the other day i found myself in the westlake district of los angeles--a seedy, downtrodden neighborhood just west of downtown whose only stand-out feature (or so i thought) is drug-dealer-infested macarthur park--looking for a side street of sufficient anonymity where i could leave my truck with a reasonable expectation of finding it in one piece when i got back.
walking quickly and looking neither left or right as is my custom when in such neighborhoods, i almost missed the graffiti-covered sign twenty feet down the littered sidewalk from where i finally parked.
knowing my city and figuring ignorance might well result in a $50 ticket, i circled it and glanced up at the other side.
wait--historical landmark in this neighborhood?
my gaze then shifted to the right, through the bars of the security fence which edged the sidewalk, and...holy motherfuckin' shit.
yeah, she's decrepit and decayed, but you can totally see what she once was, can't you?
[and almost completely obscured by unkempt foliage and security fencing, i could make out another house of similar size and grandeur next door to the right
whose onion-domed cupola could only be glimpsed if i stood on top of a car in the parking lot of the burger king on the other side of 818--but what the hell, i'm nothing if not a fool for my art.]
my original reason for being there momentarily forgotten, i wandered down this apparently once-grand avenue and up the next, ignoring traffic and the threatening glares of passersby, snapping pictures with my crappy iphone as i went [some of which actually came out] of the few majestic landmarks of a bygone era which still remain.
and yeah i know you east-coast readers will laugh at this post because you've no doubt seen this sorta shit played out everywhere you've lived in orders of magnitude greater than i can even imagine.
what can i say--i've spent my life in relatively-new places like houston and los angeles, so the real-life decay of history still strikes awe in my heart.
* * * * *
for a brief synopsis of the unhappy history of 818 s. bonnie brae, click here.
for a glimpse of the way said house [and by extrapolation, said neighborhood] looked back in the halcyon days before even the idea of security fences entered the american consciousness, i offer up the following archival snapshot:
and for more images of this once-proud neighborhood in better days, click here and follow the links.
2 comments:
This is the home that you should be living in. You are one of the few people who could appreciate such an immensely beautiful house and, at the same time, would not mind the neighborhood (too much).
Oh, and all those two bedroom, one bedroom homes built in Santa Monica for aerospace hourly workers are now worth a ton -- probably far more than Mooers House is now.
noblesavage: not so fast, babe--while i am immensely grateful such structures exist, the minimalist in me is far from certain he could actually live in one.
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