On September 2, 1961 Jay Ward productions installed a large statue in front of their office on Sunset Blvd. The statue was of their animated stars Rocky and Bullwinkle. The statues stood on the property in front of their Sunset Blvd offices until this week when it was removed. Rocky and Bullwinkle were damaged and the current owners of the building were not able to flip the bill for the repairs to the 15 foot tall statue of the Moose and Squirrel. Dreamworks, who owns the rights to the Rocky and Bullwinkle characters now have the statue and plan to restore it. It is not know if it will return to its Sunset Blvd. home when repaired.
Los Angeles has a lot of museums and many of them are quite small and obscure. One of the oddest is The Forest Lawn Museum. This is a museum in a cemetery. It is not a museum about cemeteries it is an art museum. Forest Lawn is on a hill in Glendale and was the first of its kind. There are almost no grave stones but flat markers. The founder Hubert Eaton thought traditional grave yards with memorial sculpture to be depressing and wanted a cemetery that looked like a park. On top of one of the many hills that make up the property is a large chapel and attached to it is Forest Lawn Museum.
The permanent collections include the largest stained glass collection in the US and a huge western bronze collection. In the permanent collection are also art representing the peoples around the world and includes a maoi from Easter Island. There is a rather large room that serves as an exhibition space for varying shows. Past shows have included solo exhibitons of Matisse, Goya and Rembrandt.
The museum is well worth the trip as Forest Lawn itself is beautiful and its museum is a hidden gem.
David (Dave) Gold the founder of "99 Cents Only" stores has died at the age of 80. Dave Gold had a heart attack at his Mid-Whilsire district home in Los Angeles. Gold got the idea for the 99 cent stores while running a liquor store. "When I put a .99 cent sign on anything, it was gone in no time. I realized it was a magic number. He opened his .99 Cents Only stores in 1982. The chain now has over 300 stores. A friend suggested that he open a store that all the merchandise was priced at .99cents. To create publicity for the store's opening he sold televisions for .99 cents and had members of his family call local television stations to ask what all the commotion was at the store. His publicity ploy was a coup! To this day the first 9 customers of the day get anything they buy for .99 cents as in 2008 prices did go up and are advertised as .99from to $99.99. Long known for Gold's sense of humor the business advertises it self as being opened 9 days a week. They celebrated 99th birthdays of celebrities and once congratulated Joan Rivers on her 99th face lift.
Dave Gold and his wife Shelly of 55 years still lived in their middle class home of 50 years. Along with Dave, Shelly and their three children have all worked at the stores. The company was sold and the Golds no longer have anything do to with the company as of January of 2013.
Dave Gold created a billion dollar empire .99 cents at a time.
Tucked in between two nondescript buildings on Whittier Blvd. in East Los Angeles is a building known as The Tamale because it was built to look like one. It is one of the rapidly disappearing pieces of Programmatic Architecture. Whittier Blvd was once lined with buildings shaped like oil cans and air planes but they are long gone leaving just the old tamale
The Tamale was built in the 1920's to house a restaurant that served you guessed it tamales. The building right now houses a hair salon but still looks like a tamale. Because the tamale is in an unincorporated section of Los Angeles it is not covered by the architectural preservation laws now in force. The building and a separate building containing a two bedroom house on the property is up for sale and unfortunately is what is known in LA as a tear down. Unless some ponies up the $459,000 needed to save the building The Tamale could be no more. It will have gone the way of the "Tail o' the Pup" and "The Brown Derby".
Once upon a time before there was Hollywood there was a thriving idiosyncratic neighborhood in Los Angeles called Edendale. Edendale hugged the hills along Sunset Blvd. Narrow curved streets followed the contours of the hills abruptly ending and then starting up again when the hills became to steep. In the flatter areas small farms grew vegetables and citrus. Serviced by the Red Car streetcar system Edendale was a short commute to Downtown Los Angeles. It was an idyllic enclave populated by immigrants from the east coast and Europe looking to start a new life in California. Before World War II Edendale was a thriving artist colony and American communist stronghold. It was also because of this attitude and the climate the fledgling movie industry immigrated there at the turn of the century. The silent era was Edendale's film industry's heyday. In 1911 the early film trade magazine gushed over Edendale saying: "Edendale...is a very beautiful suburb of Los Angeles. It is the motion picture center of the Pacific Coast. With clear air and sunshine three hundred days out of the year, conditions are ideal for perfect picture making. The scenic advantages of the location, too, are unique. From [Edendale] can be seen the Pacific Ocean, twenty-two miles to the west, and the broad panorama of Southern California, with its fruit and stock ranches, its snow capped mountains and its tropical vegetation, to the east, north and south. Within a short distance of Edendale may be found every known variety of national scenery, seemingly arranged by a master producer expressly for the motion picture camera."
The quiet and busy streets, the hills and lakes, and the sunshine were custom made for the early film industry. In 1909 a film company from Chicago called Selig-Polyscope opened the first permanent studio in Edendale. Later that year New York Motion Picture company opened their studio in Edendale and started making westerns under the name Bison Pictures. Mack Sennett moved his studio to what was mainly a vacant lot and started making his Keystone Comedies. His Keystone Cops movies were shot on the streets on Edendale.It was in Edendale that the first filmed pie in the face scene was shot. The Sennett Bathing Beauties pranced around nearby lakes and included such future stars as Gloria Swanson and Carol Lombard. Both Fatty Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin's careers started at Keystone. Sennett's biggest star in the silent era was Mabel Normand. She too built herself a studio right around the corner from Sennett's.
By the 1920's there were several studios pumping out movies in Edendale. William Fox started his Fox Studio's there. His early films included Cleopatra with Theda Bara. Tom Mix the colorful cowboy star built his Mixville Studio nearby. Norbig Studios opened as a rental space and directors like Hal Roach directed the early Harold Lloyd comedies on this lot.
Edendale was densely built and when the studios need more room to expand they weren't able to find the land they needed. They moved down Prospect Ave that had now been re-named Hollywood Blvd. and found the land they needed in the little village of Hollywood.
When the freeway system was built in Los Angles Edendale was dissected and eventually dissolved and became the neighborhoods of Los Feliz, Silverlake and Echo Park. There are still reminders of Edendale in tact, the post office and a library still have the name Edendale.
There is a ghost town in LA, really there is. LA being LA it is a ghost beach town. Surfridge is the town and it is real. Founded in 1921 by developers Dickinson & Gillespie Co. Surfridge was the southern part of an area known as Playa del Rey it was originally called Palisades del Rey. The area became popular with beach lovers and celebrities like Cecil B. DeMille and his older brother William de Mille. Mel Blanc also called Surfridge home.
Surfridge is no more and it is all the fault of its proximity to LAX. During the 60's and 70's the rise in popularity of jumbo jets and their jumbo noise was the nail in the coffin for Surfridge. The airport through eminent domain bought up all the houses and land displacing the residents. The houses that weren't moved were torn down. All that is left of Surfridge now are the streets and street lighting. Yes street lighting is still there and for one reason or another still comes on at night!
The retired Space Shuttle is about to become Los Angeles' newest star attraction. The California Science Center in Exposition Park will be it new home. Los Angeles being the entertainment capital is not letting come in quietly. On September 20th the Endeavor will fly over the city landing at LAX. On August 25th NASA sent a jet on a recon mission over the city looking for the best place to photo the event. The jets flew very fast and very low a dry run for the Endeavor's arrival in September. The shuttle will stay at LAX until October 13th when the Endeavor will travel on surface streets
approximately 12 miles. Half way to the final destination the Endeavor will stop for a bit on Crenshaw Blvd. While it is stopped the will be a "Half-Time" show choreographed by Debbie Allen. It really doesn't get more Hollywood than that. Then, the shall we call it parade will continue onto to Exposition Park and the California Science Center.
