Western-style cliff hangers than any self-respectin’ blog deserves. In fact, when we last left our plucky Web journal, it was finally starting to hit its stride once more after a disastrous train wreck. That was December 2009. (See the immediate post below.)

Yet, despite all his good intentions, your humble blogger again fell silent, thanks to a major setback in his personal life. Unlike many bloggers, however, he chose not to turn that unhappy event and its messy, ongoing aftermath into salacious online entertainment for readers. (Sorry. No daily jabs at “The Ex” here.)

Instead, after a five-month recovery from his fall off his high horse, here he is, back in the saddle, feeling like a kid again, eager to take up the ‘ol blogging reins and giddy up toward exciting new frontiers. (Yes, that photo really is me, circa the 1960s.)

So let’s hit the dusty trail together, shall we? Our journey into anything and everything quirky, historic, macabre and quintessentially Angeleno starts right here tomorrow at sun-up.

See ya then, pardners!

Tumbleweed snow couple near Elysian Park. Photo: M.Imlay.

The return of these tumbleweed snowmen to Stadium Way can only mean one thing: It’s officially Christmas time in the City of Angels.

It’s amusing how ingrained the concept of a White Christmas is in our pop culture. Even here, at the edge of the Mojave Desert, these are the lengths we’ll go to in “recreating” the idealized winter wonderland.

Perhaps that’s in large part because we’re a region populated by countless East-Coast transplants like a friend of mine, who every year laments that here in Los Angeles we never enjoy a “real” Currier and Ives Christmas like the ones he had back home. (It’s one of the many common complaints East Coasters seem to have about L.A., along with our supposedly “unfriendly” atmosphere, poor public transportation, and the inability to find a “decent” — i.e., New York-style — pizza anywhere.)

Reality Check

On the other hand, I maintain that a SoCal Christmas is just as “authentic” as any commercialized fantasy concocted by Macy’s, Hallmark or those maniacal Rankin/Bass cartoonists — perhaps more so. After all, a good portion of the world never sees snow in December. Count among that number Jesus himself, who was born in Bethlehem, a city that also shares a Mediterranean clime like ours in which snow is rare. Moreover, if you take into account current scholarship that dates his actual birth to spring or possibly summer, there’s not a snowball’s chance in you-know-where that the first Christmas was white.

Photo: Curious Country Creations

And yet for some reason, from California to New Mexico, we denizens of the Southwest still feel an annual compulsion to build snowmen — even if we have to resort to spray-painted tumbleweeds to do it. (Not surprisingly, there are even commercial enterprises ready to help us with the basics for as little as $59.95!) But I’ll happily take a tumbleweed snowman over the “real” variety any day.

The great thing about Southern California is you can visit the snow in the nearby mountains whenever you like without ever worrying that the fluffy wet stuff is going to follow you home.

Or you can do like me, forget about the powder and slush altogether, and just hit the beach instead.

Whatever your preference, here’s to a happy, healthy, traditional SoCal holiday season — clear, balmy, and Santa-Ana breezy, with just enough scattered showers here and there to keep the smog at bay…

StockXchng image.

While the rest of us were carving up our turkeys for the holiday, it appears someone — or something — in southern Colorado was engaging in an otherworldly animal carving ritual of their own.

According to this Associated Press story, “a creepy string of calf mutilations” has left local ranchers and sheriff’s officials “mystified:”

“Four calves were found dead in a pasture just north of the New Mexico state line in recent weeks. The dead calves had their skins peeled back and organs cleared from the rib cage. One calf had its tongue removed.”

For those who aren’t too squeamish, grainy pictures of the carnage can be found here. The lack of blood, guts, footprints and predator or ATV tracks at the scene has raised speculation in some quarters that the cattle may have met with a close, deadly encounter of the alien kind.

But before you laugh this whole thing off as an isolated incident in rural Colorado, check out this ranching forum, where the story has stirred some buzz. At least one “real-life” tale shared there is oddly reminiscent of killings attributed to Latin America’s fabled Chupacabra.

Meanwhile, my question has always been why alien travelers never seem to visit us in the big city, preferring instead sparsely populated desert, wilderness and plains communities. But maybe any slight toward us urbanites is completely unintentional.

Perhaps after traveling thousands of light years they merely prefer the dining experiences offered by quiet little out-of-the-way spots.

Dateline>City of Angels will resume regular posting after the holiday weekend. In the meantime, enjoy this Gloria Gaynor parody, courtesy USA Green Card Center.

Photo: M.Imlay

Who says L.A. has no history? Open your eyes (or in this case your camera lens) wide enough, and you’ll literally discover it in the most out-of-the-way corners of town.

While shooting the Broadway viaduct the other day, I parked my Jeep in front of this old brick building on N. Spring Street, thinking little of it. Located at the northernmost fringes of the downtown train yards, there’s nothing all that remarkable about the neighborhood — just a lot of aging warehouses and machine shops. Still, returning from my photoshoot, I liked the way the light was playing off the structure, so I took a few quick photos before driving off.

As I processed the images, the building’s backstory began to gnaw at me. How old was it? Who constructed it? What was its original purpose? On a lark, I launched an Internet search, not really expecting to find anything noteworthy. Little did I know…

Oil, Acrylics and Feminism

It turns out the 16,000-square-foot building was erected in 1914 (some sources say 1917) as a sales office for the once-illustrious Standard Oil Corp. In fact, the relief topping the door represents the oil company’s former logo. But the now-forlorn edifice has an even greater claim to fame. In 1975 it became home to the legendary non-profit feminist art and education group, Woman’s Building. Here are the details, courtesy Wikipedia:

“In 1973, artist Judy Chicago, graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, and art historian Arlene Raven founded the first independent school for women artists, the Feminist Studio Workshop…. Central to the founders’ vision was the idea that the arts should not be separated from other activities of the burgeoning women’s community, and the three looked for a site for their school that could also be shared with other organizations and enterprises.”

They first chose the old Chouinard Art Institute near MacArthur Park, which they re-dubbed “Woman’s Building” after an 1893 Chicago World’s Fair structure designed by Sophia Hayden to showcase women’s arts and crafts. (In fact, not since Hayden had anyone undertaken such an exclusive center for women’s art.) However, when the Korean Culture Center purchased the Chouinard building in 1975, the group was forced to move.

The Gallery of Sisterhood

Photo: M.Imlay

They landed here at the corner of Spring and Aurora. Though somewhat isolated above Chinatown, for 16 years the new Woman’s Building went on to distinguish itself as a hub of creative activism for feminist artists, poets and writers. It hosted programs and events featuring some of women culture’s biggest names while also variously housing theater groups, the Sisterhood Bookstore, a thrift shop, a travel agency, cafes, an arts and crafts store, and offices for Chrysalis Magazine and the Woman Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) organization.

By 1991, though, the original Woman’s Building organizers had all moved on to other projects, and the enterprise shut its doors. Today the momentous brick-and-mortar building is again up for lease as creative/office space.

Hopefully it will find a new occupant worthy of its history.