Tag: Links

Friday Night Chrome.

Posted in CultureTagged , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The chrome, metal, motor and wheels crowd gathered at Bob’s Big Boy, as they do every Friday night, to partake of a parking lot full of old restored cars.

One old man had an old crank shaft Model T and was showing a crowd how to turn the engine on.

There was a very long purple Cadillac, and more than the usual collection of mid 1960s Chevys.

Fifty-two Fridays a year, vintage autos and their lovers gather here; even as we fall deeper into the 21st Century, our hearts are stuck in place in a country and century that no longer exists.

1950s Traffic Accident on San Vicente, Los Angeles, CA.

Posted in HistoryTagged , , , , , 1 Comment

From the whimsical collection of Shorpy, I found this 1950s photograph of a car, on San Vicente, which hit a light pole.

Most likely, the driver was not texting while driving.

OSH Appliance Department Closing.

Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , 2 Comments

About a year ago, when Americans imagined the economy was rebounding, Orchard Supply Hardware (OSH) on Sepulveda (and in other locations) opened an appliance department where $1200 washing machines and $1500 refrigerators would allegedly be snapped up by those cash rich Van Nuys residents whose homes had lost 50% of their value. Chirpy long haired dudes were hired to push the appliances on hair tinted matrons.  It was an experiment in marketing and selling expensive and big-ticket items.

Now the department is closing.

Which is not surprising considering that on any weekday, there are middle-aged men and women, in their prime working years, walking around the aisles of OSH; men and women who should be earning salaries , but instead, spend their day caulking their sinks and fixing their toilet flush mechanisms.

OSH is a good place, a much friendlier and much easier place to shop than the dust filled Home Depot with its armies of illegals climbing the fences. The staff is helpful and the layout is easily navigable.

But no company is an island. OSH cannot sell what people cannot afford to buy in a neighborhood where even a broom is considered a luxury item.

And to paraphrase Lincoln,  we are engaged in a great economic civil war, testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. And I believe this nation cannot endure, permanently 90% poor and 10% rich.

A Quiet Day, a Peaceful Day.

Posted in Links, TransportationTagged , , , , , Leave a comment

Ghost Freeway, originally uploaded by anosmicovni.

For a few months now, it had been broadcast, far and wide, over the airwaves and through airy heads, that Los Angeles would be vehicularly incapacitated by the partial destruction of a tall bridge over a wide freeway occurring on a long weekend.

For surely the closure of THE 405 was truly a great emergency, predicted as cataclysmic by experts who described it in cinematic destructiveness, coined with a biblical neologism, Carmaggedon.

So into action the officials sprang, as politicians, Caltrans, LAPD, LAFD and all the fat men who sit inside the city council chambers, urged the motoring public to forestall leaving home and let the great emergency Passover.

And Saturday, June 16, 2011 was a quiet day, a peaceful day. The deafening roar of 500,000 cars stopped. And one stepped out of the house and into the dry, hot, windy air of Van Nuys and beheld a gentler, kinder, slower, less crowded city.

The skies and sounds reminded me of the days after September 11, 2001. I had been working on Radford Street in Studio City, and came out of an office on Valleyheart Drive, and looked up into the sky and saw or heard not a single jet plane flying above. The serenity of Los Angeles, without aerial assault by plane, was mesmerizing ten years ago. And absent automobiles it mesmerized me yesterday.

Civic spirit, civic pride, civic engagement, Los Angeles has all the collective civic energy of a desert mausoleum. In this town, as some call it, the idea that the greater good matters, that people might come together for a single day, and make a success of it, seemed impossible.

And though some were dubious, they stayed home in Westwood and didn’t drive their SUV to Encino to meet for baklava. Survivors of the purges of the Shah, who know what sacrifice means, took a day off from shopping and driving. And those who didn’t surf on the beach Saturday, or drive to eat sushi in Studio City, those heroic citizens deserve our applause and appreciation.

Yesterday, many stayed home and many didn’t drive, and in those neighborhoods where discarded mattresses sit in front of buildings where homeless people push shopping carts, and earn money recycling plastic, and some defecate on the sidewalk in broad daylight; where millions are undocumented, and thousands are poorly educated, where health care is withheld and violence administered; along those broad, sun-baked, lifeless, treeless, billboard-infested blocks and garbage littered curbs, the people obeyed and the politicians praised, and something so very minor and so very unimportant stood in the historical record as a great culmination of achievement in the City of Angels.

War Costs Money. Our Money.

Posted in PoliticsTagged , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Where were all these geniuses when the US first invaded Iraq, and later Afghanistan? All these wars and all the spending overseas, not to mention weapons expended on such wonderful allies as Pakistan, is directly visible in the deplorable condition of American infrastructure.

Here in Southern California we have a substandard school system, bursting water pipes, pot-holed pavement, bankrupt police and fire departments, cutbacks in every type of poverty aid; cities who are laying off park, sanitation, and medical personnel; and a public transport system which would be fine in a city of 4,000 people.

And we don’t have glorious public parks, efficient and clean streets; underground electrical, or well-patrolled and safe neighborhoods.

If you take a Google Street View of any street in Denmark, Finland, France, Sweden, Germany or Italy and compare it to many sections of Los Angles, you will have a real life story of how our nation is literally decaying and dying and how our leaders continue to pour money into useless and self-defeating war that is bankrupting us financially and morally.

Go to Google Street view and compare bombed out Dresden, Germany in 2011 to the victorious San Fernando Valley or Detroit, Michigan and see how the US treats its own.

1956: Construction of the San Diego Freeway

Posted in HistoryTagged , , , , , Leave a comment

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

In 2011, we are living amidst a big construction project on the San Diego Freeway which will add new lanes and which has also torn up vast sections of Westwood near Wilshire and Sunset along Sepulveda.

The USC Digital Archives has photographs of the 1956 beginnings of the San Diego Freeway, when bulldozers and explosives tore through the Sepulveda Pass and made it possible to eventually travel the nine miles from Encino to Westwood in less than two hours.