Category: Uncategorized

165 Charles Street is the latest glass apartment house in a trio of multi-million dollar apartments designed by architect Richard Meier in NYC’s West Village.

Several units were open this past weekend to exhibit selected galleries and artists. This marketing campaign was a unique way to sell both art and real estate and reinforce the idea that this glass and steel residence is a “collector’s item”. At the lowest asking price of $5.6 million, with 80% allegedly sold, the builder seems to have no trouble making sales.

We later found ourselves eating dinner at “Bread: Tribeca” one of those great restaurants that seem to be on every corner in NY. Unlike LA, you can just pop into a NY neighborhood and find something top rate.

Both Tribeca and Soho are thriving. Yet we hear from Joel Kotkin that, “Dense, arty neighborhoods have failed to attract talent and capital. What people really want is affordable space.” When Soho and Tribeca were affordable they had no talent and capital. Now they are unaffordable, but even those who don’t own property in these districts can enjoy a thriving, dense and arty neighborhood of restaurants, architecture and theater. Much more exciting then spending an afternoon in the “fast growing Inland Empire”.

More Tribeca photos on Flickr.

I am back visiting my parents in Woodcliff Lake, NJ. They have lived in their home since 1979, in a cul-de-sac that once ended in a 20 acre forest and azalea farm.

Four years ago, developers bought up the land. In marched the bulldozers. The company erected these monstrosities with ornate doors, cheap siding, and stone or brick facades. They have two story high vinyl windows, and great rooms. As I predicted in 2003, the residents speed along in their SUV’s and their children rarely seem to venture outside.

The builders made no attempt to blend these McMansions into the hills or woods, and they absolutely are discordant and ugly next to our older street. They even war with each other.

NJ, like California, has its own unique ugliness that is built upon the eroding sands of American civilization. These homes are dependent on cheap gas, fear of crime, living in a virtual computerland with plasma screen TV’s and $49 Home Depot chandeliers. They are utterly uninterested in their surroundings and could have been dropped into this site by flying saucers.

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This section of North Hollywood,on LaMaida between Bellflower and Lankershim, has long been a beautiful garden spot in a tentative and fragile area. Artists, actors, older people, African Americans, and recovering alcoholics share homes along these streets that have also been home to such luminaries as Carol Burnett and the late actress Agnes Moorehead.

Shockingly, these historic properties, that would fetch millions in Carthay Circle or West Hollywood, are to be razed and replaced with Levantine designed-stucco condominiums. Gardens, Spanish tile roofs, backyards and the grace of the silent film era will be no more.

North Hollywood is in the midst of one of its periodic construction booms, but tragically it never gains anything tangible as developers jam spec junk onto the crowded streets. Neighbors no longer know one another, and the only winners are the banks and the developers. Parking garages will now line a sidewalk where children once rode bikes.

Photos: California Digital Library

These are aerial images of Anaheim, CA taken from 1959-1966. They show the onslaught of sprawl in the form of freeways, huge asphalt parking lots and decentralized shopping malls. By 1966, there was only a tiny strip of orange groves remaining in this area of Orange County. Are there any orange groves left today?

What is seen in this images is so famliar to us. Yet to ponder what we live in is quite disturbing. Does anyone look at this and rejoice? Maybe statisticians and economists who throw out words like, “This Christmas, sales were up 2% at Wal-Mart”. The rest of us live in the real world of sitting in traffic on the freeway, fighting and honking in the parking lot and spending odious amounts of time “shopping” for what we don’t need. In the land that nature blessed with eternal sunshine, we rarely spend time within nature.

What if there were tax breaks given to municipalities who CREATED AGRICULTURAL AREAS? We have ratables for retail stores and write-offs for SUV’s, so why not make the creation of orange groves a tax deductible expense? We could rip up those thousands of acres of parking lots in defunct and declining malls and rebuild some of the citrus lands we have lost in the last 50 years.

Does anyone imagine this possibility? Is man in control of his environment or do we passively accept that time must degrade our surroundings? Why can’t we step outside the box and think?

Why are the most heroic Americans often the greatest squinters? What distant object are they focusing on? Is it the hostile Cherokee coming over the hill? Is it the dust blowing off the Kansas soil? Is it the midday sun over the Rio Grande? Are their eyes half closed in grittty dust or in alert action?

Why do Bill O’Reilly, George Bush, Frank Sinatra, Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Ronald Reagan, and Heath Ledger squint? What truths are they filtering out? Do they squint to save their souls?

Other nations venerate their thinkers, poets, generals, inventors, teachers, singers and martyrs. We lionize the squinter. Can anyone tell me why?

The loss of Studio City Camera, after 62 years in business, means that this fine section of Los Angeles will be missing a knowlegeable, intelligent and family owned shop.

The sign that has hung on this building since 1944 is unique. It defines the center of Studio City in a way that immediately communicates both the character and history of the area and the store itself. Here is a place where those who live and work in a “Studio” can also buy that machine which gave birth to the movie industry itself: the camera.

The typefaces used in the sign are both curvaceous and linear. A mix of the feminine and the masculine, the creative and the technical. The green background, shaped like a painter’s palette, flatters the customer with artistic suggestion. Studio City Camera was also an art store. The electronic flashbulb is eye catching and witty.

If this store’s closing means that the sign will be taken down, the entire area will lose its public face. This is a historic piece of art that must be preserved. The rest of Ventura Boulevard is a sea of plastic junk signs.

Across Ventura Boulevard, Mexicali and Lucky Brand have discreet neon signage that would have been appropriate in the 1940’s. But they lack the geographic specificity and creative eccentricity that so defined “Studio City Camera” and its magnificent sign.