The Worst Place on Earth

Sure I knew about Playa Vista, the Methane Wonderland. I'd driven past a time or two, usually shielding my eyes, cursing the show biz grifters that uncorked the development bottle by promising an all mighty Studio.

But I'd never been inside. Until last week, on a business call.




Immediately my internal compass shut down, and featherbrained, I landloped about the complex, timorously clutching my cell phone, eyed by suspicious, well-groomed labrador walkers, Electronic Arts employees, and rent-a-cops. Everyone drove Porsche Azucars--whatever. I collapsed. I recovered briefly in the library. There were no street signs or numbers. Buildings blocked the sun.

But with Floyd Landis-like determination I continued, traversing the sunken gardens, storming post-Corbusian courtyards, security kiosks, and development check-points.
The salt air drew me West. I tumbled over a stony wall, down an embankment blanketed by weed resistant netting, and onto PCH where I was nearly struck by a Porsche Paprika--whatever.

Photos don't lie!

Market Update

We may have to wait a little longer for the market to capsize.

Five straight months of declining sales volume (Jan - May), with corresponding gains in inventory, whetted concerns about a market plateau.

Then came June, and sales volume increased. Some credited seasonality, rate stability, the diminishing patience of market doom-and-gloomers.

The early word on July is the same: market activity up, diminishing levels of inventory.



Oh yeah, the alligator has this to say:

"Funny nobody talks about a gasoline bubble, even though petrol prices have undergone sudden, wild price shifts. Is anyone taking public transit just for a few weeks until pump prices 'correct'? Holding off on a RAV4 purchase until gas prices 'plateau'? Most consumers seem resigned to this higher valuation, as justified by demand and scarcity. Demand and scarcity, scarcity and demand, hhhhmmmmmm...."

Roadside Rambutan

My Favorite Street(s) to Drive continued....

San Vicente Boulevard through Brentwood into Santa Monica towards Ocean Ave.



Nope!




Swell median, swell trees, but at about 21st St. the road tilts toward the earth's end and the descent--with houses succeeding one another like booths at an endless salespersons convention, past the gardens of fantastical Mexican haciendas, masses of mesembryanthemums and coral trees, and runners in hydrangea-blue strapless jogging outfits, obscured by intervening gulfs of shadow--threatens to launch my beater pick-up, Knievel-like, into the Pacific, presumably to the delight of the Montana Avenue elite and ex girl-friends.

You think they could install a run-away truck lane?

Elsewhere....

Central Avenue, between Washington Blvd and 7th
St.



First you got Tacos Gavilan. That's just fun reuse (pssst mulitas are on the menu).








Then the "nautical deco" of the Coca Cola bottling plant, designed in 1937 by Robert V. Derrah. The streamline steamliner!

(Derrah is also credited with the Crossroads of the World shopping village on Sunset Boulevard wherein a ship topped by a lighted, turning ball, serves as the centerpiece.)


Across the street is the eclectic African-American firefighers museum.






Further north is the great wall of produce, the gigantic Seventh Street Market.








Aaahhh that's more like it, no Regency-style bee hives, no trips to Aamco, mangoes.

The Put Downs

I was at lawn party Saturday (can you just imagine me and the Gatsbys?!), trying my darndest to blend, without axes to grind, when it started.

The put-downs.

Overheard: 'L.A. is such a transient city'.

"It's an attractive, international destination", I countered, "full of dynamic people. Certainly more 'transient'--whatever that means, and perhaps what it means is good--than Akron, Ohio or Birmingham, Alabama, but no more transient than New York or Washington D.C., other peer American cities".






Later, I googled 'transient cities'. Little hard data sadly with which to make my points, but references aplenty to cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas (nuevo sun belt), New York and San Francisco (mondo expensive), D.C. (political cycles), Miami (growing internationalism), Seattle (fast changing), Atlanta (emerging regional hub) and Boston (college mecca). Kyoto, Melbourne, Milan, Dongguan, Rome, pretty much anywhere you'd want to live has been labeled transient.

Strikes me as an upper middle class perception, 'cause I doubt anybody living in Nickerson Gardens, the William Mead Homes, or Aliso Village, thinks of L.A. as
transient.




A bit faster moving than Kansas City I concede, or wherever it is mom and dad hibernate, especially if compared to the West L.A. youth ghettos. Still, I live on a block with 44 houses, and in six years only four have changed ownership.

What I wouldn't give for a little more transience!

Res Derelictae

Am I a "gleaner", recovering the harvests' fallen fruit? Or merely interested in anti-consumerist statements? Influenced by the beauty of works by Millais, Van Gogh, or Varda? Or just strangely taken by outlaw expression, guilty of idiosyncratic indulgence?

Either way, the used plumbing collection grows.



Look at this score! Driving through Koreatown, good stuff put to the curb.

A Trenton Potteries tank, gloriously thick and over-sized, with an undermount flush mechanism. Even the beefy lid was intact, dated 12 08 10! (I know what you're thinking--that it's actually a Crane. But Crane didn't acquire a controlling interest in Trenton Potteries until 1927.)





Trenton New Jersey was, incidentally, for many years the ceramics capital of the country, with some 50 studios, producing 80% of the nation's sanitary ware.



I'm having a t-shirt made, to read: I Buy Used Plumbing! Which I'll wear to swap meets and antique fairs, on house tours and long bicycle rides. It's got to be easier than heading off the scrap metal collectors, bartering for cast iron tubs, and pleading with simpleton retrofitters.

Anybody know where I can find the matching bowl?

Have You Heard the One About......

All real estate agents have a story like it. The client who looks again, and again, and never commits, coddled by "below market" rents with an avuncular landlord.

With a wondrously low, fixed monthly, and a dreamy location, the client understandably lacks the hard push and incentives of other wanna-be buyers.





So it goes, until the fateful letter arrives, the betrayal.


The owner is assuming occupancy of the unit, a big rent hike is planned, a cousin's moving in, the building's been sold, demolition is planned.

If it it can happen to the Fantastic Four, it can happen to anybody.



Artwork by Jack Kirby from issue #101 of the Fantastic Four (1970).

American Stuccolow

Lisa and Louis created the small publication American Stuccolow, based
on their own preservation ambitions and irritations. Currently the
couple are restoring a 1906 Craftsman-style bungalow in Jefferson Park.
We sat down to talk in their recently painted dining room, where the
wood had been stripped, sanded, stained, and varnished the previous
year.

Adam: What inspired American Stuccolow?

Lisa: 1529 Grace St, I think that was the address. A fanzine from
Chicago, named for the apartment building in which the writer lived.
He wrote about the building and interviewed neighbors. I showed it to
Louis, and he said, “if this guy can do a zine about his building, we
can do one about our house.”

Adam: Is it also a reaction to American Bungalow?

Lisa: Yeah, we were subscribers to that tired publication until we got
bored of looking at doe-eyed carpenters showing off their five thousand
dollar headboards and McMansions with bungalow-reminiscent detail,
kitchen islands, and can lights. We looked at our own home and that’s
not what we saw at all, nor was it our aspiration. And I used to
publish a zine called American Homebody, which was about staying at
home, so it seemed like a good project for us.

Louis: We wanted to create a sense of community that was extremely
local. And by “extremely local,” I mean the space between the parkway
and the back alley.

Lisa: American Bungalow isn't about the reality of renovation. It's
about advertising and creating consumers.

Louis: We don't have any advertising, unless you'd like to take out an
ad?

Adam: Are there any preservation myths you'd like to debunk?

Louis: Restoration is significantly more time consuming than anyone
cares to admit or imagine.

Lisa: I flinch when anyone says it's “just painted.” It sounds so
simple to rectify—but paint stripping is pretty involved, smelly, and
noxious.

Adam (#4): Are future issues planned, what will it feature, and how
can people secure a copy?

Lisa: We’re planning a holiday issue with a Jefferson Boulevard
shopping guide to all the 99 cent stores and party stores and pawn
shops within walking distance, pictures of recently stucco-ed houses,
and one lone recently un-stucco-ed house, yard news, and a new section
called “Vegan Living.”

Louis: And more Fight Club--there's a lot of Fight Club...[transcripts
of disagreements between the couple}, a list of meetings we didn’t
attend, Yard News, something about furniture....

Adam: How can people get a copy?

Lisa: They can go to StealthisSweater.com and contact the
proprietress.

Adam (#5): What about the biggest surprise?

Louis: How beautiful and sensible the architecture is, how beautiful
1/4 sawn Douglas fir is, the grain...

Lisa: We’re pretty central. I can be at Whole Foods in 30 minutes on
my bike from here.

Louis: And no one at work believes my quick commute.

Jane's New Book

Finally my copy of Jane Powell's latest bungalow encyclopaedia arrived, Bungalow Details Interior. Crucial books for old house lovers, Jane's newest tome offers commentary on subjects ranging from stove hoods to sleeping porches.

There's a slew of Bungalow/Arts & Crafts books, a few languishing in the remainders section, most with photographs of the same eight houses built by the same three men. Jane's survey takes her slightly further afield, with photographer Linda Svendsen, supplying unusual details: anaglypta wallpaper, a tiled phone niche, and a marble-backed fuse box.



Lots of good period advertisements, plus some opinions (gasp)!

Please see the archives for an interview with Jane Powell.

Uglification

Another dream, this time I'm yanking down cement block walls with chain, tow hitch, and pick-up, exhuming beautiful clapboard buried beneath villainous swirls of French Lace stucco--and without permission. I'm a restoration terrorist.




My alter ego would be sure to make this sign disappear.

Sold on the basis of energy efficiency, most of these vinyl vanguards are no more efficient than period wood windows. Some claim to damper sound. Of course, wood windows can be double paned, glazing can be replaced, weathstripping can be installed. Awful hard to modify these off-the-rack sliders though. Yet another product from makeover land, with built in obsolescence and inferior aesthetics.




Preservation credo aside, even with the faux muntins, who prefers this flat, dimension-less, vinyl checkerboard to....oh, wait did I fail to mention that I salvaged the original windows from this debacle. Sure, check out the photo of the leaded glass transoms. Can you dig it? I hereby sentence the homeowners to an art history class, or to an afternoon at the Gamble House, or just a stiff talking to.




What'd Lewis Carroll write:."..ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision".
Only the nonsense this time, isn't Carroll's verse, it's replacement windows.

The 5th of July

Is it the 5th of July yet, and will people then quit blowing crap up?

Maybe there's a secret countdown, starting some time in June. A few firecrackers at first, then a few more, louder, louder, later. Some can be nice to look at, pinpoints of deep, swirling color. Only nobody's looking, we're all trying to fall asleep or calm our petrified poochies.

Christmas celebrants don't open presents on December 19th, or 22nd. It's the whole kit-and-caboodle on the 25th. Fireworks abstinence, please people!

Yeah I'm sure it's all harmless. They used to say that about New Year's gunfire.