Author: Nathan Marsak

Bungalow courts make this town habitable. Sure, they’re full of murder and mayhem and power-cutting, eviction notice-serving landlords, but they’re also succulent little communities of Craftsman shingle and Spanish stucco and night-blooming jasmine and little spaces for your coupe. Fortunately, they’ve mostly fallen to the bulldozer, allowing things like this to be built. I could not and did not ascertain whether this was the Cedars cancer center or the parking structure for the Cedars cancer center, since I didn’t want to venture too close and catch the cancer.

I believe it was Phil Langdon who talked about the “browning of America.” No, that has nothing to do with shifting ethnic demographics. The mid-60s saw a reaction against Exaggerated Modern architecture, and so architects attached mansard roofs and brick facades to everything. Earth tones became common currency, and Broadway Plaza-Charles F. Luckman Assc, 1972, designed in a sort of “Environmental Brutalist” style-is a about as brown as it gets. By the 80s we’d returned to glass and steel, but a few hallmarks of 70s architecture, like this noble beast, remain.

But for how long? While Portman’s 1976 Bonaventure is likely to be landmarked, many High-70s buildings are being lost or compromised. Of course, one may argue that the Bonaventure is a better building than this Broadway; one may be right. But the preservationist camp owes a strange debt to Luckman-it’s his MSGCenter that stands atop the rubble of Penn Station, and it was in razing that building that America’s interest in preserving her monuments was sparked.

(Luckman went on to recommend tearing down Goodhue’s library, btw.)

Ulrey’s place on South Westlake didn’t make it, either.

A two-story parking structure, foreground, stands where the cartoon studio once squeezed out Bosko like so much egesta. But you’re not looking at that. You’re looking at the 1963 Rox-San Medical Building, and with good reason.

That little Davey Jensen learned the hard way: drinking and driving don’t mix.

Maybe Santa will bring him a new Schwinn Whizzer for Christmas. Whether the elves can whip him up a new stomach remains to be seen.

If you’re looking to recreate Davey’s folly, you’ll be hard pressed to find Double Drive. It became part of Santa Anita Ave. in ’59.

Here are a couple homes along that stretch that evoke what DD may have looked like in the postwar era –

I’ll spare you from being wounded by images of the McMansions sprouting up in the neighborhood –although I can’t help but share a couple of “Spanish” themed complexes ca. 1969-

There ought to be a monument to the man who made it with his wife’s sister, survived an icepick to the chest, and then started the whole process over again. Instead, there’s this:

Curious that the blues chanteuse should off herself before she had the chance to play the very House of Blues itself. The site of her old place smells not of honeysuckle, now, but of the HOB parking lot which replaced it.

Now that’s something to sing the blues about. That and our having lost the Utter-McKinley where she was taken. Where, we trust, she was cremated, hair and all.

Now, according to historical currency conversion, the buying power in Haselbuch’s pocket was $1,638. His watch was worth $1,321 and his ring $14,972.

Can’t help but get the feeling that Haselbuch was something more than an electrician. I don’t know what those fellows were doing with their flashlights on the corner that night, but they weren’t looking for an honest man.

Aye, wee Ruthie McLaren, a gal after my own heart. Any fifteen year-old with a penchant for thievery, and men met in movie houses, quickens the heart of this tender lad. Sure, she might have been better off at the College of Ave Maria than at Mary’s Beauty College, but with her autodidactic doctorate in Acquiring Fur Coats, apparently she doesn’t need either institution.

Hard to tell from where she hailed, as there’s no 23-the house numbers go from 19 to 25:

And what, pray tell, is the deal with this structure – had it been a modest battenboard-clad house, onto which were built multiple units?

Only Ruthie can tell us now. I picture her as still smelling faintly of delicately toasted host wafers, and sacramental wine, and freshly dressed hair.

No bludgeon-toting mothers-in-law hiding out in the Mustang, I checked.

Single room? Maybe that’s what they told the old crone. ‘Cuz while it’s not a big house, Dave and Louise could have fit the fiftysomething somewhere. Provided she was bound and gagged.

I longed to see the lair of the mysterious Dr. Castillo. Where he gave “treatments.” There was no end to the maladies for which one could be treated-while there were many fine physicians in Los Angeles, of course, every quack and quacklet was quick to advertise instant relief from piles, fistulae, nervousness, abscesses, alcoholism, insanity, varicose veins-and while the strange drugs were bad enough, one has to wonder at the claims made for “drugless therapies” which, we can only surmise, involved bathtubs somehow. Like at 480. So I set off.

I got to 450, 460-and then a Burger King parking lot. And then the Burger King.