Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.
It’s amazing, but the legal rakes are still dragging the depths of the muck — ordinary bribery and slush — and dredging up more wallowers in the City’s construction permitting process.
So what? Municipal bribery, blah blah The reason it’s in View at all, is that my brother Chris used to live at that address, when it was a fantastic, unique, funky (affordable) old light-industrial mixed-use loft. It is important to remember that even when the building was torn down for spec luxury condos six or more years ago, the avalanche of homelessness, the displacement and diaspora to the East Bay of maybe 100,000 dyed-in-indigo San Franciscans, the loss of civic identity, dying local businesses, and collapse of affordable livability, were already in full swing and much discussed. Yet this project and thousands like it, were then and are still being, built. And sitting empty. Where once lived thousands of folks.
It’s not “the market” that’s hollowing out America’s cities, not when greedy developers are flinging their phony money around to undermine or skirt regulations and approvals. The market MEANS, that there are rules and regulations and truth and clarity in the transaction, so that when something is valued, it is actually valuable. There is nothing healthy or natural about turning cities into grids of dead empty boxes on spec.
Well, it’s 2:35, I guess we’ll start. Hi guys, thanks for joining the tour. We have a rare beautiful day in notoriously “sunny LA,” to kick over whatever fragments are left of the historic sites of the Pueblo. We meet here on Fort Hill, also known as Fort Moore Hill, at the Fort Hill Memorial, also known as the Pioneer Memorial. [Semi-truck air horn…..rush-blast of gritty wind…]
THE MONUMENT HAS just been cleaned, after 22 years as “That hobo jungle crack park off the 101 freeway ramp.” Also known as “Skid Row Heights” during that era. Look down, now they’ve trimmed the overgrown ficus trees — you can glimpse a remnant of the bygone authentic atmosphere from the vanished LA of 2018.
Don’t worry, that’s not a corpse! Just a park visitor napping.
Back in September,1846, the occupying Yankees were besieged up on this hill by the revolt of the Angelenos, down there in the Plaza. When the spirited and brave, or foolish and treacherous, revolt of the Californios was finally defeated, or betrayed, and California was strong-armed, or welcomed, into the Union, U.S. forces returned and built a real fort over “The Angels,” where they could get a sweeping view of the entire Pueblo and the valley of Los Angeles. I guess we should feel lucky we can JUST glimpse this famous view today.
That green patch is the heart of Los Angeles
The redoubt was named for Capt. Moore, who was horribly speared to death and trampled under hoof by the California Lancers on the field of San Pasqual. You won’t learn much about the real history of the site — which is in fact a salient in history as well as geography — from the exhibit. It’s just 50’s-style racist LA civic boosterism about how the Boston Nation brought progress, water, and power to this arid, lifeless, backward Mexican land. Check the VVV post on the blog for the story.
The panels were fired by Gladding, McBean Pottery, who also did the waterfall tiles. The style is dazzling, now that they’ve been cleaned.
“The terra cotta art wall designed by Henry Kreis is the most notable feature of the memorial. Fabricated by the prominent California terra cotta manufacturer Gladding, McBean, it was reported at the time of its installation to be the largest bas-relief in the United States. This is the only public artwork in Los Angeles portraying an historic event that occurred at the actual site of the work. It depicts the ceremonial flag being raised over the fort on July 4, 1847. To insure the authenticity of the uniforms worn by the U.S. First Dragoons, the New York Volunteers and the Mormon Batallion – the units witnessing the ceremony – Kreis was advised by noted California historians Glenn Dumke and Robert Cleland.
LA County Arts and Culture website
Heres a great depressing video, too short, alas, about the monument, free for tour members.
Next we’ll head down the grand staircase to the Plaza. We can’t legally cross this street, or any of the four streets that now are now connected by this staircase since there are no crosswalks between. So we’ll have to zig-zag for miles between intersections, or you can follow me and jay-walk sprint — ready, GO! As you flee across the lanes, note the cheerful ghetto mural that enlivens the wall of the lofts. It lures the hipsters into believing they’re moving into a real ethnic community, built up over generations by hard-working Mexican Americans, and memorialized by child graffiti artists trained by nuns at the local Teen Drop-In Center.. Tish-tosh!
Hmmm…we want to go toward the Church…but we’re blocked by traffic and three rings of fencing. Just meet me over there!
[shouts over shoulder] Note also that the ramp has been redesigned into a boulevard leading into Chinatown, the real ethnic neighborhood that is now a vacant ghost town, just waiting for hipsters to discover it, and tear it down to build more of This Shit.
As sinuous as the Dragon Gate, the new corner of North Broadway and Caesar Chavez/Sunset Blvd.
Note how the 1960s street shade-tree planting — gorgeous pink crapemyrtle, obviously taken into account by the color designers of the new lofts — ends with the new lofts.
This Shit….Phantom wealth running to ground in Culver City.
Link
Phantom wealth runs to ground.
The Wall Street banks who own the Federal Reserve system, ask their central bank to click up millions of dollars per day on their behalf, unaudited and with no investment requirements. They claim they wish to fill the gaping hole in their greed. Since no amount of money can ever do this, they daily call for more and more. This is not considered by anybody in the banks to be a problem; the very opening of the taps, gets individual people near the faucet delightfully drenched with wealth.
However, while this Niagara of money can not make insolvency solvent, that money as it pours down the drain does not just disappear; it is siphoned off by thousands of REITs and Hedges and SWFs, also getting themselves delightfully drenched in the giddy process. But more important, they are Thinking of the Future, as they tote their buckets to the nearest patch of downtown earth…
“Phantom wealth runs to ground…”
In order to turn their buckets of fantasy bucks into real cash returns, so as to afford the hookers and blow they crave, these REITs and Hedges and SWFs must pour their phantom wealth into somewhere real. (“Real Estate” = opposite of “Phantom Wealth.”) They must pour their digits into the ground, in real soil, or rather, displacing real soil. They go into a frenzy buying up every square of property, every cuadricula of every downtown of every city on the globe. Then they kick out all the current residents, who by definition don’t represent “the future” – the future being one in which the apartments on that block go for $4,000/mo. Then they make that future come now, by tearing down all the infrastructure and investment and economic activity and stored wealth that existed on that spot heretofore, and they put up This Shit. Now we have no choice but to pay the new price, to occupy that artificially saturated ground.
The rent is too damn high because phantom wealth runs to ground.
The Valley Village View 