Author: Nathan Marsak

We tend to think of bowling alleys as full of googiefied grandeur, replete with folded-plate roofs and flagcrete walls, tapering pylons and swiss-cheesed I-beams, the assorted amoeboid whatnot and odd illuminated starburst, surmounted, or course, with a giant neon bowling pin. (America’s arguably most famous of such bowling alleys, the giant neon bowling pin-surmounted Hollywood Star Lanes, star of The Big Lebowski, was recently demo’d by the LAUSD to build Planet-Killer Elementary #6.)

But there was a time when bowling alleys were of Italianate design, or Moderne, or, in the case of the Sunset Center, grand Neoclassical affairs with giant fluted columns.

The eagle-eye’d may ascertain where the coffee shop neon was once affixed to what is now the HQ of Tribune Entertainment:

There are fewer bowling alleys in LA than bald eagles, and’re twice as endangered. An endangered, passing world. A world you’ll never know. A world where the damn rep from Red Crown Ten Pins is late; he’ll wanna try and talk you into replacing your Ebonites with his Mineralite balls again, and the American guy hasn’t fixed the Backus pin spotter so you’re gonna call Brunswick for a quote on a 20th spotter and a Telescore projector while you’re at it, and hey, maybe that cat from Acme Billiard who plays league games Tuesday can give you the skinny on refinishing your maple.

No market left at Los Feliz and Brunswick; of the four corners, there’s a Chevron and a 76 and a Del Taco. I’ve elected to upload the car wash on the NW corner for no other reason than my horror at seeing they’d sheared off four of the populuxe pylons to make way for a goddamned billboard-a horror I thought I’d share.

The scene of the other shoot-out, halfway up the 1800 block of North Argyle has, as have so many of 47project’s subjects, become freeway fodder:

Whether suicide is at the top of your list of things to do, or a few items down, believe me, there are worse places to do it than at Ives & Warren. Frederick Kennedy designed this gorgeous Spanish Eclectic basilica in 1929-for once, we applaud stucco-and it remained Ives & Warren until taken over by the Pasadena Conservatory of Music in 2001. (Kennedy is best known for his work on Pasadena’s 1925 First Baptist, National Register, sure, though that hasn’t half the cool lyricism of this building.)

Much of the interior has been gutted, save for a few interior columns with some nice curvilinear ornament. The thirty-foot central nave got a dropped ceiling, turning it two story:

The building is still lovely, though, and the courtyard with its arcaded gallery still enchants, despite part of the mortuary being turned into a nail salon, and Hill having become a major thoroughfare. I can assure you, though, that Mr. Rawles had a beautiful service.

Maybe de Havilland (in town to work on The Snake Pit) gave Randall a roll back in ’35. Maybe they were coconspirators in the Marshall Plan Rembrandts-for-gold scandal. Maybe he was just your garden-variety stalker-psycho. In any event, they were to hook up here:

The Las Palmas is best known as where Richard Gere rescues Julia Roberts from the lumpen whoreitariat that is our lot. Worth seeing for the shot of the old neon that used to grace the pole outside, since replaced with backlit plastic.

A taste of Old Hollywood: nothing says Old Hollywood like a punker with a big mohawk in front of the Las Palmas. Depending on your definition of Old Hollywood, of course.

Shotgun-wielding Whittierites? And I thought the Quakers were such peace-loving folk. Of course, try telling that to the Cambodians.

Whittier, 1947. Orange and avocado groves were being gobbled up by tracts. So when the Russian Boar weren’t busy rooting out roots and rutting with blood-crazed feral razorbacks, they were getting cranky about the encroaching subdivisions. Thus they’d thunder through backyards, letting housewives chill to the sound of them sharpening their whetters on their lower tusks.

(Note Valley View a little southwest of center. Sure, Whittier College has expanded and roads have multiplied, but it looks as though there are still some wilds nearby – take care, beasts of the wild, the locals’ve got Acts 7:42 under their belts-or do they see in themselves II Pete 2:12?)

Can only assume they dug a big pit and Hawaiian’d this noble brute. Maybe made some summer sausage. My heart goes out to you, O Terror of Orchardale.

With Kim and Larry’s complete coverage, I’ll go photo-heavy on this one and let them speak for me.

The scene of the crime – amazingly, still a printer’s shop. 821 is on the far right.

While post-47, a pic of the cut-out signage:

Much of this area was demo’d for freeway construction. Had the 110 had been built a hundred feet to the west, we would have lost the Veckoblad HQ. Instead, this Utter-McKinley mortuary was sacrificed for an overpass abutment:

Looking up Cherry, a quiet residential street, now neither, scene of the watch drop:

The area bounded by Pico, Figueroa, Washington and Burlington:

The Parzyjegla home – the 400 block of Jefferson was also eaten by the 110.

A modest house. Who’da thunk it fulla clams. Clams stink. Something stinks.

Missing moolah. Accented callers. We know about those accented callers. Bruno Hauptmann was one.

[While here at 47hq we leave the day’s events suspended in time, Bardin’s juicy tale cries out to be heard: The question stands-noone pulled down this sort of action in LA, so who tipped the crew? Or were these Indy-savvy boys out from the Hoosier state for a business/pleasure vay-cay? The FBI didn’t even look into it-they were curious about the interstate transfer of a large sum of cash, not the robbery. Bardin stated that the money was going to pay taxes, but, uh, had less of an explanation as to why he didn’t put that money in a bank. Probably had something to do with his background as a WWII-era beer-peddling black marketeer, and fellow traveler in the famously corrupt Democratic machine out Indiana/Illinois way. He bought the brewery from Democratic National Committeeman Frank McHale, with money from Democratic National Chairman Frank McKinney and, after serving a six-month Federal prison term in 1948 on the charge of putting 12-ounce labels on bottles actually containing 11 ounces of beer {hanging’s too good for ‘im!} finally got popped in ’52 by Repub Senator John Williams for concealing $231,000 of his 1946 income from his return.]

817- the life-giving Hollywood Craftsman that every Minnesotan of 1909 yearned for-your typical home on Cahuenga. Typical once, anyway.

Here, however, is what’s become of Stanhope’s house up the street at 833:

Why did these two tussle? Consider: Casper, a ghost, like a white sheet, dig. And Stanhope, player in 1947’s lambast of the Klan The Burning Cross. I seeeee.

(Burning Cross was shot at Ren-Mar Studios [nee Metro Studios] across the street at 846. Must be nice to walk to work.)

The boys at Lockheed and Vega Aircraft didn’t worry too much about the noise associated with assembling P-38s, or the probability of accidents when testing the Constellation. It was a sparsely populated part of the world out there in the No-Man’s Land between Burbank and North Hollywood.

But by the end of the war houses had sprouted up everywhere. They’re all still there.

Some things are eternal-like a son changing the locks on his mother on Mother’s Day. Other things change-a street’s worth of garages become extra rooms (above). Ailing jetliners start falling on you instead of test planes. Right nearby the Valhalla Cemetery’ll haul off and expand (giving pilots of ailing jetliners more room to ditch). But the houses remain relatively intact, and every one, every single one, is there because of Lockheed. After all, during the war Lockheed had more employees than there were residents of Burbank and North Hollywood combined.

What’s most shocking about the area is that there’s no physical remnant of the mighty city that was the Lockheed facility. The unbelievable loss of the Earhart/Hughes hangar in 1998 was right in line with the mindset that Lockheed, the Airport Authority, and the City of Burbank maintain: to hell with our aviation history. The most super-secret of super-secret development buildings, the “Skunk Works,” whence came our first fighter jet (the P-80), the U2 spy plane, the Polaris and the Stealth, unceremoniously demolished. And that Building 85 was demolished by the city when it entered into the business of funding, of all people, the Hilton family? Let’s not even talk about that.

Thankfully, around the corner from the Bryans, a ’50 Roadmaster keeps a bit of the bygone spirit of the area alive.

In their size and shape and arrangement, the houses along Marine all oozed prewar. But then, they all looked new as well. I chatted up a neighbor. Yes, her house was built in the thirties, the whole street was. Really, I said. There have been some-changes. Oh yes, she replied, we did ours in ’86. The people across the street there just did theirs.

So. Stucco and plastic windows are something you “do.” You just call someone up and say “I’d like to do my house,” and they’ll know exactly what you mean. They’ll come over and your house will get “did.” Nearly every visible trace of 30s Wilmington, borne of the 1932-discovered 2.5 billion barrel Wilmington Field (third largest in America), has been wiped from the landscape.

As to what Betty’s outfit signifies we can only conjecture; what types of costume (and their import) hung in the closets of 1610 is a matter of further fantasy. How had Mrs. Foley puzzled out her daughter’s dangerous games? Dear Myrtle must have filled her head with ignis fatuus to dispel any disquieting truths. Perhaps we can channel her spirit (which like said pale light hovers over the marshy oil fields) and pry some secreted tale from her misty midst.