Rick's Hardware

Buy an old house, shop for old house parts.  What grande dame isn't bereft a bauble: brass window lift, niggling bullet catch, or push button plate? 

Rick's Hardware at 4382 Lankershim Blvd in North Hollywood/Toluca Lake (91602), boasts a diverse inventory of door and window hardware, latches and catches.  

The narrow, densely packed shop manages to remain clean and discernible, unlike some larger salvage operations, though items aren't necessarily ordered by era or style.

Rick's caters largely to the film production community, with corresponding hours of operation:

Monday - Thursday 8 am -  4 pm, Friday 8 am - 2 pm.

Tel 818-508-7948

rickshardware@aol.com 

Video Paper

Bemoan, Bemoan Part 2

(See Bemoan, Bemoan Part 1, 6/27/2009)

Frustration, backpacking through the urban thorn, flag bearing for architectural preservation. So many buildings altered in ways I find deplorable.

Yet I hate these notions: the superior eye, the fecundity of artists--the elites, raised in a monastery of beautiful things, cultivating greater sensitivities.

Typically, I try to recognize competing cultural mandates, and the by-products of resourcelessness.  Still my non-judgemental cover bloweth, mainly to vociferate: 'how could one think X is preferable to Y'?

Can people really not see the difference(s)?  The envelope 

please......and the answer is...YES and NO.  People can see the difference, and the difference is of little value.   Utility is paramount.  

House as utility, as vessel.  How many can it shelter, bathe and feed?    

Candid Camera

Some object to security bars, which in neighborhoods that lack the moderating capabilities of landscape, can seem repressively encircling.  In many higher income communities, features of potential alienation are shrunken, if not more unsettling.

Home Security Cameras are an example of such, fixed to eaves, above entrances, atop high walls. Residences, even neighborhoods, blazon their deployment.  

As the systems drop in price (a package with four dome-shaped infrared cameras and a four channel DVR with 250 gb, costs around $1,000.00), their employment mounts.

The proliferation is also connected to the rise of the home office.  Increasingly, sound and image related professionals, in flagging entertainment industries, are forsaking rental space; instead, housing expensive equipment in re-purposed 

garages, basements, and rumpus rooms.

I asked one Hollywood Hills home owner if he'd utilized his multi-camera surveillance set-up. 

 "Yes," he replied glowingly, "we identified the cat spraying our front door."

Sub Modern (Part One)

"How dangerously bourgeois," I wise assed to the latest kid Corbusier, "a few strips of teak on the face of el bloque.  A little charity for the ol' hammer and nail guys?"

"Even if I wanted to build one of your Beaux Arts fantasies," the architect spat, "I couldn't find the craftspeople--they're under six feet of dirt, along with your aesthetic."

(A common lament, blame not my inability to compose the picturesque, to enroll the broad grammar of architecture, sayeth the builder, I am limited by my charges.)

"That's funny," I returned, "because only a couple blocks away is the Queen Anne inspired Stein Building (second and fourth images), erected not in the 1880's, but in the 1980's.  You reckon the finish carpenters were mummies?"

Los Angeles actually boasts dozens of neo free classicals, design throwbacks, and revival revivals; inspiring novelties in a landscape dominated by nuevo Mediterrauseums, and Machine Age rip-offs.

"Stick-n-stucco rules," one custom builder allowed, "because it's fast, cheap and the popular taste."

"Is the blind, leading the blind," I asked.

"You're the critic," he responded, "you tell me."

End Part One 

Living History Tour 2009

The Angelus Rosedale Cemetery celebrates its 125th anniversary, with the West Adams Heritage Association Living History Tour on Saturday, September 26th.

Tour goers will canvas the scenic grounds, between graveside portrayals of famous Angelenos including:

Jean Goldkette: a prominent jazz bandleader of the 1920's and 1930's.

William H. Shores: the first African American employee of the Security Trust & Savings Bank founded in 1889.

Katharine Putnam Hooker & Marion Osgood Hooker: mother-daughter explorers and travel writers.

Remi Nadeau: member of a pioneering, land-developing, Los Angeles family.

Everett Sloan: actor of radio, tv, and movie fame, who enjoyed a long professional relationship with Orson Welles.

For information on tickets ($25 general), visit www.WestAdamsHeritage.org.

Tour times begin at 9 am, and every 25 minutes thereafter till 12:20.

Tours are projected to last 2 - 3 hours, so don appropriate footwear and bring water.

Between the Blogs