Author: Nathan Marsak

Here’s where the happy couple were duking it out:

This was originally Sheri’s restaurant, a googie/transitional structure stripped of its original intent and reformed into the mid-late 60s Dolores’. What it was in 1947 I don’t know, as I’m yet to decode the Sanborn fire insurance maps.

I’d be interested in seeing that motel on Santa Monica. Perhaps it looked something like this, which is one block east –

Or roughly like this –

Because now-adays, it just looks like this.

After having been blown up and burnt down, Willard Chemical has since, obviously, been replaced:

The heavy industrial concentrated itself further east in Vernon; Huntington Park contented itself with light industrial, packing and shipping, and noodle huts.

The mushroom cloud o’er LA:

Didn’t they learn everything they needed to know after Port Chicago?

I’ve had some nasty reactions to the old whiskey and Technocracy cocktail (the “Veblen Cooler”), but I still haven’t stabbed anybody.

Vogel’s house number, 5613, remains marked on the sidewalk, but his house has gone the way of neoclassical marginalist theories of consumption.

Perhaps it looked something like 5614, across the street:

Or so it looked before demolition, anyway.

Ah, the Sunset Towers Apartments. Home of Howard Hughes, Bugsy Siegel, and the second-best bas relief of a zeppelin in town.

Architect Leland Bryant’s friezes also include Adam and Eve, other mythological creatures, and radiator grilles; some wags have posited Satan himself resides amongst the cast flora and fauna. Look, the Baphomet!

The Towers was the first building in LA to have “all-electric suites” and central AC, and was the first built on rockers to sway with the quakes. Note the prominent mention in Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely and in its film adapt Murder, My Sweet.

After everyone and his brother tried throughout the 70s to tear down the 1929 landmark, it was finally renovated by the St. James Club in 1986. It became the Argyle in 1994 and was fitted with endless deco from top to bottom. The new owner, New York’s Jeff Klein, has stripped the interior of the hotel of all its renovations. As bad as I’m naturally inclined to make that sound, the new renovation is based on original photographs, and while a little cloying in its adulation of “Old Hollywood,” isn’t bad at all.

Looking down toward the 100 block of West 59th, we see it’s the only one in the neighborhood with these cat-tempting trees. Did Mrs. Waters consider this before she moved in? Apparently not.

Here’s where Smokey (and before her, her kitlets) landed in the grass.

Sure, people talk about how rough and tough South Los Angeles is, and I’ve had some exciting moments down there, but I’ve also been in the ghettoes of Gary and Camden and New Orleans and DC, and I’ll take a shingled Craftsman with exposed roof beams and a separate gabled porch any day of the week.

Here’s the house at 1103, whence came all the dingdang monkeyshines.

While any eucalyptus along the 1100 block of Rose seem to have disappeared long ago, there is no shortage of oaks for our simian brethren to cavort amongst. The absence of automobiles probably has something to do with the locals’ wish to keep hurled feces from spattering their cars.

We can assume it will be some time before little Janet Johnson again quaffs honey in her quaint little home on Commonwealth.

It’s also likely that next summer pater Harold will call in Child Protective Exterminators.

323 E. 109th, home to your local rumsoaked pistol-wielding AWOL serviceman – the fruits of his folly are simply grown on the tree of his grief. Let the boy grieve, damn you!

The dreaded stuccoman has plied his trade well here.

The Victory Chapel, where ladies get religion (and shot):

You can still smell death in the air, and soya sauce, which I like to think induces Proustian reverie in the old-timers.

1500 gallons of arsenic down the drain? Hadn’t these people heard of “drains to ocean” or seen stencils of dolphins? And all within eyeshot of City Hall.