Author: Nathan Marsak

As a service to our readers, I should like to call attention to two buildings that are not long for this world. Here is one:

Stiles Clements’ Mullen & Bluett building, 1949, 5570 Wilshire, built in the Late Moderne, a style that typified the optimistic postwar building boom. Note the sexy geometric volumes and eyebrow canopy. Mullen & Bluett is a perfect example of the Miracle Mile’s auto-oriented “linear downtown,” as Reyner Banham put it. Think Wayne McAllister’s Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank or Wurdeman & Becket’s Bullocks Pasadena. Legacy Partners of Irvine are razing this building and replacing it with a 197-unit apartment/retail thingy that resembles the lowest common denominator of faux-Miami Deco. (Their next project is enveloping the Art Deco Desmond’s tower in nine stories of apartments.) I say go check M&B’s roman brick & flagstone façade and copper beveled display windows while you still can-it’s too late to admire Clements’ 1936 masterpiece of streamline KEHE building, recently demolished by LAUSD, or his equally unbelievable Coulter’s, once across the street.

This is the Bach Auricon Inc. building, 1954, 6900 block of Romaine at 900 block of Mansfield:

BA are incredibly important in the history of filmmaking, especially as regards TV newsreels and documentaries. Auricon was a semi-self-blimped single system that recorded optical or magnetic sound on film, allowing our cinema-verité pioneers to shoot with a lightweight, maneuverable, quiet camera. Logos for Modulite, Cine-Voice, Datasync and Filmagnetic are still on this building; rumors of its impending demolition abound. This is correct, original Old Hollywood in the way a thousand trips along our current Hollywood Boulevard can never be.

(A photographic addtion, in reference to the posted comment:)

You’d like to consider State-led wholesale home obliteration to be a thing of the past, charmingly 50s or maybe delightfully 60s. Urban renewal, freeways, you know, during that kooky time back then with all the Modernity.

In the early 80s, a San Pedro congressman thought it would be “swell” to build a 17-mile freeway. Kinda retro, sure, but still kind of a bad idea-akin to a late episode of Happy Days, where Fonzie adopts an orphan. In the presence of Ted McGinley.

Perhaps it was breathtakingly necessary to link Norwalk and El Segundo, although spending two billion dollars (some say four; we’ll never know) of our money to do so may be more debatable. In any event, Bray’s house-where the honor of Woman is defended with deadly force-once stood at the location of this overpass, where it could conceivably have remained until the early 90s, when the Glenn Anderson Freeway was completed.

Curious zoning in these parts. Homes and light industrial nestle cheek to jowl, and not just block to block, but parcel by parcel. Typical neighbors:

So down the street it came as no surprise that here in a pseudo-residential semi-industrial area, the Goldworthy residence had been displaced by this alchemical factory:

We’re sorry to see there’s no original monument to where bureau nunkies nabbed William Howard Evans. However, the pick-up at his lady friend’s pad is immortalized in the old chestnut “Quick Joey Small”. (It is a little known fact that Kasenetz and Katz are the fathers of 1947project.)

Commenter Larry is correct in his dissection (eh hem) of the Short-Trelstad dissimilarities. However, there is only tenuous evidence linking Hodel to New Coke. He did, however, utilize MK-ULTRA to convince Angelenos to abandon our electric rail system, and later conspired with Neil Bush and Jaleel White to loot America’s S&Ls.

The question remains, though, had there not been a Black Dahila, would Trelstad have been murdered? Can and should Mary Tate, Jean French, Evelyn Winters, Rosenda Mondragon, Dorothy Montgomery and Trelstad be discussed under the rubric of “copycat killings?”

The death of Laura Trelstad, and the site today:

Derricks have disappeared from our landscape, save for the one constructed atop Oil Patch Liquor in Signal Hill. A mere handful remain in America, in central Texas and southern Oklahoma. (Should anyone know of extant Californian derricks, please contact us.) Derricks have since been replaced by the beam pumping unit:

aka the walking beam pumper, the grasshopper, the horsehead; these can pump out low-pressure wells for decades.

Despite grilling some subsequent attackers-of-women, Trelstad’s murderer was never found. Neither was her shoe, which of course raises another question: white before Memorial Day?

Oh, the alcoholic. The only thing more predictable than the alcoholic is the child of an alcoholic. Resistance is futile. Maybe it’s your juice-damaged genes. Maybe it’s that, after a childhood of abuse and emotional neglect, you just need to share that special feeling with others. Nature or nurture, the events of your life are as precisely mapped as moves on the GAOTU’s tessellated historyboard.

Diana “Too Much Too Soon” Barrymore was no exception. John Barrymore was a kind and caring father, when he wasn’t drunk, which wasn’t often. After he died in ’42 Diana became an actor and an alkie just like daddy. By ’47, after a series of minor film roles, she was off on an alcoholiday with husband number two of her three failed marriages, brawling and slapping cops and generally putting the fun in functional alcoholic, just baby steps on her path to sanitariums and suicide attempts.

The Happy Couple, under arrest:

Diana pens TMTS and sees it made into a feature in ’58; its most truthful element being Errol Flynn cast as boozehound John Barrymore (the bottle killed Flynn a year later). Despite the picture’s Hollywood ending-she’s on the road to recovery!-Diana finally offs herself in 1960 at age 38. When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade. And put plenty of gin in it. And use it to wash down all the sleeping pills in your medicine cabinet.

“What the hell would I want with a dozen gladioli when I could have four roses?”

(Yes, Diana was the sister of John Jr., the rageful child-beating drunk who whupped Drew “Little Girl Lost” Barrymore as a toddler. Drew became a preteen addict, but has thankfully since fallen under the sway of a famous womanizing, stock-swindling, acid-dropping midcentury occultist mysteriously named “Bill W.”)

10 May was a slow news day for crime. But as I put my feet up and vainly perused the paper for evidence of murder and mayhem, an item about a new house caught my eye. Here in 1947, where building costs are high and the housing shortage acute, veteran Clement Cointe has decided to build a miniature dream house, to live in until such time as he can enlarge.

Enlisting architects Harold Bissner and Harold Zook, they’ve come up with a 700sf one-room house with a magnificently modern wall of glass (please note how unobtrusively it fits into the landscape):

Their one room is all-purpose, with closets that open to reveal built in linen and dish storage, card table, bar, coat closet and radio-phonograph. The Harolds included built in bookshelves and desk. The bedroom area-couches of grey upholstery with Mexican cow pony pillows-can be partitioned off with an accordion wall. The whitewashed fireplace in the wall of rough-sawed redwood stakes is a nice touch.

Oh, hell. Since I’ve brought up the housing shortage, I might as well touch on one of LA’s juicier housing stories: in the late 40s the City Housing Authority, its coffers full of federal lucre, pulls an eminent domain on the people of Chavez Ravine. Out come the bulldozers, which level the barrio community. Don’t worry, says the Authority, we’re building you a 3,300 unit high-rise housing project, and you’ll all get first pick of the brand new units! (And it’s designed by Richard-Freakin’-Neutra no less!)

But uh-oh, here comes the Committee Against Socialist Housing. And here comes HUAC hot on their heels. In 1953 new mayor Poulson kills the whole deal, including the resident’s Right of Return. ‘Round about that time O’Malley couldn’t connive an Ebbets Field replacement out of the borough of Brooklyn, so he went fishing in LA, and found a sweetheart deal if ever there was one. You know the rest. Go Dodger Blue.

Not that I don’t love Captain Emil Praeger’s park-the early 60s stadium is replete with atom-age flourishes-but I hope no-one goes there without recalling this image:

Sheriff’s deputies forcibly evicting Aurora “They’ll Have to Carry Me” Vargas from the Arechiga home; bulldozers razed the structure moments later.

Well, not really. This wasn’t a rigid-framed dirigible airship like Count Ferdinand’s England-bombing namesakes, this was just a gasbag on a journey of freedom, terrible freedom, seeking to join its brethren at Mines Field. Perhaps LA’s curious onlooker recalled the 9,000 incendiary balloons sent to America by the Japanese-though those only managed to kill six picnickers in Oregon, proving again that picnicking is a dangerous activity.

Barrage balloons were part of our air defense system, designed to thwart bombings and low-level air attacks. This one was probably Air Corps surplus, discard of a War Won, finding new use in peacetime America (like the friendly antiaircraft shell, plaything of children; see entry of April 26).

After a long trek across miles of stucco and security bars, I finally came to the Coulter residence. Could I be hallucinating? A nice side-gable with Doric-columned entry porch. Original board wall cladding and double-hung wood sash windows, bracketed eaves-I considered chatting up the elderly rose-tending gentleman out front, but elected not to when I realized it could in fact be Charles Coulter. And you never know when someone is going to practice the ol’ knife-throwing routine. Explains his needing no security bars.

Your average house. Balloon frame. Stucco. Low hipped roof. Patched-up shotgun blast holes. Textbook stuff.

Before the War, Bell Gardens was known as “Billy Goat Acres,” due to the large number of Okies that’d settled there. The goats and Okies have disappeared into the ether, but the area maintains a certain midcentury quality, especially as-in contrast to this “graying of America” business-the median age of the 45,000 souls who inhabit Bell Gardens is twenty-three.

Plus they still have lots of children and lots of shotguns.