Author: Nathan Marsak

Hey Glamour Gauge, why don’t you go by your real name? TRIANGLE SHIRTWAIST?! Is that what you want? Huh? Oh you do? Fine. Damn co-ops.

The ILGWU started out well enough, when it was a collection of Hebraic ex-Wobblies, and gangsters like Rothstein worked to resolve strikes. After a spell Lepke Buchalter and his ilk were raking off dues and extorting employers, and once the union was no longer about wages and benefits, well, in comes the jar full of stinkification. Little matter. In time most production would go oversees-but not without Los Angeles gaining the honor of developing the largest number of sweatshops in America (in your face, 7th Avenue!).

The co-op, market, novelty and typewriter shop are now a beauty salon, bakery, auto stereo and tuxedo place, and any hint of transoms has disappeared (transoms having gone the way of typewriter shops) but the building maintains an incredibly sexy streamlined aluminum band of canopy across its façade:

-there are 5,000+ garment trade businesses in Los Angeles-and you think buying from American Apparel will alleviate you from the inherent disservice you do to humanity by being alive? Think again.

Kim? The kid had water and sandwiches? He also had something else. A contagious skin condition!

In 1947 there were 1.9 million citizens of the city of Los Angeles. Who was going to care for 1.9 million feverish, screaming people, their purpuric skin bursting open, their dripping subcutaneous fat oozing yellowish, pus-like blood? Do YOU have enough hyperbaric chambers in which to put these people, or steel drums to hold all the amputated limbs? You don’t think they’ll drop the Bomb on Los Angeles in a heartbeat to contain an army of delirious, sepsisized necrotic humans?

Juvenile Hall. Yeah. That’s where they took li’l Paul.

My natural inclination to make some sardonic aside (the girls were killed in self-defense, say)-but as girls, like dogs, are innocents, I wish them not to come to harm. Therefore, in short:

17th and Michigan, where Lillian Dominquez met her end:

(Note young lady at right treading Lillian’s path.)

And the alley behind Barbara Morse’s home on Euclid:

Not a lot of turret n’ gabled childhood homes of anybody down Hill between 2nd and 3rd anymore. Nope, not many at all.

There’s hills behind there somewhere.

41 South Main is right about where that first tree stands. The area isn’t exactly chockablock full of dag and tintype studios anymore, either.

Chuck showed Gladys a thing-or two. Wonder if Gladys planted those trees as saplings in front of her new subdivision. Which grew up as grim, dim monuments to the dead, overshadowing and darkening the home.

People everywhere stop me on the street and query “What up dog, where you been?” I consider this, wonder why they’re talking like that, and go on to tell them that while I’ve been away, I’ve now returned and am, I add, in full effect.

Seems I went off and did this -– (I’m not only a first-class cameraman, but can portray Karl Benz in a Velomobile with the best of them) — and simply neglected to cease traveling. Lot of crime scenes in Cuzco and Sumer to be investigated after all. Sadly, my photos of Atlantean gang killings were “lost” by the lab. Damn Illuminati.

Anyway, I’d left McCarthy at the dock, so trusty Packard and I immediately set forth, traversing town to catch up on old posts. Which are now live-witness twenty-five brand-spanking-new entries au go-go,five for July, eleven in August, another nine in September.

Love and kisses, and death to all those who oppose us,

N

The Spreckles House of Crazy Times:

And the Connor residence, where the Crazy Times come and inundate like so much floodwater.

Note the map of the area. Looks like, well, the area where one encounters the female pudenda, wouldn’t you say?

Which bears a striking topographical similarity to this area —

conclusively proving that poker-wielding wife beater John D. Spreckles III was the Dahlia killer!

(The street layout also resembles a candelabra, which further serves to implicate Spreckles as a Hebrew. With Yom Kippur just days away, Spreckles was obviously making certain he had plenty to atone for.)

You can see why servicemen would advance their rent to secure a place in 1414. The bold geometric patterning of the entryway dabbles in the Late Moderne, and its wicked contrast with the canopy flourish over that shallow bay would make any GI’s heart flutter. Ok, maybe that’s just me.

There are still some ancient residential hotels, still full of crabby men (and men with crabs) in the area, but they are largely outnumbered by parking lots. Even Western Telegraph is gone, can you imagine? Residential projects are springing up in the neighborhood-we’ll see many more old buildings coming down sooner rather than later, and I’d wager lofts will rise on this lot in the near future.

The MacDonalds blasted away at each other upstairs in this handsome home. Blam, blam, blam. Sure, John and Eilen had a few damaged cochlea from mommy and daddy’s early-morning playtime, and while 140 db(a) damage will fade over time, the psychological effect will cause the tympanic membrane to vibrate. Forever.