Sunday in the Park with George

George is the snowy egret. Not that he knows that. Nor does anyone else, I suppose, since I just made his name up.

The park is Averill Park in San Pedro, where you can see lots of wild life: dozens of ducks, a few geese, egrets, phoebies and other birds, skateboarders, butterflies, and wedding parties arranging themselves near the waterfall, stone bridge, fauna or meadows to pose for photographers.

Found a 1923 article in the Los Angeles Times that mentions this park--says its 12 acres "affords a splendid view of the Bay of San Pedro from its commanding position at the head of the beautiful Vista del Oro section."

The Superintendent of Parks, one Frank Shearer, was credited with giving Averill park touches of "rustic beauty."

A 1933 piece about the spending of over $1 million on parks mentions the waterfalls at Averill--pictured 80 years later at right.

There's a picture in the 1933 paper, but online it doesn't look like much--just enough of a sketchy outline to confirm that it's the same waterfalls.

The 1933 article reports that the million dollars was being spent to put  nearly 1400 men to work full time making improvements to the parks, and the project was expected to last three years. This was during the Depression, of course, and the money was part of a $5 million city bond issue, aimed at increasing employment in many areas.

So picnic grounds were added to Elysian Park, a grotto and rock terraces went to Fern Dell, Victory Van Owen Park and Reseda Park were created, the Arroyo Seco got more channels, etc. etc. Dozens of parks are mentioned, all over LA.

And even the rocks and bricks from defunct miniature golf courses were repurposed in the parks, becoming the bases of the waterfalls and new, decorative retaining walls. Waste not, want not.

Sounds like about a fifth of the money went to Griffith Park, where miles of bridle trails were added, roads were paved, and thousands of new trees and shrubs were planted. Not sure about the figure though because apparently the estate of Col. Griffith contributed funds as well.

But as you can see from these pictures, the waterfowl in the compact oasis of Averill Park are thriving. Children were racing around, squealing and playing, men were barbecuing and telling tall tales, and the cameras were clicking and whirring. Just the right antidote for the news . . . I wonder if we could start a movement, forcing folks to balance the time they spend listening to the news with hours spent in the city's parks. Just a thought.

Halloween Events at the Zoo--Old and New

Haunted Hayride and Purgatory Sideshow 

at Griffith Park's Old Zoo

Based on Actual Events!

Apparently--or at least, according to their website--the area of the Old Zoo in Griffith Park is abnormally and paranormally active. Its history is filled with murder, mayhem, torture, abduction, and serial killings--the perfect spot for a night of hellacious fun. The ride is completely re-worked and redone, nothing like last year, so you won't know what's coming at you in the maze o' terror. Cages and enclosures now hold zombies and hooded ghosts rather than lions and tigers, but the bars are gone, and we all know that on Halloween, the barriers between the worlds are dissolved.

• Location: The Old Zoo, 4730 Crystal Springs in Griffith Park. The area is beyond the Ranger Headquarters and Shane's Inspiration, and below Harding Golf Course. Follow signs to the Merry-Scarey-Go-Round.
• On Sundays and Thursdays (except the 3rd)  in October, tickets to the Haunted Hayride are sold from 7-10:30 pm and the ride runs till 11:30. On Fridays and Saturdays, tickets are sold till midnite; the ride goes till 1 am..
• Prices start at $30, but there are add-ons, group rates, and specials so you should go see the price site yourself. Looks like cash only at the box office, though you can buy online.
• Warning: the website itself is creepy and disturbing. 

Now, for those families who are not part of the Addamses we present: 

Costumes and Trick or Treating!

Last two weekends in October (19-20, 26-27) at the Real Zoo! Here's the description from the Zoo's website: 

Pumpkin carving demonstrations, arts and crafts, creepy-crawly animal encounters, Chomp n’ Stomp animal feedings, engaging performances by Campfire Cathy where the children become the stars of the show, and a picturesque pumpkin patch.
Watch some of our resident creatures enjoy special enrichment surprises. And, of course, trick-or-treat for candy as you roam the Zoo.

Corky's Retro Vibes

Charles Phoenix was at Corky's earlier this week (follow his FB page if you love mid-century kitsch) and the place looks wild.

Of course, in this instance I am defining wild as something brighter than Pepto-Bismol. Your results may vary.

Armet and Davis designed the joint--you know them, right? They designed so many Googie-style places, like the original few Norms, Pann's Coffee Shop, the Wich Stand (now Simply Wholesome), Johnie's Coffee Shop on Wilshire,  Bob's Big Boy in Toluca Lake, the LAX Theme Building, and more.

If you love Googie, check out this Road Trip Slide Show, courtesy of James Horecka,

Here's another photo of Corky's interior, with John Gilmore, writer, glowering at the camera of That Man Ray . . . From Venice (taken from the blog of the same name.)  Ray calls Gilmore the "quintessential L.A. noir writer," which fits since he's penned books on crime in our city, like Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder

Corky's started life in 1958 as Stanley Burke's Coffee Shop on Van Nuys Blvd, according to this article from the Sherman Oaks Patch.

(Let me just digress to say that I hope all our LA-area Patches survive the coming apocalypse, since they are a great source of community-interest articles that would otherwise be relegated to blogs like this. My fondest dream would be for Patch to thrive and be able to actually pay writers again!)

Anyway, Hal Lifson in Patch writes that Stanley Burke's changed to the always open, 24/7 Corky's in the early 60s, and stayed that way for 25 years. Billy Joel played piano there in the 70s.

Then it became the Lamplighter. And toward the end of its life as The Lamplighter, it served as a location in the 2010 version of Nightmare on Elm Street. This picture is from the ItsFilmedThere blog, highlighting film locations in Chicago & LA. I suspect this is a screencap from the film; it shows the same booth that Mr. Gilmore sat in above.

Now it's Corky's again. With that rechristening came a retro renovation, so I do not know for sure which parts are really really new, which are original, which are imitative of the original, and which are the rich fantasies of decorators gone wild. And which photos have had the colors tweaked a bit, though I have my suspicians. But it's all good.

(BTW, there is an Inland Empire-based chain of Corky's Restaurants--not related.)

Canoga Metro Station Mosaic

I hardly ever go north, so let's celebrate Mosaic Monday in Canoga Park. Last year,  the Orange Line Extension Station opened and the public got to see the two 27-foot long elliptical mosaics done by Ken Gonzales-Day, titled Western Imaginary.

Gonzales-Day is an Art Professor at Scripps College out in Claremont, not far from the University of California at Irvine, which is where he matriculated. Love using that work; it sounds like water falling over stones.

He's recognized internationally, and some of his projects tackle deep and controversial themes, like lynching. He actually created two art books that deal with that topic and what it says about society through the decades, Lynching in the West: 1850–1935 (a John Hope Franklin Center Book) and Profiled (LACMA PAC Prize, 2011).  That got him interviewed on CNN--how many art professors can say that?

His shows, accolades, and projects are many, and he's relatively young. Read more about him at his website.

The pictures above hardly look like mosaics, right? So here's the close-up, just to prove that it is, in fact, a mosaic.

Probably a good time to mention that all the photographs here came from The Source, a Metro Ezine that puts up fabulous pictures and all the details of the artwork at Metro Stations and biographies of the artists who created them.

Also from The Source is the artist's statement about this piece(s):

"Inspired by the community's interest in drawing attention to the natural environment and combined with my own longstanding interest in both California history and native species, I decided to bring the natural environment into the station environment. I wanted to create artworks that would function on a number of levels and could respond to the specific needs of the site: one, to soften the stucco corridors and vast parking lots that surround it; two, to enhance the station itself; and three, I wanted to create something that would be a source of pride for local residents and of interest to those passing through."

The mosaics are of oak trees and manzanita, native to the Valley. They are accompanied by photographs on steel and enamel, up where you can see them and not embedded in the sidewalk, that show the surrounding hillsides in a nostalgic way. Westerns were filmed here up through 1960, apparently; probably a lot of them for Republic Pictures in Studio City.

A company called Perdomo fabricated the mosaics, then they were shipped and embedded in the concrete at the station, and you can see those processes at right and below. Perdomo, a family-owned firm based in Mexico, seems to be Metro's new fabricator. A couple of years ago it was Mosaica, located in Montreal, Canada.

From what I can tell, Perdomo is part of several companies making up Mosaicos Venecianos, a company founded in Cuernavaca in the 1950s by Manual Perdomo. They use the very old-fashioned methods of true craftsmen to create their smalti tiles and mosaics.

Picnic in '59, Christmas '55

It's Monday at 4:30 pm and I am just now getting through three days of emails, each with attendant tasks . . . so in lieu of shortchanging a post on mosaics, how about a couple of  feel-good photos?  One under the pepper trees (I think) and one of a pink Christmas tree?

Picnic first, courtesy of Shorpy.com. This picture is of a 1959 picnic on the grounds of the Mission San Fernando. Kodachrome gives us those nice, bright colors . . . who remembers Langendorf bread? "Grow grow grow with Lang Lang Langendor bread!:

Second, this photo has come up on a couple of my Google searches for my Baby Boomer Christmas book (out November 1!) Nothing says Christmas like a pink flocked tree, right?

 I didn't use this picture in the book because I wasn't sure who owned it, and now see that it's labeled as belonging to Charles Phoenix, who will be giving colorful and funny talks on mid-century kitsch in LA's Chinatown & in Claremont and Pasadena over the next few weeks:

Living History & Cemetery Buffs!

Come out, come out, on September 28 to the Angelus Rosedale Cemetery in West Adams.

Hear and see the shades of:

• Jennie Allen Bovard, USC's First Lady--the first feeemale professor there

• Marjorie Zier Page a Mack Sennett Bathing Beauty and Jazz Baby, who became one of TWA's first in-flight hostesses

• Ivie Anderson (right), who introduced "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing" when she sang with Duke Ellington's orchestra

• Civil War veterans like Aurelius Hutton, who helped found Pasadena, and bugler Orion Theodore Thomas

• Warrior Daniel DeVilliers, who also fought in the Civil War, as well as the Mexican Revolution and the 2nd Boer War. After all that, he was shot to death here in Los Angeles a century ago, by his ex-wife's husband.



• Unlucky Merle Evans, who died in horrible train crash at age 18--100 years ago. A Pacific Electric car from Venice, carrying folks who had enjoyed a Sunday evening at the saside, collided with another smaller train, killing 15. Learn more about the July 1913 Vineyard Station crash here.

• Dr. Oner Barker (picturesd), who testified before Senator Joe McCarthy & his House UnAmerican Activities Committee

Details at the West Adams Heritage site, Tickets are $30 in advance, $35 at the site:

Rosedale Cemetery

1831 W. Washington Blvd.

It's a walking tour.

For more infomation, call  323-735-WAHA 

Watts Towers as Mosaic Art

Are they mosaics? How could they not be? Look at these pictures!

Seventeen structures make up the Watts Towers, with three tall towers dominating. The tallest, at 30 meters (99 feet) , has the longerst reinforced concrete column in the world.

Simon (actually, Sabato) Rodia built the Watts Towers between 1921 and 1954--working on them for thirty-three years. He wasn't an engineer or a trained artist. He just plugged away with hand tools in the evenings and weekends, after putting in his time as a construction worker.

He owned the  land on the 1700 block of East 107th Street, and back in those days you could pretty much put up what you wanted on your property. Public agencies didn't involve themselves and the building codes were, well, mostly ignored by everyone.

Rodia called his work "Nuestra Pueblo" Why did he build it? He said he wanted to do something big.

He started his structures by wiring rebar or pipe together, then wrapped the joints with wire mesh. He packed them with mortar added tiles, pottery, broken bottles and glass, shells, and all sorts of found objects to make mosaics, or he used simple tools to impress hearts, spirals, vines, and other designs into the drying mortar.

 

And while he did all that, he hung onto the towers with a window washer's belt.

The Watts Tower US website is the source of the pictures above and to the right. That site is maintained as a labor of love and has updated information on it about the Towers. You can see videos there too.

In 1956, the Watts Towers were almost demolished. No one interfered when he built them, but when Rodia gave the triangular property to a neighbor who then sold it to someone who wanted to turn it into a commercial site, the city wanted to tear it down because of its lack of permits.

There was a public outcry. New owners proved that the Towers were stronger than any of the cranes and cables meant to test their strength, so the Towers stayed.

The grounds are now called a campus. The Watts Towers Art Center opened there in 1961 and  is still offering classes and exhibiting art; admission is free.On the last Saturday of September--which is coming up--they always host a Drum Festival, and the next Sunday, a Jazz Festival. More about that here

The Charles Mingus Youth Center opened in 2008.

Rodia moved to Martinez, CA after he gave the property away. He died in 1965.

The two men who had saved the Watts Towers by buying them and stopping their demolition--Bill Cartwright and Nicholas King--gave the property and towers to the city of Los Angeles in 1975, and the city turned them over to the state in 1978. So technically, the Watts Towers are a State Park.

But the site is run by a combination of our city's Cultural Affairs Department and LACMA--the LA County Museum of Art.

The Towers were named both a California Historic Landmark and a National Historic Monument in 1990.

You can tour the Watts Towers on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday any week from 10:30 am to 3 pm, and on Sundays from 12:30 pm to 3 pm--unless it rains. No tours in the rain!

Tours leave every half hour. The charge is a measly $7, though children and seniors get discounts.

The photo on the left was taken by friends of my friends Pol and Andy, who  stopped here on a Tuesday on their way to Popeye's (yes, Pol was craving. He worked there in high school and still has to get a fix occasionally), so I know that this is now as close as you can get when it's closed. No tours on Tuesday. It's fenced off.

Theatre Review: Hamlet

Not our usual forte, but when you see something really good, you share, right?

A new production of Hamlet the Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles is wonderful. I got more out of it, in terms of understanding exactly what was being said, that I have from any production of Shakespeare over the past ten years. For those of us who don't know the plays by heart, that is a big point.

But mainly, the performances were superlative. Elizabeth Swain as the ghost was riveting. Hamlet, as played with just the right intensity by Lisa Wolpe, was always half mad, half pretending. Natsuko Ohama as Polonius (lower left) was fussy and funny, exactly as he should be. Claudius (Veralyn Jones) was almost tragic--remorseful on occasion, cold and calculating other times. Minimalist set; excellent players.

The cast is entirely female, which I noticed in the first few minutes only because their voices are pitched higher than I might expect. Five minutes in, caught up in the ghost's appearance, gender became a background issue and by intermission, I had pretty much forgotten about this. It turns out that Hamlet is iconic and doing an all-female show affects the play in the same way that using Victorian clothing might: It makes you do a double-take at first, and think about context and first impressions and stereotypes a little, and then you just settle back and enjoy because the play's the thing.

Hamlet is playing through October 27 at the Odyssey, 

2055 S. Sepulveda 

310-477-2055 box office 

Performances are Friday and Saturday at 8, Sunday at 2, Alternating Wednesdays and Thursdays at 8

General Admission $25-30, but there are pay-what-you-can events, specials for Equity members, and more--click on the Special Events box.

Pictures from the California Historical Society

They're digitizing!

The California Historical Society sent out an email connecting to their Flickr Commons page, where they're putting up pictures from their collections.

This one was taken at Rancho Santa Anita around 1890, and the only two people smiling are the two mustachioed gents lying on the ground, holding hands in front. Something is definitely going on there.

There's a photo of the 1908 Oakland Baseball Club, an 1898 art class, a daguerrotype of some early miners, over 150 pictures of soldiers of the Spanish American War, on parade and in camp (those are in San Francisco--before the earthquake), some pictures of early business catalogs and ads--including a handbill from an 1869 theatre performance--and this ad for The Hub clothing store which was just too weird not to copy, and 1890s certificates of residence for Chinese workers in the state--details on that below. And more will be added soon.

The Society says these pictures have all been determined to be in the Public Domain, though the CHS holds the physical picture. Which doesn't matter much to bloggers, but is great for anyone wanting to illustrate a book or paper. Getting rights to use pictures is a tricksy business these days!

The residency certificates, with old pictures attached, refer to an Act of Congress passed on May 5, 1892. That would be the Geary Act, passed by the US Congress, regulating one class of immigrants: the Chinese. It came ten years after the Chinese Exclusion Act, extending that earlier act for another ten years and mandating that those of Chinese descent who were here legally carry these certificates to prove themselves legal. They could be deported if caught without papers. The Geary Act also barred Chinese citizens from testifying in court.

I copied one of them--the papers of Ng Gwan, a 49 year old farmer. The youngest of these men (and they were all men) was 22; the oldest 60. What a flourish the clerk used to fill these out!

The law was protested and fought in court without success. In 1902, after 20 years, it became permanent--and it was not repealed until 1943, when the US was fully engaged in war with Japan.

Joseph Young at Belmont High School

Since the schools are closed today, let's post a tribute to artwork therein!

Belmont High School is home to a mosaic by Joseph Young (it's also the alma mater of Ricardo Montalban, Jack Webb, Anthony Quinn, Mort Sahl, and other luminaries).

This particular picture and the signature photo of comes from R. L. Swihart's Blog, Without Lifting a Finger. Since I'm lifting it from him (hope he doesn't mind) I guess I'm actually the one lifting a finger-the one poised over the keyboard.

To learn more about Joseph Young, let me point you to both his FB fan page and some previous posts:

• The Temple Emanuel mosaic in Beverly Hills

• The Family Mosaic, installed in the Valley Cities Jewish Community Center

• The Police Dept's Architectural History of Los Angeles Mosaic

• Eden Memorial Park Mosaics in Mission Hills

• UCLA's History of Mathematics Mosaic, here and here

• Links to his obituary and other artwork