“Dark Shadows” fans, cast, and crew are celebrating its 50th birthday next week in Hollywood. We mark the anniversary by bringing in one of the original stars, and one of the original fans. ... When LAPD officer Jorge Parra isn’t walking the beat in LA, he’s still thinking about the city’s streets and buildings. He’s spent years building a 72-square-foot model of LA, out of Legos, in his kitchen. ... We’ll tell you what researchers discovered about the best way to increase voter turnout: voters need to make a simple plan, tell someone about it, and then think what their neighbors will say if they don’t go to the polls.
Commemorating LA's Chinese Massacre, possibly the worst lynching in US history
"We are holding this solemn observance to remember the bigotry and hardship endured by the early immigrants and to share the lessons that are embodied within that experience for this and future generations." -- Dr. Gay Yuen, Friends of the Chinese American Museum.
Monday evening, L.A.'s Chinese American Museum will commemorate the 145th anniversary of possibly the worst lynching in American history, the Chinese Massacre, which happened near the present-day museum. Robert Petersen tells the story in his podcast, The Hidden History of Los Angeles, which he shares with Off-Ramp.
Standing on Los Angeles Street today, just north of the 101 Freeway in downtown, I can hear the hum of the freeway behind me. I can see tourists congregating on the plaza and people walking to and from Union Station about a block away. But 145 years ago, this was the site of one of the darkest chapters in Los Angeles history, when 18* Chinese immigrants were tortured and hanged.
In 1871, Los Angeles was a small, but notoriously violent town of little more than 5,000 people. The town also had a small Chinese community. And during this time there was a growing anti-Chinese sentiment based on fears that the new immigrants were taking white jobs. This economist resentment, which quickly devolved into racial hysteria, serves as the backdrop to our story.
On the evening of October 24, 1871, one of L.A.’s six police officers, Jesus Bilderrain, was at a saloon on the corner of Arcadia and Main Streets when he heard gunfire. He jumped on his horse and headed for Calle de los Negros, which was the center of L.A.’s Chinese community. He shouted for a fellow police officer, Esteban Sanchez, to join him. They arrived and found five or six Chinese men shooting at each other in the middle of the street. When the officers arrived, the men ran off in different directions.
The officers found a Chinese man named Ah Choy lying in the street with a gunshot wound to his neck. The gunfight was caused by a dispute between two rival Chinese factions over the kidnapping of a young Chinese woman. A group of gunmen had fled the scene and headed into the nearby Coronel Building. The Coronel Building housed the core of the Chinese community and was filled shops and tiny apartments.
What happened next is not entirely clear, as different eyewitness offered different accounts of the incident. In one version, Bilderrain said that he courageously ran into the Coronel building and was immediately shot. Falling to his knees, with a bullet in his arm, Bilderrain blew his whistle to raise the alarm.
A popular rancher and former saloon owner named Robert Thompson ran up to the other officer, Esteban Sanchez, and asked what was happening. A bystander then yelled out: “The Chinamen have shot Bilderrain.” Thompson was not a police officer. But in 1870s L.A., private citizens were used to taking the law into their own hands.
And so, an armed Robert Thompson drew his pistol and stepped to the open doorway of the Coronel building. He fired a wayward shot inside. A bystander shouted to Thompson, “Don’t go in there or they’ll shoot you.” Thompson replied, “I’ll look out for that.” He stepped into the hallway and was immediately shot in the chest. Thompson turned back into the street, collapsed, and died.
Thompson’s death incited a mob estimated at 500 people — nearly a tenth of the entire population of L.A. — to gather around Chinatown. The mob laid siege to the Coronel building. Climbing up the walls they used axes to hack holes into the roof. They sprayed gunfire from shotguns and rifles into the rooms below. At one point the mob tried to set the building on fire before attempting to use a fire hose to force the Chinese into the street. Finally, they stormed the building.
What happened next was an outbreak of violence that was shocking and brutal even by the savage standards of 1871 Los Angeles. Mob members dragged Chinese to hastily erected gallows at several different locations.
One of the victims, Dr. Gene Tong, was probably the most respected Chinese men in L.A. As Dr. Tong was being dragged in the street, he pled for his life in English and Spanish. He could see the bodies of his neighbors hanging from a nearby gate. Dr. Tong reminded the mob that he was innocent and had not taken part in gun battle earlier that evening. He even offered his captors his entire savings of several thousand dollars if they would let him go. That only prompted mob members to rip open his pockets and search for money. Then a mob member raised his pistol and shot Dr. Tong in the mouth.
By 9 p.m., nearly all of the Chinese who had not escaped early in the evening had either been captured by the mob or found refuge at the jail or in friendly American houses and shops. The next morning, Angelenos witnessed the devastation as they saw the bodies of the dead laid out in double rows.
Subsequent criminal trials in connection with the massacre resulted in eight convictions. But the convictions were overturned by the California Supreme Court based on a technicality. All eight men were set free and the D.A. decided not to retry them. And so it ended. And it was quickly forgotten. During the following years with waves of new residents and the arrival of the transcontinental railroad, L.A. grew to become a modern city.
Today, there is little left of L.A.’s original Chinatown, before it was moved to its present-day location to make way for the construction of Union Station. And while mostly forgotten, echoes of 1871 still remain at the present-day locations of the massacre. On Los Angeles Street at Arcadia Street — this is the approximate site of the Coronel building where the massacre started. Or the parking entrance to the L.A. Mall on Los Angeles Street, just north of Temple -- this is the approximate site of Goller’s wagon shop where ten victims were lynched. Or the Hall of Justice, on Main and Temple Streets — this is the approximate site of Tomlison’s Corral, where four other victims were lynched. It is ironic that the Hall of Justice stands upon a place of such injustice, but also apt for Los Angeles which is home to so many contradictions.
(*The exact number killed is in dispute. Scott Zesch, in his book "The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871," documents 18 deaths.)
Photos: How cop's eye for detail helped this Angeleno model the city in his kitchen — from Legos
Los Angeles is always changing, and so is its skyline, a fact Jorge Parra keeps in mind as he engineers his own version of L.A. ... in his kitchen.
Parra's L.A. is made up of about 70,000 Lego pieces, and it takes up about 72-square-feet in his home.
“I love skyscrapers and towers,” Jorge says. “I wanted to recreate the skyline – and that’s something that I am still working on. I only have four [skyscrapers] right now and City Hall. I want to expand that to the Ritz-Carlton and the Bank of America Tower. I think those are going to be my next projects.”
His colorful plastic brick model of L.A. already includes the Wilshire Grand Tower, L.A. City Hall, the U.S. Bank Tower, LAX. And, of course, there is even a miniature In-N-Out.
When Jorge isn’t working on his Lego L.A. City; he works in the real Los Angeles.
“I am a police officer with the LAPD,” Jorge says. “As a police officer you focus a lot on detail. You have to be very detail-oriented. It’s a way to release what you do at work. It’s a form of therapy as well.”
Jorge Parra had never seen Lego bricks until he was in second grade when his neighbor received a Lego set for his birthday. After that, Jorge knew exactly what he was going to ask for when his own birthday rolled around. Jorge, now 23, has been collecting ever since.
He says that he never would have imagined what would become of his collection.
“You can take those bricks, those generic multicolored bricks that everyone knows and go and sculpt something like this,” Jorge says. “These structures that are instantly recognizable to anyone in L.A..”
His model isn’t an exact replica, but the iconic elements really paint a picture of the city life.
There's a section that resembles the historic core in downtown, and a beach that has a lot of wacky characters that might remind one of Venice Beach – I'm looking at you, Lego man with a banana costume.
The characters are everywhere. On one corner a Lego man is selling hot dogs, and a few blocks down, a quartet of Legos are about to play some mariachi music.
Jorge’s model isn’t on display year-round because it takes up so much space in his home. But he makes an effort to recreate, organize and add new iconic structures to this city once a year for his YouTube channel.
Make sure to listen to the audio to hear Parra reveal where he finds his rare Legos, and to hear the little Metro train that runs through his Los Angeles.
#VoterGamePlan: Save yourself heartache and hassle. Use KPCC's voter guide
RIP Mel Haber, a prince of old Palm Springs, owner of Melvyn's, 80
UPDATE: Mel Haber, Palm Springs' old school restaurateur, died Tuesday at 80 of lung cancer. According to The Desert Sun, Melvyn's is in the process of being sold: "The restaurant was put up for sale when Haber's health began to fail. It is now in escrow, Ellis said, and is being sold to a group of investors from San Francisco including Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom."
It’s a typical Saturday night here at Melvyn’s, one of the oldest and most iconic restaurants in Palm Springs. The bar is packed, a piano player belts out covers, couples fill the dance floor. And every weekend, you'll find Melvyn Haber roaming the restaurant.
"I am best known for the fact on my opening night, I chased away Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw, who were on a motorcycle, not realizing who they were. That was the first of one thousand foot-in-mouth experiences that I’ve had here," says Haber.
The 79-year-old Haber — he goes by Mel — is the owner and proprietor of one of Palm Springs's oldest hotels, the Ingleside Inn, and its restaurant, Melvyn’s, which he named after himself. Forty years ago, Haber was a Long Island businessman looking for the good life. He was tired of selling fuzzy dice and other automotive tchotchkes. With no experience in the hospitality business, he came out west.
"I was going through a midlife crisis, stumbled out to Palm Springs and wound up buying this property," Haber says.
The compound was originally built in 1925 as the private estate of the Humphrey Birge family, owners of the Pierce Arrow Motor Car Company. In 1935, they sold it to Ruth Hardy who ran it as a private hotel until 1965. "She had the who’s who of the world here, from Howard Hughes to Herbert Hoover to Clark Gable to Gianini who built the Bank of America," Haber says.
But by the time he bought the place in 1974, it had seen better days. "It was as shabby as could be," Haber says. "There was no air conditioning. The jacuzzi was cracked. The carpet was threadbare." It also wasn't open to the public.
Haber decided to make a go of it, improving the property, revamping the rooms and opening it up to anyone who wanted to rent a room. With no connections or experience, Haber did it through sheer brute force: "Fortunately, nothing was happening in town. Palm Springs was a small village. The opening and closing of the racquet club determined the social season. And people flocked here."
Did they ever. Locals came looking for a bit of glamour, celebrities came seeking privacy, writers came in search of a soothing retreat. Four decades later, Melvyn’s hasn’t changed much. The maître d’ and some waiters have been here 40 years. They still do tableside preparation, with a chafing dish and flames. It’s old school.
"In those days, everybody in Palm Springs was somebody. Right after I came here, Palm Springs became the symbol of the rich and famous. Gerald Ford, the president, just moved here. [Bob] Hope was here. Annenberg was here. Robin Leach was here doing shows. And I appeared on all of them. Why? Because I had a hot saloon in Palm Springs," Haber says.
Melvyn's became a celebrity magnet attracting Debbie Reynolds, David Hasselhoff, John Travolta and Carol Burnett, among others. One day, Haber spotted regulars Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell at the front desk.
"I say, 'How come you’re here? I didn’t know you were coming.' Kurt Russell had just gotten a brand new plane and he was a pilot," Haber says. "They were looking for some place to fly for an excuse. They said, what could be better than flying to Palm Springs and having lunch at Melvyn’s by the pool?"
Haber remembers one star with special warmth: Dinah Shore. "I don’t know how to explain this, there was something tremendously sensuous about her. You wanted to cuddle with her, you wanted to hug her. She was warm and fuzzy. She was as sweet and as nice as anybody I ever met. Without question, [she was] my favorite celebrity," Haber says. "I get some of the current celebrities but I don’t know who they are when I get them."
One celeb was bigger than all of them.
"Sinatra, incidentally, was awesome," Haber says. "When he came in, I would leave. There was an aura about him of power that I cannot describe. He’s the only person I’ve ever been intimidated by."
One day, Frank Sinatra asked Haber what kind of caviar he had: "I don’t have a clue but I figure there's black and gray. I got a 50% chance of guessing. I said we have black caviar."
Mel must’ve guessed right — Frank Sinatra held the reception for his 1976 wedding to his fourth and final wife, Barbara, at Melvyn’s.
"Comes the night of the party, I ask Sinatra if he wants me to close the whole restaurant. He says no, you can keep the patio open to the public as long as they don't disturb my party. About 7 o'clock, two guys come in with cameras strung around their neck, with these hats on with a sign that says Enquirer. I couldn't believe how obvious they were. So, of course, we escort them off the property."
Later, at midnight, as the party is winding down, Haber and his manager are walking Frank and Barbara out to a brand new Rolls Royce. As the newlyweds drive away, two men jump out from behind a tree and snap a picture of Sinatra through the windshield.
"Jilly Rizzo runs up, rips the camera out of the guy's hand, takes the film out of the guy's camera and throws it on the floor. Monday morning, the picture appeared in the Enquirer. The two guys that were sent in that said Enquirer were sent in to throw us off base. Decoys. The two guys, beautifully dressed who were here with two women having dinner on the patio. When they jumped out from behind the tree and took the picture, that camera goes back in the pocket and the camera for ripping and throwing away is out there for Jilly Rizzo to grab. That's how good they are," Haber says.
"At the end of the night, I said to him, 'Mr. S, I can't tell you what an honor it is for you to have your party here. He said, c'mon kid, you’re meshpuchah. In Jewish, the word meshpuchah means family."
Mel has no intention of ever retiring or ever selling. He’ll be the first one to tell you his success is unlikely. And he knows he has something special on his hands.
"People who love this kind of property, love it. They hate the big box hotels. When I travel, I go to big box hotels. I am everything that’s wrong for this business," he says. "I am not a foodie. I am not a wine connoisseur. I can’t cook a hamburger, make a Bloody Mary or open a cash register drawer. And I’m not into quaint charming hotels. However, this property happens to be unique by itself. There’s a magic ambiance about it that I’ve come to appreciate. I am the great American story. Don’t ask me how or why. I keep saying: The guy upstairs has me confused with somebody else."
How long can Mel Haber keep going? For as long as he can still put on a suit jacket and spin a great story.
Song of the Week: 'Grief Thief' by Arjuna Genome
This week’s Off-Ramp song of the week is “Grief Thief” by the Los Angeles band Arjuna Genome.
Arjuna Genome was the solo project of Douglas James Sweeney, a Los Angeles born singer and songwriter. Sweeney died unexpectedly this month - he was 26.
Sweeney was an vital part of a dynamic, diverse independent music scene in Los Angeles. That community will pay tribute to him on Friday, October 28 at Stories Bookstore and Cafe in Echo Park.
Check out the video for Arjuna Genome's "Grief Thief" below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5E4kFwpsAqU
KPCC's VoterGamePlan: Efficiency expert Charles Duhigg explains why voting is like getting married
KPCC's Voter Game Plan is our way of saying, "We feel your pain, and we're here to help you through this election." And one of the things we've been saying over and over is that we want to help you make a plan for dealing with the election - everything from figuring out the props, measures, and candidates on the ballot to finding your polling place - because making a plan increases your chance of getting it done.
How do we know this? Because we talked with Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer prize winning reporter for The New York Times and the author of "Smarter Better Faster," a book about being productive.
"You've captured something," Duhigg told me, "that social scientists have been studying for a really long time, which is How do we increase voter turnout." And they found some simple things they could do to get people to vote. After calling people and asking if people were going to vote (people always say yes), they'd ask what time of day people were going to vote. If they could answer that, they were much more likely to vote.
"There's something about just coming up with a plan in your head, and what they've discovered is that we basically try to look for evidence around us as to whether we're committed to something, including what we say to strangers. And so when we come up with a little bit of a plan in our mind, it gives us a framework for actually acting on it."
And here's where marriage comes in. Duhigg says there's also a social contract involved. "We want to fulfill this mental picture that we have of ourselves. If you're trying to lose weight, if you tell someone that you're trying to lose weight, it's more likely that you'll eat less. And the reason is, first of all, a little social responsibility. Someone's keeping tabs on us how the diet's going - or who did you vote for."
"But equally strong or secondarily," Duhigg says, "When I say something to someone else, I'm creating a picture in my mind of the person that I want to be."
And that, Charles agrees, is why we get married in front of family and friends.
And by the way, Duhigg says when researchers told people that they were going to tell their neighbors whether they voted or not, voter turnout went WAY up.
Hey! You can take photos at the Getty's new 'London Calling' exhibit. They want you to!
"London Calling: Bacon, Freud, Kossoff, Andrews, Auerbach, and Kitaj" is at the Getty Museum through Nov. 13, 2016.
I was at the opening of "London Calling" at the Getty on Monday night, and the excitement was palpable. People weren't just milling through, chatting with their friends — they were turning to strangers and talking about the works.
Co-curator Julian Brooks laughs and says, "I think it's just amazing visceral work. Paintings, drawings and etchings that, when you see them, they really move and affect you."
They're 74 paintings and drawings of the so-called London School, men who were developing a sort of radical conservatism in the 1940s to 1980s.
"They were working in a figurative style at a time when that was deeply unfashionable. Everything around them was abstract and conceptual. And what they were doing at the time seemed to be old hat," Brooks says. But what Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach and R. B. Kitaj did was to use some of the new methods of the new school to take the old school one step further. They liked and respected the work of Turner, Constable, Degas and others, "but they took that to the next level," Brooks says.
Brooks says 85 percent of the works came from the Tate Museum in London, and happened because of their previous collaboration, the massive and massively popular exhibit of J.M.W. Turner's works, "And that was a great success for all of us, and so the Tate did an exhibition (just) on Frank Auerbach, and they said 'Would you like to take that?' And we said we're very interested, but we thought it would actually be better to show him in context with some of the other people working in the city at the same time." The Tate agreed, and Brooks says, "amazingly enough," this is the first major exhibition of these artists together in the U.S.
But there are two more firsts.
Getty director Timothy Potts, who also co-curated "London Calling," said in the news release, “The majority of paintings and drawings in the Getty Museum’s collection are fundamentally
concerned with the rendition of the human figure and landscape up to 1900. This shows ... what happened next.”
And, big news for Instagrammers and Snapchatters: the Getty is not only letting you take photos of the artworks, but encouraging you to do so (#LondonCalling). Brooks says, "Increasingly, everyone realizes that actually there's no harm done" by people taking and sharing photographs. And of course, it speaks to the younger audience the Getty hopes to bring in along with its other patrons. When they do, they'll be moved, too.
Review: Huntington's 'Blast' is the backstory to Getty's 'London Calling'
Off-Ramp commentator Marc Haefele reviews "Blast! Modernist Painting in Britain, 1900-1940," at the Huntington Gallery through November 12. "London Calling" is at the Getty Center through November 13.
In England in the decade after World War 2, a third of the housing was bombed out; shops were empty. Food and even clothing were tightly rationed. As the old Empire vanished into thin air, the nation hovered on the edge of economic collapse. But from this stressed, sad, grayed-out culture came an unprecedented outpouring of great art.
The Getty Museum just opened a new exhibit called “London Calling,” featuring six artists from England’s post war era. And across the county, the Huntington has a new show called “Blast," which showcases a dozen pictures by predecessors, mentors, and teachers of those six “London” artists.
The Getty’s display offers more spectacle, and of course it includes Freud and Bacon, the two most famous British artists of our time. On the Getty’s streetlight posters you see Lucien Freud’s “Girl with a Kitten”— the cat somehow content in a stranglehold, the girl’s attention diverted into the middle distance. The geometry is loose, but Freud’s attention to detail is achingly fastidious. 10 years later, these aspects reverse—Freud’s fussiness is now a studied blotchiness, the shapes more massive and real, as he reaches toward the incredible physicality and presence of his last great nudes.
Francis Bacon spoke of his art as “sensation without the boredom of its conveyance,” and many think he intended to shock and appall. The Bacons at the Getty are relatively sedate, stressing his mighty shaping technique, his figurative genius, his startling color sense.
There’s also R. B. Kitaj, who’s been called the greatest historical painter of our time. He’s almost blissfully figurative with his wedding, his refugees; his tributes to the murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Isaac Babel riding with the Red Cavalry; something like Chagall if he’d apprenticed with Breughel.
Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff -- still painting today in their 80s and 90s – are more expressionist, but still invoke the plain, battered surroundings of a weary metropolis. And Michael Andrews wrapped up his short career with pure landscape, pictures literally infused with the sand and dirt in his paintings.
Go see “London Calling” at the Getty first, then head to the Huntington, to see a dozen recently acquired or loaned prime British paintings from before World War 2, some of which strongly influenced the Getty painters.
There’s pioneering modernist David Bomberg, with whom both Auerbach and Kossoff studied. You can see in their work Bomberg’s bold use of layered paint and colors, and a leaning toward abstraction.
There’s Stanley Spencer, whose powerfully emotional work with its combining of plants, humans, and animals foreshadowed themes of Lucien Freud.
Walter Richard Sickert is represented by one of his placidly unsettling "ennui" studies. He’s the Godfather of most modern English painting, and in his later years revised his style in keeping with the younger generation he sometimes mentored.
There is the sardonic "Cubist Museum" of Wyndham Lewis, who carried the avant garde torch in British painting until he lost faith in modernism and found equal fame as a novelist.
And there’s a fine, subtle portrait by Gwen John, the only woman painter in either of these shows.
It’s 28 miles from the Getty to the Huntington, but you should make the trip to see “London Calling” and “Blast.” Together, they provide a rich, continuous century’s span of English figurative art we’ve seldom seen here.