Results tagged “laistory”

Last week came the news that the Clinton family (yes, Clinton) had decided to sell the building that has housed Clifton's Cafeteria, known as Clifton's Brookdale because of its whimsical forest themed decor, since 1935. Although few people admit to finding the food offered at the last of the Clifton's Cafeterias a gastronomic revelation, the news brought the immediate fear that this would bring about the end altogether of a decades-long institution in Los Angeles. While the Clinton family hopes to just unload the property but continue to operate the cafeteria (they actually only bought the building at 648 S Broadway in Downtown outright in 2006) now seems like a fitting time to fill in the gaps of local history when it comes to the Clintons and their Clifton's Cafeterias...and maybe, if you're hungry, prompt a trip with a tray down the lanes of the eatery--the last of a dying breed.

On August 1, 1939, California Attorney General Earl Warren sent 250 local and state officers to raid four gambling ships anchored off the coast of Santa Monica and Long Beach. The Tango and Showboat idled off Long Beach while the Texas and the Rex anchored off Santa Monica. Local and state authorities, riding in Fish and Game boats and 16 rented water taxis, easily boarded the Tango, the Showboat and the Texas. Once aboard, raiding officers eagerly threw roulette wheels, dice tables, black jack tables and slot machines into the Pacific Ocean. Upon approaching the S.S. Rex, officers were greeted with armed gunmen and high-pressure fire hoses. A nine-day standoff ensued, which newspaper men dubbed "The Battle of Santa Monica Bay."

Once upon a time, Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley boasted its own theme park. The theme, ostensibly: Beer. Well, what else would you make the central focus of an amusement park located on the property of a major brewery?

The Cocoanut Grove, a supper club where the rich and famous dined and danced, opened 3 months after the Ambassador Hotel, in April 1921. It was designed in Moorish style. The palm trees that decorated the room were rumored to have come from the Rudolph Valentino film, The Sheik and they had stuffed monkeys hanging from them. The ceiling was painted midnight blue and sparkling stars were strewn across its firmament.

As late as 2005, the Ambassador sat on twenty-four acres of land on Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown. It was set far back from the street and had the haunted look of old castles. It drew the eye as only someplace ruined, someplace steeped in history can. Blinded, it was worn with crumbling at the edges, bound by a perimeter of chain link fences. It was a fabulous ghost and it could have been a fabulous relic.

These days we're all a-Twitter about food on wheels. From comforting classics like ice cream novelties to tacos with an Korean twist, we seem to love the idea of finding food on our own two feet and the vendors' four wheels. But before Los Angeles was a tangle of freeways and cars getting food items from a truck was actually a way of life. While some of us may still live in neighborhoods frequented by produce and grocery trucks issuing familiar beckoning musical calls, beeps, and horn toots, once upon a time in L.A. our city's bread and other baked treats could be found driving around SoCal 'hoods in the form of the Helms Bakery Coaches.

In Los Angeles, we knock things down. We build them the way we like them. We believe in creating a world the way we think it should be. It's this ethic that has destroyed some of our more famous landmarks, Pickfair was dismantled by Pia Zadora, the original Brown Derby may, at the time of this writing, be a dry cleaner. In a place where people come to reinvent themselves no one has much time for old stuff.

Growing up on the East Coast I recognized early in life that doughnut culture orbited around the sugary planet called “Dunkin Donuts.” Some of my earliest memories were commercials featuring a gentlemen (who resembled both Super Mario and Hitler) who would exclaim softly through a grin, “it’s time to make the donuts.” Los Angeles didn't seem to have an equivalent character, nor a universally agreed upon doughnut hub. I observed the undiscerning masses finding satisfaction in the city's numerous, tiny independent doughnut shops (whose wares looked to all have rolled off the same assembly line in Palmdale.) But it didn’t take long to figure out that the most prominent doughnut in LA was three stories tall and stale as hell (see picture above.)

     

Yesterday was officially National Doughnut (or Donut) Day, but there's no reason to not carry the spirit of celebration over to your weekend, which is why today we're looking at the story behind one of our city's most well known structures.

Hollyhock House is a wonder wrought by Frank Lloyd Wright for our fair city. Though old Frank was a dick in person, he was unquestionably one of the more prominent architects of the twentieth century. Usually associated with his midwestern "Prairie Houses" (very influential in the arts and crafts movement, they were extended, low buildings with sloping roofs and deep terraces and overhangs. These, incidentally, were also an early example of "open plan" homes, the obsession that has driven many a Los Angeleno to alter fine old homes for the worse), or his later usonic homes which made middle class housing out of geometric shapes, he also believed in organic homes, that were in harmony with the land and other natural features that surrounded them.

We live in a city filled with thousands of landmarks, but whether it's just our proclivity for changing courses like our capricious weather patterns, or it's a matter of life imitating the kind of art that put us on the map, even when we call something a "landmark" it doesn't mean it's even here anymore. Or, really, that it even makes sense. Such is the case with one of the most unusual landmarks to spring up in the city, the Tower of Wooden Pallets that accidentally became art, then a landmark, then--to most--just a memory.

As any fan of LAistory knows, Los Angeles is a city of vanished places. We tear free of the past, and generally, whatever comes next, is not as fabulous or interesting as what was there before. The same holds true for the property called Pickfair.

Imagine a structure hailed for its exterior design that took 60 days to build, was trafficked by hundreds of thousands of people for almost four decades, spent 17 years abandoned with an uncertain fate, contributed to the launch of LA's preservation movement, and took one night to burn to the ground.

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--Joni Mitchell, "Big Yellow Taxi"

After Fatty Arbuckle's career was deep-sixed by one of the biggest scandals of its day, he tried his hands at a few things, not the least of which was Fatty Arbuckle's Plantation Cafe. Built at 11700 Washington Boulevard in Culver City, across the street from the site of Arbuckle's elementary school.

There are plenty of ways you can reach out and connect with Los Angeles' vast and fascinating history beyond the confines of our weekly LAistory column. Whether it be through joining a preservation group, taking a walking tour, visiting a museum or historic site, or opening up the pages of a book, LA's stories are often within our grasp. For LAistory, while we like to do the writing and photo-taking (or finding) ourselves, we, too, draw inspiration from our interaction with the city's resources, which is why LAistory is taking a brief pause today to give a shout out to a couple of publications that give us--and can give you, too--a better understanding of where we are and where we came from.

We in Los Angeles like our big food. Big, architectural, junk food that is. Perhaps the king of big food is the Tail 'o the Pup, a hot dog stand designed in the shape of a hot dog in a bun. Already moved once from its original location where the Beverly Center now stands, the Tail O'the Pup was declared by the City of Los Angeles to be a cultural landmark. In 2005, it was moved again, to make room for developers.

It was just over a year ago when the doors closed for good at the Virgin Megastore in the retail complex towering over the southeast corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights. For many, it was the end of an era; the music store was the much-lauded anchor of the stores at 8000 Sunset and a regular stop for locals, celebs, starry-eyed celeb hopefuls, and tourists. But this wasn't the first time this corner said goodbye to a longstanding local legend. For half a century, Schwab's Pharmacy occupied a spot on the same segment of the Sunset Strip, and, like its successor, was also a regular stop for locals, celebs, starry-eyed celeb hopefuls, and tourists.

Unfortunately, you were born too late. You missed the alligator farm. At the turn of the century, the Lincoln Heights neighborhood popular as a weekend get away for Angelenos. In 1907, Francis Earnest and his partner, Joe "Alligator" Campbell opened an alligator farm (It was right next door to their ostrich farm. I'm not kidding.)

William Desmond Taylor lived the kind of life that would be tough to live today, in our era of numbers and cards and facial recognition software. In the end, he paid a steep price for that life and so did Hollywood. Maybe he even lived many lives.

Every winter, many Angelenos get excited by the novelty of heading downtown to Pershing Square and lacing up their ice skates and gliding along (or falling down on) the rink set up during the holiday season. If you spend enough time in Los Angeles eventually you'll hear someone say their weekend plans include "going to the snow," as if cold weather was a destination. And though we may crank up our heat on some chilly wintry nights, we still wear flip flops on our feet with scarves around our necks around here. So it's actually quite fitting to know that once upon a time, when UCLA's roots were barely sinking into the grounds of a blossoming area called Westwood, there was an outdoor skating rink open year-round for pros and amateurs alike.

In 1849, a flood of people came to California to cash in on the gold rush. They spent years bent over rivers, sifting for gold. Sometimes they made a fortune. Others, they came away empty handed. In this town, perseverance can really pay. Or sometimes it just gets you even more screwed. The “Dan the Miner” Statue has stood in Carthay Square since 1925 and has certainly seen both sides of this virtue. “The Pioneer” by Henry Lion stands about seven feet tall and weighs 512 pounds. He was designed as part of a fountain that stood in Carthay Center, and like many other works of art in the area, he celebrates the explorers who settled the west. He holds a pan (some think it looks like a deep dish pizza) from which water once flowed to a pool at his feet.

       

Call it a sign of the times: The property on the southeast corner of Wilshire and Highland bears a giant banner bearing the word "Foreclosure."

All cities have the things they’ve plowed under. In Los Angeles, we still have whole neighborhoods that are named after things that aren’t there anymore. The Carthay area is named after a legendary movie palace, the Carthay Circle Theater. Other areas are also named after movie theaters, like Picfair, but Carthay Circle was considered on par with Grauman’s Chinese and second to none.

As Los Angeles began to reach out in all directions from its tenuous core in the early part of the 20th Century, the city became a place for families and for visitors, and finding ways to make money off keeping them entertained was a frequent pursuit of many visionaries and entrepreneurs. Although a massive theme park like Disneyland didn't come on the scene until the 1950s, in the 1940s animals were the stars at many local attractions.

Ken Kesey told us that “Some things are true, even if they never really happen.” What if a woman was never killed in a house that looks like it might gobble you up if you’re not careful? What if that crime felt true? Then where are you? Well, the answer is, of course, Los Angeles.

Shopping "experiences" like those Rick Caruso has developed in Los Angeles certainly give locals a lot to grouse about, but aside from the perils of modern living (see: Muffin tops, American Girl, and Uggs), these outdoor hyper-designed environments aren't anything new. Of course we can go back hundreds and hundreds of years and note that shopping outdoors in a village-esque atmosphere was a way of life--mainly because you lived in that village--but we can also go back to the 1930s to look at was once a glorious architectural and entrepreneurial vision that was much celebrated right here in LA.

It all started with the ostriches. Well, not really, but don't you think it should have? In fact, Griffith Park started with a curse. When the original owner of Griffith Park, Don Antonio Feliz died of small pox in 1863, he left his extensive land holdings to Don Antonio Coronel. Subsequently, his blind, destitute 17 year old niece, Dona Petronilla, cursed the land -- great misfortune would come to whoever owned it.

Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle had the dubious distinction of being the movie business' first scandal. Born in Kansas in 1887, Roscoe Arbuckle (who only used the name "Fatty" professionally, and otherwise detested it) was catapulted to fame in Mack Sennett's Keystone Cops movies. He made famous the "pie in the face" gag so familiar to many of us. For a larger gentleman, he was an astonishingly graceful tumbler, and was said to have a lovely singing voice. Opera singer Enrico Caruso told him, "with training you could become the second greatest singer in the world." The first, presumably, being himself. He mentored both Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.