It’s a solid house, stolid even. The curved entry whispers “moderne.â€
A seventy five-thousand dollar home if ever there was one.
Such are the spoils of love.
The Fewkes’ lived in the back house, at 5941 Gage —
and it was here where Dolores lived her life, dreamed her dreams, and let her heart beat for a budding existentialist who had issues with Christianity and women. A potent combo. “In the last five years my mother’s attitude toward me changed,” said Welch. “There wasn’t the same kind of affection as there used to be. And the church didn’t live up to what it was supposed to.” Who wouldn’t adopt what the papers called “the immature philosophy of pessimism?”
Maybe part of his escape to Horse Flats had to do with feeling confined in this newly-dense urban environment. The likes of Huntington Park, Walnut Park, Bell Gardens and South Gate had been, just previous to his birth, endless acres of grazing sheep and cauliflower fields (Amelia Earhart learned to fly in one such South Gate expanse of dirt). In the early 20s cities were incorporated, every inch was parceled out, and frame buildings went up like mad.
Welch lived in this one, at 7501 Whitsett:
And it was here, during his post-Navy freakout, he argued religion, thought his dark thoughts, and formulated a philosophy based on a common youthful misreading of Schopenhauer (seemingly endemic to the postwar geist).
Like get hip. Murder-suicide is no answer in an absurd vacuum, dad.
Ah, Utley. Anyone shot at and repeatedly beaten, who refuses to sign a complaint, is OK in my book. Me and all of Cornero’s boys say so.
Cornero was the rumrunner-turned-Pioneer of Vegas, Father of the Stardust. LA County deputies were fond of boarding his ships off Santa Monica (Cornero often turned the firehoses on Earl Warren’s boys) to hack up roulette wheels for the photographers-in-tow. Cornero survived Cohen-ordered assassination attempts in Beverly Hills the way others survive headaches, until he was finally, in 1955, whacked in Vegas by Moe Dalitz (with a poison 7&7 – how else would you want to go?)-
-the fate of Utley, Cornero’s long-suffering concessionaire, is a mystery. All we’ve got is that he may or may not have lived with this Robertson character at 7143. The fate of 7143 is, of course, evident. I picture it as a rambling rough-hewn shingle affair with wide eaves and cross gables, maybe replaced in the mid-50s by a short-lived Polynesian themed apartment complex, who knows. All we have with certainty is that in 1965 somebody erected this fourteen-story concrete warehouse, converted in 1990 to the Hollywood Versailles Tower condominium complex.
A taste of old Hollywood: behind the Hollywood Versailles, across a parking lot, hides this piece of American Foursquare Edwardiana. How this pattern-book prairie box survived is another mystery.
The manhole in question:
What else do you see? Nothing. Except Geoff Palmer’s Orsini Apartments in the distance. Between that infant-concealing manhole cover and the Orsini, here at the northern end of Bunker Hill, just east of its Fort Moore area, once stood the 1887 Geise Residence. Couple of years ago, a man named Geoff Palmer applied for a demo permit to raze the LAST remaining Victorian structure on Bunker Hill. He didn’t get it. Nevertheless, the City had decided to relocate the house. Palmer told his foreman to knock it down anyway. Palmer got a slap on the wrist. The house is still gone, though.
Palmer also knocked down these adjacent structures a few weeks ago:
–which is too bad, as they were a pair of fine early commercial structures, one a Mission style with nice tile work, the other having cool ghost signs that read “Lumber” and “Mouldings” and, in the middle, likely indicating its original purpose, “Auto Repairing.” These, and the Geise Residence, were flattened for the forthcoming Orsini Two. And the site for Orsini Three? Across the street to the north:
And thus will serve to fuel the total obliteration of Bunker Hill from our collective memory, in conjunction with the loftifization of the Giant Penny, the Pan-American, Victor Clothing… some will profit, but will it be us? Or our Palmers?
No wonder Angel’s Flight lashes out at man — as does any animal who can no longer recognize its habitat.
‘Course, sometimes LA is just about a vegetable-crazy guy named Trinidad what took his rifle wading into the brack of Lincoln Park lake. Was his offering to be accepted as Abel’s? Or was he just itching to glaze the fowl bastard in honey and lavender, to feel the essence of something once-sentient poured down his throat in the form of pan juices?
We shall not know. Those in the throes of Vegetable Frenzy are beyond comprehension.
From up and down the block I could hear running feet and the odd door slam, doors on houses much like this one, unassuming structures in that graveyard-laden grey area between Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles.
While footfall fell and doors slammed, what I didn’t hear were children in yards, yards now universally browned-out or paved over. Also didn’t hear cries of “Look after the kids!,†thank God.
Where was Saenz running? Perhaps a block over to Calvary Cemetery to find solace in meditation? Down Indiana St. to hide in his secret recesses of the scrap yards of Vernon? Or up Whittier Boulevard and into LA, to find whatever he felt was denied him in life?
But the Sunset Strip couldn’t compete with the Vegas Strip by the late 50s, and Ciro’s — along with the Trocadero, the Mocambo, et al — disappeared, leaving the horror that is today’s Strip in its wake.
The Modern facade has been destroyed by the Comedy Store. I suppose they think that’s funny.
Mr. Ahlberg dragged our vic into the park on the lower left of this image. Middle-aged women of 1947 were, then as now, ripe for sacking and rape and other unglorious ends. Once and a while, angry mobs say enough is enough and no means no, usw. So was screamed for this park and its library.
The Edison Building (there, over the shoulder of the Library, Allison & Allison) has withstood its attackers since 1931 (she maintains the finest lobby murals in town). The Fruit Exchange seen across from Library Park (Walker & Eisen, 1935) wasn’t hardy enough to prevent calamity. (And is, at present, site of the Tallest Building West of the Mississippi.)
Library Park fell to the pavers:
and then, that Grande Dame, the Library herself, was set for sacking and rape and, worse yet, outright murder. The developers and city colluded to whack her big-time. They’d sold her air rights for some late-80s AC Martin/SOM knock-offs when they set fire to her. Twice.
But the onlookers screamed and yelled and nearly took apart the evil-doers: so was borne the Los Angeles Conservancy. The Library thus stands as a potent metaphor–yes, They might have a gun. Whether or not it’s too late, whether you have the guts to yell “Let us have ’em!” during or after an attack, for God’s sake, yell, yell, and don’t fucking stop.
So Officer Putman escorts the former wife of a fellow officer home at 1:30am. Shoots her, throws the gun on the lawn.
An accident. When I have an accident, I’ve usually just cut my finger opening a can.
Again with the stucco and window job. Why is it people stucco? It’s applied via inherent sloth. They’re told you’ll “never paint again — painting looks bad in twenty years!” So they have chicken-wire stapled to their craftsman shingle and swimming pool gunnite shot the hell on their houses. It looks like shit when it’s sprayed on and it looks just as shitty twenty years later. If that isn’t cultural progress, I don’t know what is.
Christ in the desert never had such a forbidding landscape. Here we are spending all this money on schools, and we can’t even afford some decent plantings for wandering kids to sleep in. Giant rocks and cacti? Nice. Let’s plant some damn cushy ivy! It’s for the kids! If you hate ivy, YOU HATE CHILDREN!!!
The aforementioned liquor store may have been located in the brick building on the right. As for Gilroy Avenue, that disappeared completely. The child-beating evil that was Mrs. Pearl Cooke evidently sucked the whole street into Hell.
