Dingbats! Dingbats! Dingbats!

If you've lived in in Los Angeles, you've seen dingbats.  They're those boxy apartments that sprang up the 1950s and 1960s.   You know the ones:  Stucco blocks held up on poles (or walls) so you can park under them.   Some are plain, but many are adorned with garish details- glittery tile, funky sconces, and often a name splashed across the front.
These names always suggested something far different than "Standard Issue Boxy Dwelling:"

The Capri!
The Monte Carlo!
Camelot!
Kona Kai!
The Argyle!
The Stardust!

Some great (and ugly, and so-tacky-they're-wonderful) examples can be seen here, here and here.
And to think when  I was a kid I thought all apartments looked like this. 

Stay off the Grass, ya Black Dahlia Sillies!

"Please stay off the lawn," the tour guides said. "In fact, stay off the sidewalk. And please don't do what someone did, the first time we gave this tour, and lie on the grass.
We stood in a nice suburban neighborhood. You'd never guess anything ugly  had occurred 64 years earlier.
I was on Esotouric's  The Real Black Dahlia  tour, visiting  locations associated  with  one of the one of Los Angeles's most infamous unsolved murders. 
The guides tactfully steered us just south of the where the body (which was cut in two) was found in 1947.  I think they wanted to point out the location without having us stomp all over someone's property, as it lies on what is now someone's front lawn, right next to the sidewalk.
Later I did some Google searching and discovered some visitors (and there are plenty) aren't so thoughtful.  The case has a cult following and some people have spread out on the grass and posed for pictures.  What the hell!?

 

I wonder how often it happens?  What's it like to live there*?  Do the residents get mail addressed to the victim?  Do people leave flowers and plush toys?  Do crazy people knock on the door and ramble on about the case?
Does the scene below ever happen?:

If this were my lawn, it would happen.
Or maybe I'd just charge each weirdo five bucks per photo.

*The house was built about nine years after the body was found.   Rumor has it that the builder (or original owner) was obsessed with the case, if not personally involved, which I find hard to believe.  Looks like a regular tract house to me. 

L.A.: The Good, the Bad & the Smoggy

What I like and dislike about my hometown, Los Angeles:

Good:
More diverse than E-bay!
Cool sounding names like "Cuhanga" and "Topanga!"
Neon!
Funky goofy shops, cafes, galleries.
Googie!
Big Donuts!
Hollywood!
Disneyland! (ok, it's one county over)
Bungalows!


Could be Better:
Traffic. Words Fail.
Sprawl- Everything's spread out- it can take two hours or more to get from one end of town to the other.
Public Transportation (better in Santa Monica and Culver city).
Older architecture, even famous places, typically razed instead of preserved.
Earthquakes (though I'd rather shovel my apartment every 10 years than shovel snow all winter).
Trees and shrubs typically the color of Hefty Bags.
That concert hall* looks like wreckage.
No cardinals.**


*Normally I like goofy buildings, but this one has a cold, aloof vibe. Each time I see it I get flashbacks of getting cut on the jagged lid of a can. It looks somewhat better at night.
**They were introduced here but I've never seen one!

Octopus Crackers

About 12 years ago, an octopus at a local aquarium created a flap.
Her name, Octavia
"She shouldn't confined to a tank!,"animal rights protesters said. "Octopuses are sensitive, intelligent, compassionate creatures! Free Octavia!"
Octopuses are intelligent- at least enough to solve problems and get into mischief. But I have a hard time buying the concept of an octopus tapping his tentacles and contemplating his imprisonment. If anything, they like to snuggle up in a secure nook when they're not hunting. Compassionate? Get outta here. They eat each other.
At the height of the controversy, Octavia pulled the plug on her tank. It happened at night, so there was nobody around to stop the drainage. When the aquarium reopened the next morning, it was too late. She was octopus jerky.
The activists blamed the aquarium, suggesting that the creature did this on purpose to end her tragic life.
They held a candlelight vigil in her honor.
People are nuts.

Freezer Burn

That's not dust on my windsheild, that's ice.
Los Angeles isn't supposed to get this cold. This was the wrong morning to accidently hose water up my sleeve when I filled the bird bath.

60 years ago today: The Black Dalhia...

author's note: post was written in 2007
January 15th, 1947, Los Angeles.
Her body was discovered in a vacant lot, right next to the sidewalk..  She'd been cut in two at the waist and was posed with spread legs and her arms raised behind her head  Her mouth was slashed.  There was no blood- apparently the killer had drained it elsewhere.
Here's a then and now pic of the crime scene .


The victim was Elizabeth Short, 22..  .Popular lore depicts her as a would-be actress or model, but it's likely that's a bunch of  "Lure of  Hollywood Stardom Destroys the Innocent" nonsense.   I'm not sure what she wanted to be.  Maybe she didn't either.  She tended to drift from place to place- a few weeks with one friend, a few weeks sharing a room with other girls, a day or two mooching off a kind stranger, etc.  Except one stranger, or perhaps "friend," wasn't so nice.

The press  named her "The Black Dahlia" (her nickname). Rumors spread. One suggested she was a prostitute (she wasn't).
The murder was never solved.
Like the Jack-the-Ripper case, theories pinned the crime on mad doctors, vindictive women and famous people. Every few years a new book roles in about who "really" killed her.

A list of  (paraphrased) titles includes:

• My Dad Did it!
• No, my Dad Did it!
  
• A Creepy Guy did it but Whoops, the Evidence Burned up.
• A Famous Celebrity Did it.
• A Famous Rich guy and a Famous Mobster Did it.
• A Surrealist Artist did it. Surrealists have People in Pieces, Right?
  

I think it was some unknown creep with a vicious streak.
Her killer wasn't the only one to exploit her. She's inspired in books, movies, video games, and remarkably bad folk art.  On eBay I saw a snowglobe of the crime scene (no, I didn't buy it). 
Wait a second- I'm blogging about her. I guess I'm guilty too. Whoops.  Sorry.

Notes- photo of Short has been artificially colored.  All three photos have been snagged separately from the internet, so I can't promise they haven't been tampered with.  I included the Wikipedia link for a general overview, but remember this is wikipedia, so its vulnerable to any mistakes (or pranks) from its collaborators...

Happy Quakeversery

I took this pic on a flight from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. It's where the San Bernardino Mountains meet the desert. Note how linier the boundery is. That's because the San Andreas Fault devides the two.
150 years ago this month, it ripped itself a new one. Known as the Fort Tejon Quake, it measured 7.9 to 8 on the Richter scale and may have been more powerful than the 1906 San Fransisco shake up. Centered in cenral California, it cracked the ground for 200 miles. Rivers slid off course (in one case, backwards). Waves threw fish from lakes. Trees uprooted. Near the epicenter the fault moved thirty feet.
The death count? Only two (known). Almost nobody lived near the epicenter. In 1857 it was the middle of nowhere. The few who did live nearby had bizarre stories to tell.
Lots of people live in the danger area now. Parkfield, Wrightwood, Palmdale and possibly San Bernardino are in for a beating if that quake repeats itself. And I can't be to smug- the southern leg of the San Andreas (including this picture) hasn't jumped for centuries. Plus, like a crime boss, it has a network of underlings running through Los Angeles to help wreak the place.
Excuse me while I put on my crash helmet.

Crime and Scary Water

A friend and I went hiking (sorta) at a Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area. It was spookier than a ghost town graveyard. Local signage depicted happy families frolicking in the grass, but no one was there. The birds (if there were any) were silent. No sound except the ambient clank of the oil pumps on a distant hill.
We finally found others at the lake (which stood behind a sign saying it was "closed"). Maybe the odor had something to do with the closure. I'll bet there's more dead things in there than in the La Brea Tar Pits.

The lake isn't the first scary body of water in the area. In the fifties a large reservoir stood just to the east. Nobody concluded that building a reservoir on an earthquake fault might be a bad idea. Nearby oil drilling made the land even more unstable. In 1963 the reservoir cracked open, pouring a 50 foot wave into the neighborhood below. Five people were killed and 277 houses were destroyed.
Here's a pic:



The former reservoir is now part of the empty, creepy park. You can still see a slight depression at where it was. Also note that most of the "spill area" was never rebuilt.


Back at my end of the park, I saw this sign:

Huh?
Does anyone really think some would-be criminal sees it and thinks, Hey, it's an anti-crime zone! I guess I'll have to do my dirtywork somewhere else.

I feel so much safer with that sign. Was it erected by a descendant of the dopes who built the reservoir? Will they "protect" the area from future calamity with a sign like this?

Tail o' the Dead Guys at Amusement Parks (a.k.a. that's Not Chicken Wire!)

When I was a little girl a friend told me someone got killed at Disneyland*. That was blasphemy. Dead People? At Disneyland?
I ran home and asked my Mom if it was true. No, she told me, then she added that recently a dead body was found in a nearby funhouse. It wasn't hidden or anything- it was part of the display. That made me feel much better. Stuff in a funhouse could be real? Even the paper- mache stuff was freaky... and now I had to be on the alert for dead bodies!?
What freaked me out as a kid intrigued me as an adult. How does a dead guy get himself into a funhouse?
Here's the story.
There used to be an amusement park Long Beach called Nu-Pike. Their spookhouse ride, Laff in the Dark, was where the body was discovered.

People were shooting an episode of a T.V. show there. One of the workers noticed something weird about a cowboy prop hanging on a noose.
Namowal's hacky rendition
Naked except for a thick coat of orange paint, it had autopsy stitches. And it was anatomically correct. Its hands modestly hid most of its private parts, so someone moved them aside to see if it really had what seemed to have. The arm broke loose and guess what? It was anatomically correct on the inside too. Ya know, bones...
They shipped him off to the coroner. Authorities concluded he was Elmer McCurdy. In life he'd been a blundering outlaw who was shot dead in Oklahoma in 1910. He was embalmed and went on a carnival peep show tour. Before the internet blew in you had to pay money if you wanted to see an infamous dead guy.
As decades rolled by he changed owners a few times. By the seventies he was so shrunken and paint-glazed that he could pass for a paper mache... if you didn't look closely. His Nu-Pike owners thought he was a dummy when they strung him up. After he went to the coroner they hinted that they'd like him back, but didn't get their wish. Elmer was shipped back to Oklahoma and buried. **


Last week I found about the history of my favorite ride at Disneyland, Pirates of the Caribbean. It included this bit of trivia: in the early days, the skeletons were real.
No funny mix ups here- they wanted realistic props. Pretend skeletons looked fake. So they snagged some medical specimens and put them to work. In other words, dead people. On a ride. At Disneyland. As a little kid I floated by them each year, oblivious to their true nature.
The book added that the real bones were replaced long ago and given the obligatory "proper burial". That's no fun. I'd rather have my bones dressed up in pirate garb in a ride as opposed to being thrown in a hole. But that's me.

*yes, this happens, but it's rare

**(Elmer's story is chronicled in depth in this book: Elmer McCurdy: The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw by mark Svenvold)

Ghost of the Pink Lady

Malibu canyon is haunted. In 1966 a woman was rubbed out at an early age. Her ghost is still there.
Here's what happened. Grafitii covered the rocks over a tunnel on Malibu Canyon Road. A local artist thought it was ugly. She cleaned it up and painted a 60 foot high woman. Local authorities weren't impressed (probably something to do with the subject being nude). Within days she was blotted out with brown paint. Local authorities are no fun.

Here's what she looked like in her glory days:


She's considered long gone, but you can still see her "ghost" if you know where to look.
Perhaps it's traces of the original paint, but what kind of paint lasts 40 years? More likely, the paint they covered her with has protected that section of rock long enough for it to erode at a different pace.
Here is a contemporary photo, scaled in photoshop to line up with the cracks in the rocks.
She seems to be wearing the shrowd of paint they covered her with. Can you find her?


How about now?
Here's the rock part of the original photo superimposed over the modern one.