How 1950s LA prepped for nuclear war; the Aqualillies are part of the synchronized swimming renaissance; Brains On and sound; LA's Wrigley Field.
Dive into a synchronized swimming renaissance with the Aqualillies
Off-Ramp's Elyssa Dudley reports on the resurfacing of synchronized swimming.
A few years ago, synchronized swimming seemed like a lost art, a throwback to the 1940s, with its flowered swimming caps and one-piece swimsuits. But now, synchronized swimmers are surfacing in everything from fashion ads to music videos. Is it a true renaissance or just a flash in the pool?
"When you're thinking of those 1940s images of synchronized swimmers, you're thinking of an Esther Williams musical, you're thinking of a Busby Berkeley movie, you're thinking of her legacy," says Mary Jeanette, team captain of a Los Angeles-based synchronized team called the Aqualillies.
http://youtu.be/RQj0Saj3L4s?t=1m13s
Williams became a synchronized swimming sensation in the '40s and '50s after starring in a handful of MGM “aquamusicals,” which were like your average musical, but with water. Williams died in 2013, but there’s a good chance the image you have of synchronized swimming — bright red lipstick, beaming smiles and poise — is because of Esther Williams.
After the Esther Williams golden age of synchronized swimming, the art form pretty much died out everywhere except the Olympics. But now, a renaissance is being led by groups like the Aqualillies, with cameos in music videos like Justin Bieber’s “Beauty And A Beat” featuring Nicki Minaj:
http://youtu.be/Ys7-6_t7OEQ?t=2m16s
And the show "Glee":
http://youtu.be/3eYUn3caWTI?t=1m34s
As well as performing at Justin Timberlake’s private birthday party, entertaining at fashion shows for Guess and Vogue and posing for a Chanel ad.
(Chanel ad featuring Aqualilly Alex Stensby. Photo by Patrick Demarchelier.)
"I think it really feels powerful to be in the water. You can do things that you can't do in other places when you're in the water, but you also have to work in an entirely different way," says Mary Jeanette. "But the nice thing is that you know that your friends to the right, and the left, and in front of you are all doing that same thing with you."
This summer, the Aqualillies are teaching classes for beginners at the Annenberg Beach House in Santa Monica and Sportsmen's Lodge in Studio City.
"I thought that I would take to it really naturally because of my background in dance, but it's like a whole other animal. The dancing definitely helps, but it's like dancing and then trying not to drown," says dancer Sara Fenton.
Jeanette says a lot of her students come for the nostalgia and glamour of synchronized swimming, but soon find out that it's an intense workout too.
"There's a huge problem with doing synchronized swimming as a fitness activity, and that is that it's addictive. The workout is like nothing else. It's like cardio pilates in water. There's something almost therapeutic about it as well," says Anita D'Alessandro, who's been taking classes with the Aqualillies for years. "Moving to music, the feeling of no gravity in the water, and the floating — I don't know, there's just something magical about it."
For more information about taking classes with the Aqualillies, visit their website.
A peek in the LA City Archive: How the city prepped for nuclear war in the 1950s
Michael Holland, Los Angeles city archivist, checks in regularly with Off-Ramp. This time he pulls out a box from the archives that shows how L.A. dealt with the threat of nuclear war.
Los Angeles has been preparing for worst-case scenarios for many decades, from earthquakes to floods to wildfires, and you can find the paperwork for all that prep work here in the city archives. But inside Box B-2196, you’ll find how the city prepared citizens for the worst disaster of all — nuclear attack.
In January of 1951, the L.A. City Council enacted Ordinance 97,600. It defined a disaster as “an act of violence affecting the local, state or national welfare.” It needed to be defined because Southern California had become such a major producer of military technology, not to mention the importance of the seaports at San Pedro and Long Beach, plus all our airports.
The possibility of enemy attack wasn’t at all unreasonable. And of course we knew just how bad a nuclear attack could be — we saw it in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So, we get the mundane plans and nightmare scenarios in the papers in this box.
One example comes from the transcript for “Atomic Attack Survival,” a City Council committee hearing from August 1959. A Mr. J.H. Goodrich, representing Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, described an early version of what we would now call “reverse 911 calling” whereby authorities can call a number of citizens simultaneously in an emergency.
“There are a number of units that can be rung at one time by just energizing the signal,” Goodrich said. “But we would have to charge for that.”
VIDEO: US Nuclear Tests in 1959
Meanwhile, speaking of communication, throughout the 1950s the city increased the strength of the radios in police and fire vehicles, utility trucks and even animal control cars. The City Council approved and spent both local and federal civil defense resources to upgrade infrastructure everywhere. Soon, police and fire departments could keep in contact while inside tunnels and in remote locations.
(An undated photo of a woman at the entrance of a bomb shelter. Image: Ralph Morris/LAPL)
Alongside the rational public safety discussions resides the assortment of materials on what a post-bomb world might look like. The pamphlets and books may have tried to reduce the fear of atomic death by offering resilience as a mantra — but it’s not very reassuring.
One such book is titled “How To Survive An Atomic Bomb,” published in 1950. The paperback cover carried the warning, “If there’s atomic warfare, this book may save your life!” It gives bomb shelter layouts and talks about fallout, and then there’s what we’d call an FAQ. Will food containers be safe to eat from? Page 74 answers that question:
“Atomic rays can pass through tin and glass very easily. This does not cause them to spoil and make them dangerous to eat. BUT don’t eat anything from a car or jar or package that was opened before the atomic bomb went off or that was broken open. Better to throw it away.” - Excerpt from booklet, “How To Survive An Atomic Bomb.”
After a similar discussion on safe water, page 76 asks, “How about smoking? Is it all right to smoke?” Let’s not even get into the question on page 111 about rural living that goes, “You said earlier that light-colored materials throw off the heat of the bomb-flash better than dark-colored ones. Does this apply to animals too?” You’ll have to come to the archive to get the answer to that one.
So far, we’ve avoided the real-life fate depicted by these morbid pamphlets, and the widespread fear of nuclear attack has faded into history. I know a guy who turned his backyard bomb shelter into a wine cellar. I suppose there are more enjoyable ways to ride out the end of Los Angeles, but that one is good enough for me.
(Michael Holland's commentary originally appeared in the city employee newspaper, "Alive!")
Here's why we're putting a GPS tracker in a mattress (updated)
Update 2:24 p.m. Monday: Matt the Mattress was picked up from his curbside retreat in Silver Lake at 12:07 p.m. on Monday. He made a short trip down the 5 Freeway before getting off the freeway in Lincoln Heights. Then he went to a property owned by the Los Angeles Department of Public Works.
Is this the end of the road for Matt? We have a call into the representatives from the Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation to see if they'll let us take a look at Matt — and, hopefully, let us have the tracker back. Watch this space for more.
Previously: This week, Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson and KPCC Environment Correspondent Molly Peterson left a mattress on the side of the road with a GPS tracker inside it. The mattress is somewhere in Silver Lake waiting for the city to pick it up. We've named it Matt the Mattress.
Why did we kick Matt to the curb? The short answer is we want to see where he ends up. Here's the long answer:
Lots of mattresses end up in landfills
When you want to dispose of your mattress in the city of Los Angeles, residents are asked to get in touch with the Department of Sanitation's "bulky item pick-up" service. Off-Ramp's Kevin Ferguson talked about this last year.
The L.A. County Department of Public Works estimated government agencies collected 60,000 mattresses in 2012. Of those thousands of mattresses, the County says just 600 of those were recycled. The rest go to landfills for now.
The California state government wants to change that
Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown signed SB 254 — a bill mandating that mattress manufacturers and retailers recycle their products. A state agency has been formed and regulators are currently figuring out how to enforce the new law.
An unknown amount get refurbished
When a mattress gets recycled, the parts inside — the foam, the springs, the wood — get repurposed into other stuff: scrap metal, insulation, carpeting.
When you refurbish a mattress, you turn an old mattress into a new one. Licensed refurbishers apply new fabric to the outside of the mattress and disinfect the old one assuring it's free from contaminants. The problem is, not all refurbishers are licensed — and retailers will rarely admit they sell refurbished mattresses.
Could Matt turn into Matt II?
We want to keep you updated
Watch this space for updates on Matt the Mattress's voyage. Will he go to a landfill? An unlicensed refurbish? The house of a person who really, really wants a mattress? We'll have that here, and more updates on Off-Ramp's Facebook page.
Los Angeles had America's first Wrigley Field
When most people hear the name “Wrigley Field,” they picture brick walls, deep dish pizza and the longest World Series drought in Major League Baseball. But two years before the Chicago stadium became known as Wrigley Field, there was already another ballpark with the same name 2,000 miles to the west.
Built in 1925, the first Wrigley Field was a perfectly symmetrical ballpark with more than 20,000 seats on the corner of 42nd Place and Avalon Boulevard in South Central Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Angels called the stadium home for thirty-three seasons until the migration of two major league New York teams in 1958 brought on the end of the Pacific Coast League in Los Angeles.
The New York Giants defected to San Francisco, the Brooklyn Dodgers settled into Los Angeles and with them came appearances by every National League star and for the Dodgers in particular, three World Series titles in less than ten years.
The Angels folded that same year, and for a time, Wrigley Field was without regular home games. Like so many other dormant structures in Los Angeles, it became a popular filming location. The movie version of Damn Yankees had ball players singing and dancing across the infield. TV shows like The Twilight Zone and The Munsters used the bleachers as a backdrop. But it was a baseball-themed sports show that left the most curious claim to fame:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC9ku86y42o
Twenty-six episodes of Home Run Derby were filmed in the off-season of 1959. Some of the biggest names in baseball spent an afternoon hitting long balls onto the front lawns of neighboring houses, their second story windows clearly visible as the cameramen tried to track the hits.
Unlike most celebrity game shows these days, the sluggers in Home Run Derby were competing for serious cash. Over the course of six appearances, Hank Aaron took home over $12,000, the equivalent of more than a third of his year’s salary.
The show only lasted one season. Host and creator Mark Scott died suddenly of a heart attack a week after the last episode ran and the derby didn’t resurface until 1985 when Major League Baseball adopted the contest as an official part of All-Star Weekend.
In 1961, Gene Autry bought the Los Angeles Angels and brought the team back to life. They played their first year at the stadium where 248 home runs were hit in just over 80 home games, including two of Roger Maris’ record 61. That dubious ballpark record lasted more than 30 years, but the Angels only lasted at Wrigley for a season.
The following year, Dodger Stadium was completed, offering more than two and half times the seating of Wrigley Field.
Four years later, the Angels moved into an equally large home in Anaheim. Wrigley Field held on until 1969, hosting occasional concerts and rallies, including one by Dr. Martin Luther King, but it couldn’t sustain itself. The field was demolished and turned into a city park, burying most of its history along with it.
But at least we’ve still got the home run derby.
PHOTOS: New Woodland Hills homeowners find fully stocked fallout shelter in their backyard
A few weeks ago, my friend Chris Murray wrote:
Chris and Colleen recently closed on a Charles DuBois Ranch House and the bomb shelter is an absolute time capsule: still stocked with old magazines, bunks, sleeping bags and medications. I told them to keep it in case of imminent Zombie Apocalypse. You're more than welcome to visit...
He didn't need to ask twice. Chris and Colleen Otcasek immediately agreed to let Off-Ramp into their time capsule, or time machine, and didn't flinch when I showed up with shop lights, a 100-foot extension cord, historian Charles Phoenix, and KPCC photographer Mae Ryan. Chris and Colleen even made a relish tray and served Arnold Palmers.
It's really not a bomb shelter; it would never withstand a blast directed at the Valley's aerospace industry. It's a fallout shelter, designed to keep the radiation away for a few weeks, like in this cheery movie, which I'm sure comforted millions of Americans.
And inside we found a Kresge's worth of items: Kleenex, sanitary napkins, canned food, sleeping bags, magazines -- which delighted Med, Charles, Chris, and I ... and pills and a writing tablet hanging on the wall with a 30-year calendar, which made Chris Otcasek, the most somber of the group, ask, "What would you write on this? A suicide note? Anyone who built a shelter in their backyard would have to be pretty optimitistic."
Chris had just coincidentally seen a Twilight Zone episode in which a Cold War backyard fallout shelter doesn't do anything but drive neighbors apart when they think they're under nuclear attack.
Unlike many homeowners, Chris and Colleen don't plan to fill in their shelter. They say they'll leave it as it is, undisturbed for the next owners.
Midnight Mission centennial: How this man went from homeless to managing a shelter
In 1914, Tom Liddecoat — a Pentecostal minister and businessman — opened a small shelter on the intersection of Fourth and Los Angeles streets in downtown Los Angeles. With the promise of a hot meal, he'd invite anyone on Skid Row in to listen to his sermon. Dinner was served at midnight.
One hundred years later, the Midnight Mission is still going strong. The meals are served earlier now, and there's lots more of them: The Mission served 3,000 breakfasts, lunches and dinners a day last year. The headquarters are on Seventh and San Pedro now — near the heart of Skid Row.
Clancy Imislund is the Mission's managing director. He's worked in that position for 40 years. Before that, he was using their services. Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson talked with Clancy about his job and how he got there.
On how he ended up on Skid Row
Well, I wasn't on Skid Row very long. I was only on Skid Row one night. And that was at an all-night theater up on Broadway. At that time, there were two or three all-night theaters. They were designed for old drunks, I guess. Because the tickets would cost 25 or 30 cents. You'd go in there when it rained, or it was cold, and you could sleep in there. You'd try not to find a movie with much explosions or shots.
They didn't run all night; they ran until five in the morning. And then they'd come in and say, "All right, you bums! Everybody out." And that's when I hit the street.
I ran into a guy who said, "Do you want to sell a pint of blood?" And I said, "You bet!" We walked up Fourth Street to a blood bank. And I did not have enough iron in my blood to sell a pint of blood, so they suggested I go to the Midnight Mission.
So I went there for breakfast. I said, "I got to have some breakfast. I'm very sick." And the man said, "We just got done serving." And I said, "Come on, for God's sake — I'm sick! Help me!" And he said he can't serve me.
I grabbed him by the lapel — which was a bad thing to do — and two guys stepped over, undid each hand, and threw me out the door into the rain. They said, "Don't come back!"
And so some guy steered me to an [Alcoholics Anonymous] club out out Wilshire and Fairfax. I thought it was going to be three blocks; it turned out to be 75 blocks! That morning I stopped drinking, and I haven't had a drink since. That was 1958, so that's a long time ago.
On how drinking affected his life
I had just been fired by a big advertising agency in Dallas. I had a fairly good career, but I was drinking very, very heavily. That's why I was discharged. And my wife and children left me in Dallas. A guy had given me a car, said to drive to Los Angeles for him. I got as far as Phoenix, and I hid the car so that when I drank, no one would steal it. And I hid it so well, I have not found it yet!
Then I hustled some guy for $20, got a bus ticket to Los Angeles. I don't know why — I thought maybe the car would show up here.
On how he came to work for the Midnight Mission
When I was 15 years sober, I was doing very well. I was a marketing director for a publishing firm in Beverly Hills. My family had returned. We all lived in a big [house] out by the ocean. And somebody called me one day and said, "The guy who's been director of the Midnight Mission downtown just died suddenly after a heart attack, after 40 years on the job. Do you know of anybody who'd be interested in taking the job?" And I said, "No, I don't. But I'll look around."
I had brought in AA meetings to the mission, but I had nothing to do with their operations. I was lying in bed one day and thought that would be kind of good to do that — just for a few weeks before they found somebody.
And I got caught up in it. Because I'd been doing a lot of work with people who were down and out. And I went to the board and said I'd like to apply for the job. And recently — Feb. 1 — I celebrated 40 years here. I didn't really think I'd be here that long, or I'd have made different plans!
On how Skid Row and the Midnight Mission have changed over the years
The Midnight Mission was a much smaller facility. It was over on the corner of Fourth and Los Angeles. It had been there a number of years. But Skid Row then was old white drunks, mostly. They were very hard to, in a way, to change. Because most of them — their lives were behind them, and they didn't much care what happened next. They survived — just survived.
I don't think much has changed [at the Midnight Mission] except we have people here who work with these guys in groups. We have counselors. And the counselors adapt to them. And now we have a group of people who have been off crack. And they understand the crack situation very well, and they're counselors for people with crack problems. And we have alcoholics; we're working with alcoholics.
And it's been quite successful. We try to treat the people — sober people — with respect. Which they're not used to.
The Midnight Mission serves breakfast, lunches and dinners to residents of Skid Row and is always in need of help. If you'd like to volunteer or contribute, you can do so through their website.
PHOTOS: The nuclear engineer who built last week's fallout shelter
Last week on Off-Ramp, we told you about a "pristine" 1960's backyard fallout shelter in Woodland Hills. Turns out, it wasn't quite as pristine as we advertised. Yes, it was full of many of the items its builder stocked it with, from tranquilizers to toilet paper to army blankets.
But last week, I got this email:
That house in Woodland Hills was my childhood home. I grew up in that house and my father built the bomb shelter. We used to have Bomb drills when I was a kid. I just sold my childhood home to the Otcasek's about six months ago. If you want the real story on that bomb shelter, I'm the one who's got it.
How could I resist?!
I met Debra Kaufman at the house Wednesday and interviewed her in the dining room. She brought a bag of stuff she understandably cleared out of the shelter, which I photographed. But more importantly, she brought the story of the man who built the shelter, her father Alvin B. Kaufman.
Kaufman (1917-2004), was a man of many parts. Debra describes her dad as an autodidact who held his own as a nuclear engineer with men with far more formal training. One of his areas of expertise as a nuclear engineer for Litton Industries was to determine the effect of a nuclear blast on equipment. Of course this means he well knew its effect on humans, so it's no wonder he built a shelter in the backyard of his home.
But in an interesting twist on what we had previously speculated about the shelter and its potential effect on the neighborhood in case of nuclear war, it turns out Alvin proposed to his neighbors in the cul-de-sac that they build a shelter big enough for the whole neighborhood. Deb says he was rejected, so he made one for the family.
RIP David Weidman, 93. Prolific printmaker, found new fame in Mad Men
UPDATE 8/8/2014: I'm very sad to note that David Weidman died Wednesday at the age of 93. Pat Saperstein has a nice appreciation of him in Variety.
KPCC's John Rabe talks with iconic printmaker David Weidman. Weidman is now in his late eighties, made thousands of prints and posters for homes and hotels in the 60s and 70s, plus backgrounds for several animation studios. He still lives in the house he built in Highland Park more than fifty years ago. He's not making prints anymore, but he -- and his wife Dorothy -- still had lots to say about his craft, which mixes the perspective and emotion of Cubism, with the storytelling and personality of Norman Rockwell, with the sense of humor of, well, David Weidman. COME INSIDE for a slideshow and book signing info ...
On Saturday, November 28th, from 5-7pm, David Weidman will be at The Vintage Collective in Long Beach selling art and signing copies of his beautiful, comprehensive book, "The Whimsical Works of David Weidman, and Some Serious Ones" plus Darrell Van Citters' "Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol," for which Weidman did art.
Created with flickr slideshow.
Grant Morrison explores 52 different universes in 'Multiversity,' from Nazi Superman to our world
Comic book writer Grant Morrison, who splits his time between his native Scotland and Los Angeles, has been writing comics for 30 years. His work includes some of the most influential works in comics history — from "Animal Man" to "All-Star Superman" and beyond. His new project, "The Multiversity," has been in the works for almost a decade and explores big idea metacommentary on the DC Comics universe and our own world.
"I've been working on this thing for eight years, so for me it feels like a child almost. I'm so glad to see it's finally delivered. Basically, we're finally defining the 52 universes of DC's multiverse," Morrison told KPCC.
This labor of love lets Morrison look at alternate versions of the iconic characters fans have known. He said that he would start with a sketchpad and start redefining an existing character for a certain world.
"One of my favorite things is just sitting down and making up worlds, and especially if you're doing things that are basically bouncing off the DC universe, the material's all there," Morrison said. "It's just, what's a Nazi Batman like? And rather than just going for the obvious, you start thinking that through, and what kind of world, and where would he have been brought up, and why would he have certain attitudes."
Morrison's been known throughout his career for pushing the boundaries of comics, often breaking the fourth wall. One of his first iconic stories in "Animal Man" featured a Looney Tunes-inspired moment where the hand of the artist could be seen and the main character had a conversation with Morrison himself. He's continuing that in "Multiversity" with one of the issues looking at Earth-Prime, the DC Comics version of our own real world Earth.
"There are combinations of certain things I've always been doing. One of my great missions is to dissolve the boundary between the reader and the comic, and this I think does it more effectively than anything else. I think in this one, the reader is really on the front line. You do actually have to fight a monster as the reader. It gets quite scary in issue 7."
Still, Morrison doesn't want to let that sort of storytelling be all that defines him.
"There's those meta elements that I'm pretty well known for," Morrison says, but now he wants to reach different audiences with each book. "So rather than, for the people who are sick of Grant Morrison metaphysical metanarrative stories, there's also really just simple, something like Thunderworld, which is an all ages Captain Marvel, Marvel Family story."
One of the other genres Morrison is set to explore in these books is political thriller in "Pax Americana," riffing on "Watchmen" and using similar storytelling techniques as the comic book, but with the characters that originally inspired "Watchmen" before being changed for that series. He's also writing books tackling pulp, celebrity culture, alternate history and other edges of the DC multiverse.
"Even if people don't like what I've been doing all these years, there's six books where there's none of that and there's just stories."
Morrison said that it's important to him that his work has an impact in our world.
"One of my proudest things is that the Superman scene that we did in 'All-Star Superman,' where he saves the young goth kid from suicide, has actually saved real people's lives in the real world. And to me, if I do nothing else in my life, I've saved some kid's life by writing that scene."
Morrison says that shows the power of comic books and of Superman.
"That shows that Superman doesn't have to be real in order to do good things, and that kind of justifies my take on these characters, in that they don't have to be real, but they can still inspire us. They can still represent that part of us that rises above ourselves. And I think that's the value of superhero characters in comics: They can actually help real people get through life."
Morrison said that he's excited about writing different versions of these characters, arguing that you to understand a character like Batman, you have to see him from multiple angles. But he did admit that a different take doesn't always work, noting that his attempt to write an anti-corporate Superman in "Action Comics" didn't have the impact he was looking for.
"Once I tried that, I really began to believe that Superman works best as a purely symbolic figure, and any attempt to actually have him beating up corporate heads and things, it's not really achieving much in the real world," Morrison said. "So for me, the bigger Superman adventures get, the more effective they are. But I think there was a strand in there that was worth pursuing, but someone else should try it — some little Occupy kid should write Superman."
While the angle may be tilted, some elements of the characters can stay the same throughout universes, Morrison says.
"What holds true [for Superman] is indomitable will," Morrison said. "We've got a universe where the Nazis won the war. But rather than make that a simplistic idea, where it's just here's evil Nazi Superman with his red eyes glaring, we though, well OK, they won the war, but 70-odd years have past, and suddenly the world's fine."
Morrison said that, even in that context, Superman will still be Superman.
"Superman knows that it's built on the bones of million, and because Superman's a good man, the guilt starts to destroy him. So we can see a different kind of Superman. He's still the same, powerful man, but once something like that gets under his skin, it can dismantle his entire belief structure. So we wanted to do that one, to take quite a subtle approach to a Nazi Superman."
The Multiversity books came out of taking known characters and putting them into a new context.
"Every one of them was worked out to be a slightly different, here's what would happen if you put Superman in this terrible situation, here's what would happen to Superman who's never been in a terrible situation. You know, here's a guy who's never had to fight in his life. What does he do when trouble comes calling?"
Morrison hopes that these characters could live on past "Multiversity" and continue to inform the stories DC Comics tells. He laid out some of the complexities he's trying to set up in a large map of the DC multiverse (click here to see the full-size version of the Multiversity map) and has spent years thinking through what these worlds are all about.
"I want them all to be characters that they're not just one note, they're not just some dumb thing that comes in for a fight and then dies. I want all of these characters to be able to sustain their own series, and sustain their own books, and sustain their own universes."
While Morrison loves DC Comics, he expressed mixed feelings about the "New 52" reboot, which wiped many of the previous stories DC had published out of continuity.
"For me, it was kind of weird to see a lot of the history disappear, but then it's exciting a new generation of writers coming up and putting their own ideas in and creating a new version of all that."
Morrison grew up with DC Comics, and it's still the universe he has the most affinity for. It's one he plans on sticking with and it's the one that's defined his career — despite doing some work for Marvel, notably on the X-Men.
"I think when you're a kid, if you get into one thing or the other, you're either a Marvel kid or a DC kid, no matter what you think later. So for me it was always DC that pressed the button, and it's why I keep going back there, and I kind of find it endlessly fascinating."
"Multiversity" hits comic book shops this month.
A map of the DC multiverse, designed by Grant Morrison (click here to see a full-size version):
The mysterious mannequins of North Hollywood Toyota
Off-Ramp contributor Collin Friesen looks into the backstory of the mannequins that greet you from the parking garage for a NoHo Toyota dealership.
In Los Angeles, there are landmarks and then there are… well, those things that just make you say “huh?”
One that falls into the latter category is in North Hollywood, just when the 134 turns into the 101. On your right, lining the rails of the four-story Toyota dealership, frozen in place, looking blankly towards Griffith Park. Male and female, a few kids. Their arms raised in what I’ve always assumed is some kind of automotive-related salute.
Two dozen in all, frozen in time like a plastic Pompei. These are the mannequins of North Hollywood Toyota.
They’re fun to drive by occasionally, but Sara Logan is the receptionist at DDO Artists Agency, a neighbor of the dealership, and for her, they’re practically in the next cubicle.
“The arms will move when the wind picks up, especially at night," she said. "Someone looks out and someone’s arms are moving, it’s a little creepy.”
SPEAKING OF CREEPY: Why cereal box characters make eye contact with your kid
“I’ve come out here late at night and been startled," said Noel Graham, North Hollywood Toyota’s Internet director, "but I can assure you, none of our mannequins has caused any harm.”
He's also the dealership's mannequin history expert.
“Chris Ashworth is our owner and GM, he’s British and has a very interesting sense of humor, and at some point we had a vehicle on a ramp with its nose in the air, and he thought it would be fun to put a body in there waving at people, so he put a body in there,” said Graham.
So how did that lead to all of this? I ask.
“Addiction is a very serious thing in L.A.," said Graham. "Yeah, it blossomed, when he went to buy the first mannequin he got a group deal so next thing we had a whole family.”
I have to admit, I was kind of hoping there was something more nefarious or sales-oriented to the mannequins. Like the dealership wanted drivers to think there were just a ton of people buying cars that day and so they’d want to check it out. Think Don Draper pitching the client… “Mannequins, they bring us home, they are home.”
But the dealership says these “people of plastic descent” do help the bottom line. You may not know the name of the dealership, but you know it’s the one with the mannequins.
The cops know them, too, says Noel Graham: “At one point we got fined, one of our pranksters thought it would be funny to have a man hanging from the railing by the Freeway… it was a joke that went bad when people thought it was a real person. We paid a fine and have kept them in line ever since.”
As I walked among the mannequins, I could see how the constant exposure has taken its toll. Some paint is a little chipped, a wig not hanging right. But they do get a change of clothing every few months, with outfits donated by staff members. A few have been replaced over the years, and yes, sometimes a mannequin, or a just a body part, will go missing.
It puts me in mind of the last line of the poem "Mannequins of 7th Street" by Tamar Yoseloff:
We, merely flesh, race past, hail cabs, jump buses, never to strike their timeless pose.
They keep watch from their temple of glass, stranded in silence, all dressed up and nowhere to go.