Author: Nathan Marsak

1801 South Soto To-day

Tombstone? Of marble? Nah, they’re more often made of Indiana granite (or were in 1947-they’re now that embarrassing black Chinese stuff). 15-ton slabs of marble were reserved for the finest of mausolea, so Ray Hunt (no relation) was definitely going for something beyond his station. The sin of pride.

The marble company, its freight car-have been lost to the ticking clock. As shall happen to you, dear reader. Tick. Tick. Every untoward choice you choose makes that slab of marble you’re unloading just that much heavier.

1730 Keeler To-day

1947 is best known to the Angeleno for the Dahlia, and on the world stage there’s-what-the War for Hebraic Self-Determination, or the Kon-Tiki sailing about, but for America-at-large, 1947 means Roswell.

Crazy things were flying around in our skies all the time, which, fans of little green men will be sorry to hear, were most likely secret US military whatnot. And radio controlled bombings of Burbank were part of that scenario.

(We like to drop bombs. Anglo-Americans killed an estimated 400,000 German civilians with plain ol’ bombs; 40,000 in Dresden town in just a day and a half.)

Here’s one now!

And here’s the house in question, as menaced by jetpack-wearing members of Paperclip, and Parsons’ OTO rays, and reversed-engineered alien Buicks, and for our purposes here, radio-controlled Project Sign woefully non-guided torpedos.

The adjacent lot behind 1730, where the damn thing came to earth, has had constructed upon’t the 1979 98-unit Villa de los Reyes condoplex-

-wherein the missle landed right about here.

523 N. Cahuenga Avenue To-day

Awwww. The happy couple.

Bernice and camera lock unblinking eye: this is the happiest day of my life, and everything is going to be perfect from hereonin. Tom, he’s espied some other skirt already.


Of all the houses on the block-that one on the left a typical example-only the Falkenburg home, right, has a giant wall of flora shielding it from the eyes of man. What are they hiding? The shame, apparently. That energy born and borne as opprobrium’s heir.

Dames sure are dizzy in this town.

Middy’s Air Army


This is too damn suspicious. Sure, go ahead and argue it’s likely there’s some sort of giant feline-bolixing lodestone under Venice sending cats up trees, or a scientist shooting suicidal brainwaves to the pussy population…tell yourself anything you want…but the disturbing fact remains that the last time we blogged about a cat leaping from a tree, it was one block away.

My instinct tells me there is something of the treacherous cat intelligence at work here-there are independent agents of the feline flying corps across Los Angeles (cf. our post of August 9) but to set up an actual base of operations? They are grouping-planning… plotting…waiting…there’re 75,000 Mexican Fan and Canary Island date palms in Los Angeles, and probably as many of these beasts-prepare for the sky-darkening clowder of carnivorous cats!

211 West Ninth To-day

The liquor store is now a parking lot. Of course it is. It had to be burned. It had LEPROSY!!!

I can see Baccarat now. His mottled porcelain white-skin. The nasal ulcers. The eyebrows falling off. “You want the pint or the fifth?” His cytokines and activated macrophages raising all manner of lesion and nodule-“your change, sir!”

Ah, leprosy. That most biblical of afflictions. We think of leprosy, ahem, Hansen’s, as some sort of Medieval/pirate-themed/Third World typa deal, but remember, American citizens so diseased didn’t win the right to vote until 1946. Dan had probably been hauled off to Carville in shackles and under armed guard, as many a leper was, while outside the walls kids in catechism class were learning the palindromatically helpful Repel evil as a live leper. (I like to think said wisdom is still so imparted.) Heck, the Japanese still excecuted the children of lepers through the 1950s.

To Carville’s credit, it was there in the 1940s scientists discovered sulfones could cure leprosy…though it wasn’t until the late ’90s that long-term residents were given the choice of leaving. Forty of them remained. Home is home.

5751 Tuxedo Terrace To-day

I don’t get the Hollywood Hills. It’s cramped, there’s nowhere to park, and every time you run out of liquor it’s twenty arduous minutes to the store. But I suppose that’s the price you pay for privacy.

Looks private enough-

-and it is an impressive three-story structure-

-but that sixteen narcos would wind there way up there to bust some tea-blowing agony piper, that puts me off the Hills for good.

8311 Sunset Avenue To-day

(Since there’s so much to go on [and on] about Mt. Kalmia, check out the comments section for all the fine print.)

When I read that there was a twenty-room Norman castle fronting Sunset Boulevard, of course, I knew it was gone.

1933:

And 2006, same view…wait…could something be lurking behind that fifty-foot-high frontage of foliage?

A-HA! Mt. Kalmia lives!

But back to 1947–here are the Sherriff’s knights storming Mt. Kalmia Castle, armed with their 12-hour notice, herding evictees to outside the walls:

Two of the Queen’s abject subjects, Ann Phill and Bernard Epstein, getting the royal boot:

As I approached Mt. Kalmia’s stately gates–

–one of those round portions opened up. A face appeared. It was a a very well-spoken, and very large, African-American gentleman who asked if there was anything he could help me with. I explained, you know, architectural, with the old houses, you see, in what must have sounded like befuddled mid-70s Woody Allen meets Jerry Lewis doing the nebbish. He considered this for a while before closing the little door.

He gave away nothing, but I knew, behind those gates…

7026 Flora Avenue To-day

Oakvid feared his child was not sane. Sometimes we see too much of ourselves in our children.

Theodore Oakvid and his little Sophy:

Apparently Theo was under the thrall of Social Darwinism, but took it a little too far. Contemporary accounts note “the patient asserted he sincerely believed that only the fit should live and that his daughter was among those unfit.”

Those who take their Herbert Spencer way too seriously end up in San Bernadino:

…at the Patton State Hospital.

At some point the beautiful 1925 Bell High School enlarged itself to the south and a playing field ate up the east side of Flora.

But the field didn’t stretch all the way down to Florence Avenue, leaving this little house intact. Imagine a collection of these running up the street.

Or perhaps the Oakvid residence looked something like its one-time ‘cross the street neighbor.

Newspaper accounts place Mrs. Florence Oakvid as outside milking the cow during the time of Theodore’s murderous attack. Not so many cows in the hood today.

L’affaire Garth Avenue

The age-old battle between the Papacy and ZOG for world domination takes many forms, this gladiatorial duel a footnote in that long and terrible struggle.

Each woman’s domicile, Kelly house in the foreground.

And it was here, at the Goldberg’s, where ladies battered each other, a cowboy emerged to fire his six-gun, and a flower bed was assaulted.

The vicissitudes of the wrestling match had been explicated for four days when Judge Alfred E. Paonessa termed the suit “a travesty on justice and fruitless expense to the taxpayers” before throwing both parties out of his courtroom.