Around the second weekend in February, here in Southern California, from 2016 to 2021, from the archives –
Spaced Out (39 images): Sometimes Hollywood seems totally alien. Perhaps that’s intentional. Sunset and Vine, Monday, February 8, 2016
A Little Bit French (34 images): Franklin Village on the east side of Hollywood is a quiet little neighborhood that’s oddly French. It’s not just the row of funky little French restaurants. It’s the classy Claridge Hollywood – in 1934, Charlie Chaplin commissioned European craftsmen to build him this very French looking project, after staying at the Hotel Claridge Paris on a honeymoon. To the left is the massive French-Norman Chateau Elysee – 1927, by architect Arthur E. Harvey – built for Elinor “Nell” Kershaw, the widow of Thomas Ince, the man who invented the Hollywood studio system back in the silent days. It was the place to see and be seen in the twenties and thirties, but now it’s the Scientology Celebrity Center. The spooky abandoned building across the street is the 1926 Villa Carlotta Apartments. That was Nell Kershaw’s first project on the street, and Italianate, not French. Maybe that’s why it failed. It’s a strange little neighborhood. ~ Tuesday, February 9, 2016
Basic Winter Light (31 images): The only subject matter is the light. Out here, in the winter, that’s enough. ~ Wednesday, February 10, 2016
Intensely Chinese (34 images): The new cultural center of the Southern California Teo-Chew Association at 649 North Broadway in Chinatown – ready to open. The Teo-Chew are Han Chinese people native to the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong province in southern China, who speak their own Teochew dialect, and now most Teochew people live outside China in Southeast Asia – in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia, and here in the United States. The civil wars during the Jin Dynasty were a bit much for them – but now they see themselves as the “real” Chinese, in exile, the cultural elite. Perhaps this building proves that. ~ Friday, February 12, 2016
Down Dark Alleys (32 images): Los Angeles turned dark – days and days of rain. No one has seen this for years, and now there are strange creatures in the alleys. ~ Tuesday, February 7, 2017
Eyeing the Colors (30 images): Winter can be drab, even in Los Angeles, but not in the streets. The street artists take care of that. The colors pop. ~ Wednesday, February 7, 2018
Photogenic Transition (40 images): The House of Blues on the Sunset Strip is now a large hole in the ground, with an impressive crane – another new chic hotel on the way – or luxury condos or something. The Sunset Strip is always in transition – but that only makes it more photogenic. Change is photogenic. ~ Monday, February 12, 2018
The Quiet Edge (30 images): The quiet edge of Hollywood is Griffith Park – the escape from the nonsense – the old neoclassical observatory up top and mysterious Fern Dell hidden below. The nonsense of Hollywood Boulevard isn’t far away, but it seems far away on a winter afternoon. ~ Tuesday, February 13, 2018
Bathed in Light (40 images): There’s no subject matter here, unless the subject is light – the winter light down Museum Row, Wilshire Boulevard at Fairfax. That’s enough. The light is enough. ~ Wednesday, February 14, 2018
Surrounded (38 images): The new Hollywood surrounds Old Hollywood. New pastel condos and the sleek W Hotel now surround the old Pantages Theater. The soul of Hollywood is leaving. ~ Friday, February 8, 2019
A Bit of Everything (40 images): Fairfax and Beverly – on one corner it’s the abandoned Fairfax Regency Theater– continually enhanced by the local street artists – but this is Raoul Wallenberg Square so he’s across the street on another comer, extending his hand. And on a third corner it’s that Spanish dancer and all the flowers – and a row of oddly geometric buildings. CBS Television City is on the fourth corner. That’s where every game show on television is taped and home to “Real Time with Bill Maher” and whatnot. There’s a bit of everything on this corner. ~ Monday, February 11, 2019
Heavenly Darkness (25 images): Los Angeles is having a wet winter – days and days of heavy rain – but the ducks at Heavenly Pond, up in the Franklin Hills, find that just heavenly. They’re happy. ~ Thursday, February 14, 2019
The Bounce (40 images): This is the light bouncing around Hollywood on a bright winter afternoon, from one odd building to the next, from Hollywood and Vine down to Sunset and Vine. That was the day’s entertainment, better than all the movies. ~ Monday, February 10, 2020
Fountain of Light (35 images): You know. California. Winter. And this is Echo Park Lake, where the winter light on the water is dazzling. Long ago, in 1974, when he lived just down the street, Jackson Browne wrote that song – “Fountain of sorrow, fountain of light / You’ve known that hollow sound of your own steps in flight / You’ve had to struggle, you’ve had to fight / To keep understanding and compassion in sight / You could be laughing at me, you’ve got the right / But you go on smiling so clear and so bright…” That may have been about Joni Mitchell. Or maybe it was an ode to Echo Park. ~ Tuesday, February 11, 2020
Munchkins (40 images): The Culver Hotel – Curlett and Beelman, architects – opened in 1924, the brainchild of city’s founder, Harry Culver. Curlett and Beelman also designed the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard for Louis B. Mayer, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Sid Grauman. The first Academy Awards were handed out there in 1927, but the Culver Hotel has its own history. It was central in Laurel and Hardy shorts like “Putting Pants on Philip” (1927) and in many of the Our Gang shorts that Hal Roach churned out, and Red Skelton, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Ronald Reagan maintained part-time residences here. But it’s most famous because short people stayed here – it was the home of the small actors and actresses who played the “Munchkins” when The Wizard of Oz was being filmed a few blocks west at MGM in the late thirties. Later, the hotel was owned by John Wayne, who eventually donated it to the Los Angeles YMCA. It was repurchased and restored in the nineties, and became a hotel again. It’s perfect now, and now the Cowardly Lion dances is his fountain in the plaza, forever. He’s ignoring the severe Art Deco across the way. That’s the “new” Culver City. ~ Thursday, February 13, 2020
Art Walls (40 images): There’s art on walls and walls as art all along Sunset Boulevard. Sometimes there’s no difference. This is the odd stretch of Sunset between Hollywood and the Sunset Strip. There’s not much here, but there’s everything here. ~ Friday, February 14, 2020
Bauhaus Blues (40 images): The Beverly Hills Media Center, 100 North Crescent Drive at Wilshire Boulevard, an old office building, was transformed by the architectural firm Gensler (M. Arthur Gensler Jr. & Associates, Inc.) – because everybody needs a bit of Bauhaus now and then. Bauhaus was that German art school, founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919, that gave the world the Bauhaus style in modern design and Modernist architecture. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe took over the school in 1930, and that’s what this is about, streamlined highly geometric architecture. It never gets old. ~ Monday, February 8, 2021
Morning Coffee (40 images): A man sitting on the fire escape at a transient hotel on Sunset Boulevard at Bronson, nursing his morning coffee on a cold winter morning. Life may be hard. But the view is good. ~ Tuesday, February 9, 2021
Route 66 Neon (40 images): Santa Monica Boulevard at the bottom of the hill is also “Historic Route 66” – the last of it before it ends out at the Santa Monica Pier. Here, in West Hollywood, it has neon. ~ Thursday, February 11, 2021
Hill Street Blues (45 images): Suddenly, in the eighties, gritty neorealism was hot. Hill Street Blues was the hot television show – cops and robbers with multiple layers of moral ambiguity in an unnamed fictional city that looked like a quite real inner city, a place where nothing is easy. Let’s be careful out there. Most of the location shooting was done here in Los Angeles, but not on our Hill Street. This is South Hill Street in downtown Los Angeles. It’s not gritty at all. It’s pretty cool. ~ Friday, February 12, 2021
Just Above Sunset 