Tag Archives: murals

Downtown L.A. Forecast: Rain, Coronavirus, More Tear-Downs

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TRIGGER ALERT: ‘#CYNICAL’ SKIP TO VIEWING PHOTOS FOR THE CAKE AND ICE CREAM

It may be only a short time yet before riding Metro becomes foolhardy. (If quarantines get like they are in Europe, it might become impossible.) Plus, we’ve got storms coming this week… winter storms reliably increase local infections, and turn the whole of Metro into a hobo jungle. Who could give the homeless a shred of blame for their squalor? With society trapped in an abysmal spiral of human catastrophe, run by billion-airheads and ignored by checked-out consumers, Metro and the public libraries are the only sick-room/shelter the folks living rough have got. Noting their lack of proper health care (easy to note, since I share it) I imagine that if the weather doesn’t warm up soon, there must be a crushing, Medieval death toll among the hapless, sitting-duck homeless population of Los Angeles — and anyone who has to ride Metro with them.

SO, Patient Reader, since I might not be able to venture Downtown again for a while, I took advantage of the already relatively deserted City today. I hadn’t even realized the LA Marathon had just ended, until I met crowds of flushed, panting athletes getting ON the subway at Pershing Square just as I was getting off!

LEAVING NORTH HOLLYWOOD: NoHo Park lies adjacent to NoHo Station. Distant looms Mt. Cahuenga, at the foot of which is the NEXT subway stop, Universal City. That’s how long the distances are between Metro stops. It’s another dozen stops or more to Downtown, through Hollywood, Los Feliz, Koreatown, and Westlake.

  • I’m not deterred…under the mountain we go! Destination, Angels’ Flight at Pershing Square.
  • Grand Central Market

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Grand Central Market, by giving itself over to high-priced hipster food, kicking out the farmers, attracting white kids and raising the rents on Broadway, killed the entire historic district. Only five years ago it was the bustling, throbbing, Mexican/Chinese shopping and entertainment (movies) district. It was ‘polyglot’ but it was exciting and colorful and certainly made plenty of money; there were fabulous Beaux-Arts shopping arcades and cafeterias, and there was mariachi music playing everywhere and fascinating old legacy businesses, like music shops and expert Italian-import tailors selling ridiculously cheap fine haberdashery. It now appears every building along Broadway, except the market, is vacant on spec of “redevelopment”. Even the homeless seem to stay away now.

  • The rear of the Bradbury Bldg. gives on Biddy Mason Plaza and Monument
  • Historic Downtown. They’ve ALMOST completely destroyed it. Murals are the artists’ last resistance.
  • St. Vibiana’s, the old Catholic cathedral of an old archdiocese
  • Now it’s a private banqueting hall and occasional club space. Seriously.
  • But it’s still here!

FLETCHER BOWRON SQUARE: Alta California’s provincial capital and archives, Government House, once stood here in a fine adobe. So did El Palacio, Abel and Arcadia Stearns’s huge casa adobe; also the city’s first hotel the Bella Union, where the Butterfield Stage stopped. So too, the first LA County buildings. Also the first big commercial “blocks” in the 1870s, Temple Block, Baker Block, etc., London or New York-style Victorian emporia. They grew out of ground-floor adobe saloons which still retained the original dirt floors. These buildings all grew up together and were more or less knocked into each other for 100 years, with floors and wings that served as publishers, wineries, importers, flophouses, opium dens, artist studios. You know, the City. Then it was all torn down — surviving opium dens, Raymond Chandler-esque Victorian boarding-houses and all — in the 1970s….for THIS.

  • The Triforium. Shudder.

I guess it was appropriate to honor Mayor Fletcher Bowron by tearing down the City’s central core, since he was the man who had torn down almost everything else. Progress Bowron, LAX Bowron, Freeway Bowron, Bunker Hill Bowron. I reflect, that great men are drawn to civic office because they are awed by the living City and wish to increase her health and beauty; and small men are drawn to city leadership because they hate and fear the City, which belittles them. They have to prove how high THEY have risen, by pissing on the past and killing what they never could understand. LA has had both kinds of leadership; and it shows. For 150 years, it’s looked like a Promise of Paradise that has been bombed by its own citizens. Okay! We’re walking, we’re walking…

  • Main Street crosses Aliso over the gully that used to hold El Camino Real, but now holds the 101.
  • Yangna was here. Still is, it seems.
  • The Merced Theatre — 1871. Joining San Francisco, the Merced created a circuit, “the Coast”, and the Western branch of the U.S. entertainment industry was born. In the early 20th century it was a drag ball resort.
  • Pico House, the hotel Pio Pico built on the Plaza in 1870 with the proceeds of selling the Valley.
  • A coral tree, LA’s official city tree, blooms in the Plaza.

For years I wondered what they did to the Pico House in the early 80’s that was so damned embarrassing it had to be closed to the pubic forever. Since today the lights had been left on in the abandoned building for some reason, I finally got a chance to take a look. This is what all the best, and best-paid, minds in civic planning, historic preservation, and commercial design, came up in 1981 with when their task was: “preserve LA’s most historic luxury grand hotel and restaurant complex, located on a highly-touristed corner, in the middle of a National Park, on a spot that marks the very center of the City.”

Avila Adobe, in the heart of Olvera Street:

  • View Union Station from the rear garden of Avila Adobe.
  • Turkish rugs and Chinese silks, smuggled through San Pedro to evade the Monterey customs.
  • The ‘new’ Cathedral
  • Robert Graham’s Queen of the Angels
  • Saint Andrew, detail from the Ezcary Altar, completed in Spain in 1678. For years this was the main altar at San Fernando Mission. Note the wonderful vines!
Before heading back down into the bowels of Metro, I paused at one of the fountain courtyards at Union Station.

The Doheny Library Murals at USC

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The Short View: Doheny family, terribly wealthy oil tycoons in Los Angeles, big supporters of USC, gave this library to honor their dead son, who went there, and was a war hero.

The Long View: In 1892 an old prospector and generally ruthless bastard Edward Doheny, Sr. struck oil in LA when he spotted pobladores’ caretas going to and from the La Brea Tar Pits, as they had for generations, to get pitch to line the roofs of their adobes. Doheny sucked LA dry of oil, and then went on to drill gushers in Bakersfield and Mexico. He cornered West Coast oil, and became the only man in the country to stare down John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Trust. He was the richest man in California by 1902. There Will Be Blood, was about Doheny.



Smart but spoiled young son Ned was sent to USC where, as LA’s richest heir, he was BMOC. He studied business, married and had a bunch of kids right off. In 1917 Ned was called into the Navy for World War I. Ned learned all about how the Navy was being modernized to run on oil, not coal. He learned where the Navy got that oil, and how much it paid for it. Somewhere in the wide, wet world of the Navy, Ned met Hugh Plunkett, who became Ned’s buddy, friend, flunky, fixer, enabler, crony, private secretary. After the war Hugh becomes “like one of the Doheny family.” The class difference between them, really, came down to those few years of polish provided by Ned’s Trojan education and of course the Doheny millions. But young Plunkett must have been eager to do anything to please these glamorous people.


In 1922, Plunkett accompanied his boss, Ned, on a trip to Washington, D.C., carrying a black bag full of $100,000 in cash. Ned was giving it to Sec. of the Interior Ball, to bribe him for looking the other way on Teapot Dome, one of the Navy’s oil leases. Plunkett was just the bag-man, but he certainly, and probably eagerly, handed the bag of money safely to the Secretary. He and Ned were guilty as hell of bribery.



By 1929, the story was out and the “Teapot Dome Scandal” was disgusting the nation. Unsavory bribes, including Ned’s, came to light. Pres. Harding was so deeply implicated he simply sailed away and died in the frozen north. And in Los Angeles, at the famous Greystone Mansion, both Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett were found dead, each shot through the head.

There is all kinds of speculation about who killed whom, but the View has sifted the evidence to conclude: that Hugh, who was in way too deep, was mentally fragile and panicked about becoming the fall guy for the Dohenys. He must have threatened to turn state’s evidence; whereupon, as he tried to leave the bedroom, Ned shot Hugh in the back of the head. Then, some time later, after a doctor had been summoned, Ned shot himself in despair at everything he’d done, especially the betrayal of his friend, servant, secretary, amanuensis.

The Dohenys, staunch Catholics, did not bury Ned in sacred ground, but near Hugh, in Forest Lawn. This suggests they knew Ned was Hugh’s murderer and himself a suicide. If anything, the gay subtext that was inevitably read into the murders distracted the public from the real story, one of government corruption by the Dohenys. Clearly, the two men were not in any way gay, but just as clearly, they had a very tight and complex male relationship. It was ultimately expressed in an episode of shockingly intimate violence. Everybody blamed Hugh, obviously a hot-headed servant gone mad.


Edward Sr. was quietly acquitted of the Teapot Dome charges, one suspects out of sympathy for the loss of his son, or the feeling that a kind of poetic justice had been served by the bloodbath. Then Wall Street crashed. Scandal forgotten, the Dohenys gave USC the absolutely splendid Edward L. Doheny, Jr. Memorial Library. The Treasure Room, built as the rare book room, has gorgeous friezes around the upper walls, portraying the development of literacy, and obviously starring the 1930 USC Track and Field Squad and Water Polo Team, as models.


The striking murals would be poignant enough, with their classic, innocent, “old college days” homoeroticism. But, bearing the story of Ned and Hugh in mind, the Viewer can interpret all kinds of fascinating overtones in the figures. The artist, Samuel J. Armstrong, was Philadelphia-trained, and went on to be a chief animator for Walt Disney. Armstrong apparently was one of the directors of “Fantasia,” particularly the live-action sequences including Stokowski (Leopold!) leading the fabulous Philadelphians in the Toccata and Fugue.

Oakland’s Chinatown is especially blessed with beautiful murals. Almost every drab urban after-thought wall, dead-end or loading dock has been turned into a Pacific Rim dreamscape.

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Pa Kua Healing and Martial Arts, on Magnolia Blvd at Laurel Canyon in the Valley Village center, gets a new mural for a sign.

The studio is a Favorite Local Business, creating for our community a stylish, warm and pedestrian-friendly street interface, which is a clue to their humanistic body-friendly values.  Pa Kua adapted our walkable village center creatively, suiting a new era’s pedestrian-ready needs. They doubled down on the LA City plan to plant trees on merchants’ rows, and at their own expense Pa Kua has clustered Roman cypress into their plot – triple kudos for having chosen trees that are at once traditional for Valley Village, provide excellent shade and vertical wind screening, yet don’t hog the streets or block the signage.

The mural is a welcome addition to Valley Village. I love the bold and harmonious Asian colors, which just pop in our golden southern-exposed sunshine.