Monthly Archives: October 2017

The Lankershim-Van Nuys plot. The famous “Two Ikes”, were father- and son-in-law, and between them owned most of the San Fernando Valley. Lankershim’s farm in the 1870′s pioneered (organic!) dry wheat farming for export on an industrial scale – think mechanical combines pulled by twenty-mule teams across hundreds of acres. Now the family that made the Valley bloom with fruit and helped it to gush with water feeding a million lush gardens for generations, lies encased in the same parched brown lifeless California hardpack that they started out with. Ozymandias, indeed.

One of the many amazing wounded angels in Evergreen Cemetery. With his heroic beauty and severed right hand, the statue strikingly recalls the legend of Tiw, the Old English god who tricked Fenris Ulf into a magic collar by pledging his right hand, placed between the beast’s jaws. The gods sprang the trap and collared the monster, but not without the sacrifice of Tiw’s lost hand.

There’s a Judson Street in Prospect Park in East L.A.

Happy Halloween from the Spookiest Cemetery in Los Angeles….the ironically named, once grand, now grim Evergreen, out in East L.A. The city’s most historic Protestant cemetery is the resting place for many of the great pioneer Yankee famiiies (Temple, Workman, Hollenbeck, Bixby, Lankershim, Van Nuys). Their colorful lives, their stunning achievements in settling and building the city, their wily genius for developing modern agriculture and industry, even their staggering wealth and sheer historical importance couldn’t secure dignified memorials maintained for more than a few generations. Privately owned, this business is an insult to common human dignity and is the best argument I’ve ever seen for public ownership of public antiquities. All of Los Angeles is disgraced and dishonored by the condition of this slum of a graveyard.