noirish Los Angeles

[tovangar2]

Originally Posted by ethereal_reality

EDENDALE area 1932.


http://www.atwatervillage.org/

I am intrigued by 'Airport Gardens(?) Night Club' south of Grand Central Airport.
__

This has come up before:
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...postcount=5154

http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...postcount=5160

http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...postcount=5155

If FabFiftiesFan has it right, here it is, looking super swanky and way more New York than Glendale:


Trisha Bennett - Etsy

FabFiftiesFan relates that Continetal Club patron and protector, Mayor Frank Shaw, was recalled in 1938, making way for crackdown-on-vice Mayor Fletcher Bowron. Bowron, if anyone recalls, was the one unseated fifteen years later by the powerful LA businessmen's "Committee of 25" because he wanted to reserve Bunker Hill (and a few other developer-coveted spots) for affordable housing. Opponent Norris Poulson, The Committee of 25's puppet, slid into office with funding from "Citizens Against Socialist Housing", known by its acronym, "C.A.S.H.". So blatant. I love LA.

GW references Jim Heimann & his research. Always reliable.

The Continental Club rates a couple of mentions in Heimann's Out With the Stars (1986) but no pix :-(




I never tire of zooming around the Wonder City of America map:
http://www.bigmapblog.com/2011/los-a...-america-1934/

[GaylordWilshire]

Ebell LA


I'd always thought of the Ebell Theater as a "neighborhood theater"... but it looks huge in pictures on the club's website here. I had no idea.

It looks like the tall section parallels the stage and does hold lights, flats etc.

[rcarlton]

Originally Posted by GaylordWilshire

Note the address on the floorplan... The Oesterreichs were living in Los Angeles at 858 N. Andrews Boulevard by 1920...

LAPL

The street view is now obscured by too many trees (trees--my nemesis), so a picture from the curb wouldn't show much except that the house on
its left and the wall are still there. Perhaps to avoid confusion with St. Andrews Place not far to the west, Andrews Blvd later became Lafayette
Park Place... 858 N. Lafayette Park Place still stands...

Google SV

The house appears to have been enlarged, although the front roofline is more or less the same. I wonder if the current owners are aware of the
shenanigans of 90 years ago? Probably... (I think they should put a plaque on the front)... Also had to look closely to see what was going on in
what appears to be a hot tub out back... the ghosts of Dolly and Otto?

A look through the trees:
trulia

zillow

zillow

zillow

This Apartment is located at 858 North La Fayette Park Place, Los Angeles CA. 858 N La Fayette Park Pl is in the Silver Lake neighborhood in Los Angeles, CA and in ZIP Code 90026. The average listing price for Silver Lake is $814,858. 858 N La Fayette Park Place. Rent is $825 month for 350 square foot studio apartment. 4195 square feet, built in 1915. Wonder if they are renting out Otto's attic, and how many square feet did he have?

[FredH]

James Lileks in his blog today talks about urban renewal in his hometown of Minneapolis...but the statement applies just as well to Los Angeles.

"Ever since urban renewal knocked down Bumtown, it’s been a ghostland, and fifty years later it’s just starting to get its spirit back. As usual,
a Great Plan was responsible - an Olympian mind looking down on maps and buildings, and seeing clean lines and pure structures arranged with
pure cerebral logic. You can say one thing about these schemes: they always look good from on high."

Also:

"Like most of Gehry's work, it's glass-shards in a Jiffy-Pop bag. It's not as if they had to go classical on the site - but almost anything streamlined
Moderne from the 1939 World's Fair would have fit, and have adopted itself to the glories the site presented. As modern and spare as Moderne was,
it still belonged to the previous tradition. It belonged."

"But everyone wants a Gehry; everyone wants a Neimeyer. Just one! And if there's a piece of the past we have to sacrifice, well, there's plenty
of that. Until there isn't."

http://lileks.com/bleats/archive/12/1212/120612.html

[Los Angeles Past]

Originally Posted by rcarlton

858 North La Fayette Park Place, Los Angeles CA. 858 N La Fayette Park Pl is in the Silver Lake neighborhood in Los Angeles, CA and in ZIP Code 90026.

I knew that street name rang a bell. As I've mentioned here before several times, my mother worked for Utter-McKinley Mortuaries in the 1930s and '40s as Maytor H. McKinley's personal executive secretary.

The grand McKinley mansion was located at 310 Lafayette Park Place. I remember visiting that house many times as a toddler. (My mom and the McKinleys remained good friends all the rest of their lives.)

Here are some excerpts from a magazine article about MHM from 1946. It contains the only picture I have of the now-vanished McKinley mansion (other than the one in my mind's eye). The place was a real palace inside. It was certainly the biggest house I had ever been in, at that age.

Does anyone here have a better/larger picture of this house? I'd guess the most likely candidate for this would be GaylordWilshire!







Mom at UMM's flagship Viewpark chapel at 3719 West Slauson, in 1941.



I still have the Winton wristwatch Mother is wearing there. It was a gift to her from Mr. McKinley.

-Scott

[AlvaroLegido]

Hi noirish cronies ! (pardon my english, I'm french, I live in Paris).
I started reading the thread from page one in January (about 3 pages a day). I've just made it to the current page. I knew nearly nothing on L.A. (except from the novels by Raymond Chandler), now I am becoming a scholar ! I guess I could draw by heart by now a map of the old Chinatown/Plaza area and Bunker Hill. I've been eager every day to read not only from vintage L.A. but from this society of similars thinkers with various sensitivities which I hold in high esteem : the hugely inquiring and enthusiastic E_R ; the aesthete GW (more in the « Magnificent Ambersons' » way than in the « Double Indemnity ») ; the detectives Sopas and Gsjansen (please come back !) ; the scholars Beaudry and Scott ; the adventurer 3940Dx (Rosslyn Hotel tunnel) ; the family concerned Ninja55 ; the surveyor Fhammon ; the novelist Michael Ryerson ; the passionate newcomer Tovangar2 (who restarts to my delight our favourites Chinatown/Plaza & Bunker Hill) and all the others... Thinking back to those 500 pages, I guess I've found the peak of the spirit of the thread (« not only noirish but everything L.A. » as once the founder said) at Betty Katz by Michael Ryerson (page 491 #9805).

Well, I have something noirish to share : nobody talked yet about Russ Columbo.


russcolumbo.com

That forgotten singer was as famous as Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee in the early Thirties and had a perfect microphone technique (do you agree, Mr Steve Hoffman ?) and an outstanding legato. It's still worth listening to him.


lastfm.com.br


[Quoting Wikipedia]
On September 2, 1934, Columbo was shot under peculiar circumstances by his longtime friend, photographer Lansing Brown while Columbo was visiting him at home. Brown had a collection of firearms and the two men were examining various pieces. Quoting Brown's description of the accident:
« I was absent-mindedly fooling around with one of the guns. It was of a dueling design and works with a cap and trigger. I was pulling back the trigger and clicking it time after time. I had a match in my hand and when I clicked, apparently the match caught in between the hammer and the firing pin. There was an explosion. Russ slid to the side of his chair. »
The ball ricocheted off a nearby table and hit Columbo above the left eye. Surgeons at Good Samaritan Hospital made an unsuccessful attempt to remove the ball from Columbo's brain; he died less than six hours after the shooting. 

Good Samaritan Hospital

flickriver.com

Columbo's death was ruled an accident, and Brown exonerated from blame. His funeral mass was attended by numerous Hollywood luminaries, including Bing Crosby and Carole Lombard who was romantically involved with him.

AlvaroLegido

[GaylordWilshire]

Hello Scott...

Well, I'm pretty sure that that house was made an L.A. Historic-Cultural Monument and then got torn down, maybe in the '80s--there was lawsuit etc... I'll have to go digging.

[Los Angeles Past]

Originally Posted by GaylordWilshire

Hello Scott...

Well, I'm pretty sure that that house was made an L.A. Historic-Cultural Monument and then got torn down, maybe in the '80s--there was lawsuit etc... I'll have to go digging.

Thanks, GW! I'd be grateful for any info you might be able to find.

[kznyc2k]

More Christmastime Hollywood courtesy of Vintage Los Angeles, this time from 1953:

[GaylordWilshire]

310 S Lafayette Park Place...

There are quite a few articles on the McKinley House. Here are two from early 1989:


Los Angeles Times Jan 2, 1989


Los Angeles Times Jan 9, 1989

[Los Angeles Past]

Originally Posted by GaylordWilshire

310 S Lafayette Park Place...

Very interesting! Says the house was built in 1917, and it looks like that era, but it couldn't have been McKinley's originally. He would only have been 15 years old at the time of its construction.

Thanks, GW!

-S

[ProphetM]

Originally Posted by FredH

James Lileks in his blog today talks about urban renewal in his hometown of Minneapolis...but the statement applies just as well to Los Angeles.

"Ever since urban renewal knocked down Bumtown, it’s been a ghostland, and fifty years later it’s just starting to get its spirit back. As usual,
a Great Plan was responsible - an Olympian mind looking down on maps and buildings, and seeing clean lines and pure structures arranged with
pure cerebral logic. You can say one thing about these schemes: they always look good from on high."

Also:

"Like most of Gehry's work, it's glass-shards in a Jiffy-Pop bag. It's not as if they had to go classical on the site - but almost anything streamlined
Moderne from the 1939 World's Fair would have fit, and have adopted itself to the glories the site presented. As modern and spare as Moderne was,
it still belonged to the previous tradition. It belonged."

"But everyone wants a Gehry; everyone wants a Neimeyer. Just one! And if there's a piece of the past we have to sacrifice, well, there's plenty
of that. Until there isn't."

http://lileks.com/bleats/archive/12/1212/120612.html

<3 Lileks.

I've been avoiding posting the following since it is not in Los Angeles, but since we're on the subject of Gehry and new buildings in old styles...

Just west of downtown Las Vegas, there is a new development area on land that was formerly owned by Union Pacific. It is slowly being built out, and thankfully since it was previously a rail yard, they did not have to destroy a bunch of old buildings or neighborhoods to do it. One of the new buildings is the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, which can best be described as a shiny silver office building midway through the process of melting in the Las Vegas heat:


Lou Ruvo Center - South West Corner - 2010-12-10 [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], by Cygnusloop99 (Own work), from Wikimedia Commons

Or maybe instead of 'extreme heat' Gehry was thinking 'a building as seen by someone with brain problems'.

But anyway, there is a far more appealing building just around the corner. The name of the whole area changed to Symphony Park once the Smith Center for the Performing Arts came on board. It is an art deco masterpiece and would fit in well among the beautiful art deco work that still remains in LA. It's no Richfield Building, but it's pretty impressive.

A search yielded a picture from February in another thread but I thought I would throw a few pics in here. Hoover Dam was clearly an inspiration, and this is easily the most fantastic thing built in southern Nevada since the dam. I took these photos when I went to a LV Philharmonic performance in April, about a month after it opened.















In a place known for its artificial facades and lack of permanence, we finally have something truly built to last.

[GaylordWilshire]

Meanwhile, back in L.A....

Originally Posted by Rycroft

Hi

I was wondering if anyone has any information/photos of this building. I used to drive past it every day and wondered if it's a factory or if it's an apartment building. And if it's the later, do people still inhabit it being that it's right next to the 10/110 interchange. The building is just off Venice on Wright street. Any information would be greatly appreciated.


Photos by Google maps

As soon as I saw the gray building on the right, I thought, aha! I know I've seen it before. I was certain we looked into here once before...possibly in connection with the Black Dahlia... or did a movie star once live there? Anyway...I couldn't find anything with the %&#@ing "search" feature here ... I'm sure we were once in this bend of freeway, at the door of that gray building... and then I remembered Mabel Monohan: http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...postcount=1235.

It was none other than BARBARA GRAHAM, Noir Princess, who once lived at 1438 Wright Street... well, Rycroft, I know this isn't really about the coral-colored building you were asking about, but I wonder if its story can top 1438's?

[fhammon]

Originally Posted by GaylordWilshire

It was none other than BARBARA GRAHAM, Noir Princess, who once lived at 1438 Wright Street... well, Rycroft, I know this isn't really about the coral-colored building you were asking about, but I wonder if its story can top 1438's?

I was intrigued and just had to revisit:


"Barbara Graham in courtroom. (Herald Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library)

“The brashly attractive 32-year-old convicted murderess, her bleached blond hair turned to its natural brown … walked to her death as if dressed for a shopping trip” (Los Angeles Times, 1955, June 5, p. 1). Even the blindfold Graham requested was treated as a fashion accessory in some accounts: “Her face was an ivory cameo accented by the mask [blindfold] and her rouged crimson lips” (San Francisco Examiner, 1955, June 4, p. 1); “the mask hid her tired eyes and she looked pretty in her beige suit” (The San Francisco Chronicle, 1955, June 4, p. 1). Her hands trembled, and “her small pendant earrings quivered nervously” (The San Francisco Chronicle, 1955, June 4, p. 1), but she retained her composure.

Lots of detailed info on the case here:

http://testaae.greenwood.com/doc_pri...ooks/greenwood

..and here:

http://www.johngilmore.com/Books/preview_graham.html



http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/articl...in-2630485.php

"Bloody Babs"

[DouglasUrantia]

[QUOTE=FredH;5927712]James Lileks in his blog today talks about urban renewal in his hometown of Minneapolis...but the statement applies just as well to Los Angeles.

"Like most of Gehry's work, it's glass-shards in a Jiffy-Pop bag. It's not as if they had to go classical on the site - but almost anything streamlined
Moderne from the 1939 World's Fair would have fit, and have adopted itself to the glories the site presented. As modern and spare as Moderne was,
it still belonged to the previous tradition. It belonged."

"But everyone wants a Gehry; everyone wants a Neimeyer. Just one! And if there's a piece of the past we have to sacrifice, well, there's plenty
of that. Until there isn't."


If you want ugliness to dominate your city, be sure to hire Gehry as your architect. His designs are nothing more than wadded up tin foil made-large into a grotesque structure.

Here is Mr. Gehry 'designing' a building.

[jg6544]

The pulpit, lectern, and organ from the old St. Paul's Cathedral (Episcopal) are now at St. James' Episcopal Church on Wilshire at St. Andrew's Pl. The Cathedra is at the Diocesan Center on Echo Park Ave.

[Those Who Squirm!]

Originally Posted by ethereal_reality

'Those Who Squirm'.
You must have been enjoying your lunch outside the 'Lion's Den'...an off shoot of the MGM Commissary.

That must be the one, though we didn't call it that. IIRC when you entered the lot from the Overland gate, this place was about two-thirds of the way down the main drag that runs through the property. The porch or outside seating area faced west. I was "overhead", working in the Producers' Building; maybe the creative guild folks still called it the Lion's Den.

Damn! I still miss that job after all these years.

[GaylordWilshire]

Originally Posted by DouglasUrantia

If you want ugliness to dominate your city, be sure to hire Gehry as your architect. His designs are nothing more than wadded up tin foil made-large into a grotesque structure.

Wow. Not even sure why we're talking about Gehry or Las Vegas here... I'm way tired of hearing about him and think it's time for a new direction, but his Spruce Street building here in Manhattan--yes, 76 stories of something like wadded-up tinfoil-- is pretty sophisticated. I wouldn't call it grotesque. Better than the Postmodern junk Philip Johnson left us with--proof that retro notions can be a mess.

[GaylordWilshire]

Originally Posted by Los Angeles Past

Very interesting! Says the house was built in 1917, and it looks like that era, but it couldn't have been McKinley's originally. He would only have been 15 years old at the time of its construction.

Thanks, GW!

-S

Well, Scott, the McKinleys are a complicated bunch to sort out. It seems that there were multiple Maytor Hoppenyan McKinleys (what could be the derivation of the name "Maytor Hoppenyan"?)... the one in your illustration was born in 1902; his father, MHM Sr., was born in 1878 and died in L.A. in 1952--perhaps he owned the house before Junior? Interestingly, it seems that there was also a Maytor Hoppenyan (no McKinley) who is listed in L.A. directories before WW2, and who is described elsewhere as having been in the funeral business back in Wisconsin... possibly a cousin who came to L.A. with the rest of the family? Anyway, as a fan of The Loved One and The American Way of Death and with my own experiences arranging my mother's funeral not long ago (getting into fits of laughter with my siblings over the various "options" such as a release of turtle doves or some absurd such--NOT appreciated by the waxen morticians), I find the whole business strange and opportunistic... but it seems that even sanctimonious morticians can have noirish private lives.. love this story of Maytor and Maxine... (could your mother have known Maxine?)...


Los Angeles Times

[DouglasUrantia]

Originally Posted by GaylordWilshire

Wow. Not even sure why we're talking about Gehry or Las Vegas here... I'm way tired of hearing about him and think it's time for a new direction, but his Spruce Street building here in Manhattan--yes, 76 stories of something like wadded-up tinfoil-- is pretty sophisticated. I wouldn't call it grotesque. Better than the Postmodern junk Philip Johnson left us with--proof that retro notions can be a mess.

I actually like the Spruce St. Gehry building. It least it doesn't look like a bad 1960s ACID trip. Maybe Mr. Gehry has finally mellowed and come to his senses.

Here it is:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_Spruce_Street