Category Archives: L.A

The Bradbury Building

L.A, L.A. Remembered,

bradbury-building001

The Bradbury Building is an architectural landmark in downtown Los Angeles, California. Built in 1893, the building was commissioned by LA mining millionaire Lewis L. Bradbury and designed by local draftsman George Wyman.

It is located at 304 South Broadway and 3rd Street, and has been the site of many movie and television shoots, rock videos, and works of fiction. It’s the location of the office of Eagon Quinn, a character in my Mike Montego novels, set in 1960’s Los Angeles.

Lewis L. Bradbury (November 6, 1823–July 15, 1892) was a mining millionaire – he owned a mine named Tajo in Sinaloa, Mexico – who became a real estate developer in the latter part of his life. He planned in 1892 to construct a five story building at Broadway and Third Street in Los Angeles, close to the Bunker Hill neighborhood.

A local architect, Sumner Hunt, was first hired to complete a design for the building, but Bradbury dismissed Hunt’s plans as inadequate to the grandeur of his vision. He then hired George Wyman, one of Hunt’s draftsmen, to design the building.

Wyman at first refused the offer, but then supposedly had a ghostly talk with his brother Mark Wyman (who had died six years previously), while using a planchette board with his wife. The ghost’s message supposedly said “Mark Wyman / take the / Bradbury building / and you will be / successful” with the word “successful” written upside down. After the episode, Wyman took the job, and is now regarded as the architect of the Bradbury Building. Wyman’s grandson, the science fiction publisher Forrest J. Ackerman, owned the original document containing the message until his death. Coincidentally, Ackerman was a close friend of science fiction author Ray Bradbury.

Wyman was especially influenced in constructing the building by the 1887 science fiction book Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, which described a utopian society in 2000.

In Bellamy’s book, the average commercial building was described as a “vast hall full of light, received not alone from the windows on all sides, but from the dome, the point of which was a hundred feet above … The walls and ceiling were frescoed in mellow tints, calculated to soften without absorbing the light which flooded the interior.” This description greatly influenced the Bradbury Building.

A Bradbury Building interior
A Bradbury Building interior

A restoration and seismic retrofitting was undertaken by developer Ira Yellin and project architect Brenda Levin Associates in 1991. As part of the restoration, a storage area at the south end of the building was converted to a new rear entrance portico, connecting the building more directly to Biddy Mason Park and the adjacent Broadway Spring Center parking garage. The building’s lighting system was also redesigned, bringing in alabaster wall sconces from Spain.

The building features an Italian Renaissance Revival -style exterior façade of brown brick, sandstone and panels of terra cotta details, in the “commercial Romanesque Revival” that was the current idiom in East Coast American cities. But the magnificence of the building is the interior: reached through the entrance, with its low ceiling and minimal light, it opens into a bright naturally lit great center court.

Robert Forster, star of the TV series Banyon that used the building for his office, described it as “one of the great interiors of L.A. Outside it doesn’t look like much, but when you walk inside, suddenly you’re back a hundred and twenty years.”

The five-story central court features glazed brick, ornamental cast iron, tiling, rich marble, and polished wood, capped by a skylight that allows the court to be flooded with natural rather than artificial light, creating ever-changing shadows and accents during the day.

Cage elevators surrounded by wrought-iron grillwork go up to the fifth floor.

Geometric patterned staircases and wrought-iron railings are used abundantly throughout. The wrought iron was created in France and displayed at the Chicago World’s Fair before being installed in the building. Freestanding mail-chutes also feature ironwork.

The walls are made of pale glazed brick. The marble used in the staircase was imported from Belgium, and the floors are Mexican tiles.

During construction an active spring was found beneath the work-site, posing a threat to ongoing work on the building by weakening the foundation. However, Mr. Bradbury was very committed to the project, which he believed to be the greatest monument possible to his memory. Consequently, he imported massive steel rails from Europe to bolster the building and allow its construction to continue.

The initial estimate for the construction of the building was $175,000, but the final cost at completion was over $500,000—an extremely large amount for those times. Using the GDP Deflator method, this amount translates to more than $11 million in 2008 dollars.

Lewis Bradbury died months before the building opened in 1893, although it stands as a testament to his and George Wyman’s vision.

The building has operated as an office building for most of its history. It was purchased by Ira Yellin in the early 1980s, and remodeled in the 1990s. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1977.

The building has served as headquarters for the Los Angeles Police Department’s Internal Affairs division and currently is used by other government agencies. Several of the offices are rented out to private concerns, including Red Line Tours. The retail spaces on the first floor currently house Ross Cutlery (where O.J. Simpson purchased a stiletto that figured in his murder trial), a Subway sandwich restaurant, a Sprint cell phone store, and a real estate sales office for loft conversions in other nearby historic buildings.

The building is a popular tourist attraction. Visitors are welcome daily and greeted by a government worker who provides historical facts and information about the building. Visitors are allowed up to the first landing but not past it. Brochures and tours are also available. It is close to three other downtown Los Angeles Landmarks: the Grand Central Market and the Million Dollar Theater (across the street) and Angels Flight (two blocks away). The building is accessible from the Los Angeles MTA Red Line via the Civic Center exit three blocks distant.

The Bradbury Building is featured prominently as the setting in films, television, and literature – particularly in the science fiction genre. Most notably, the building is the setting for both the climactic rooftop scene of Blade Runner (1982), as well as the set of the character J. F. Sebastian’s apartment in which much of the film’s story unfolds.

The Bradbury Building appeared prominently in the noir films D.O.A.’(1950) and I, The Jury (1953). M (1951), a remake of the German film, contains a long search sequence filmed in the building, and a spectacular shot through the roof’s skylight. The five-story atrium also substituted for the interior of the seedy skid row hotel depicted in the climax of Good Neighbor Sam (1964), supposedly set in San Francisco but almost entirely shot in Los Angeles.

The Bradbury Building is also featured in The White Cliffs of Dover (1944), The Indestructible Man (1956), Caprice (1967), Marlowe (1969), the 1972 made-for-television movie The Night Strangler, Chinatown (1974), The Cheap Detective (1978), Avenging Angel (1985), Murphy’s Law (1986), The Dreamer of Oz (1990 TV movie), 1994’s Wolf and Disclosure, Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), Pay It Forward (2000), (500) Days of Summer (2009), and The Artist (2011).

Television series that featured the building include the 1964 The Outer Limits episode “Demon with a Glass Hand.” During the season six episodes (1963–64) of the series 77 Sunset Strip, the Stuart “Stu” Bailey character had his office in the Bradbury. In Quantum Leap the building is seen carrying the name “Gotham Towers” in Play It Again, Seymour, the last episode of the first season (1989). The building appeared in at least one episode of the television series Banyon (1972–73), City of Angels (1976) and Mission: Impossible (1966–73), as well as in the “Ned and Chuck’s Apartment” episode of Pushing Daisies, which debuted in 2007. The building was also the setting for a scene from the series FlashForward in the episode “Let No Man Put Asunder.” In 2010 the building was transplanted to New York City for a two-part episode of CSI NY. The Bradbury Building and a fake New York City subway entrance across the street were also used to represent the exterior of New York’s High School for the Performing Arts in the opening credits of the television series Fame.

The Bradbury appeared in music videos from the 1980s by Heart, Janet Jackson, Earth Wind and Fire and Genesis, and a Pontiac Pursuit commercial. Part of Janet Jackson’s 1989 film short Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 was filmed in the building as well. The interior appears in the music video for the Pointer Sisters’ 1980 song, “He’s So Shy.” The Bradbury Building was also used for Tony! Toni! Toné!’s “Let’s Get Down” music video.

The building was featured in the photography on the Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 box, while the personal computer game SimCity 3000 shows the building as one of many built in the so-called Medium Commercial zones.

The Bradbury has been frequently alluded to in popular literature. In Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, the protagonist refers to Philip Marlowe, who would “feel homesick for the lacework balconies of the Bradbury Building.” In the Star Trek novel The Case of the Colonist’s Corpse: A Sam Cogley Mystery, the protagonist works from the Bradbury Building four hundred years in the future. Other allusions occur in The Man With The Golden Torc by Simon R. Green, and the science fiction multiple novel series The World Of Tiers by Philip Jose Farmer.

DC Comics and Marvel Comics – the latter of which has offices in the real Bradbury Building – both published comic book series based on characters that work in the historic landmark. The building serves as the headquarters for the Marvel Comics team The Order, and in the DC universe, the Human Target runs his private investigation agency from the building.

 

 

L.A.’s Wrigley Field

L.A, L.A. Remembered, Uncategorized, , , ,

wrigleycolor

Wrigley Field was a ballpark in Los Angeles, California which served as host to minor league baseball teams in the region for over 30 years, and was the home park for the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League as well as a current major league team, the later Los Angeles Angels, in their inaugural season, 1961. The ballpark was also used as the backdrop for several Hollywood films about baseball, as well as TV series such as Home Run Derby.

Wrigley Field was built in South Los Angeles in 1925 and was named after William Wrigley Jr., the chewing gum magnate who owned the first tenants, the original Los Angeles Angels Pacific Coast League team. In 1925, the Angels moved from their former home at Washington Park (Los Angeles), which was also known as Chutes Park. Wrigley also owned the Chicago Cubs, whose home (Wrigley Field) is also named after him.

wrigley-field-chicago
William Wrigley Jr., the chewing gum magnate, had two ballparks named after him — the Chicago park was named for Wrigley over a year after the L.A. park’s opening

The Los Angeles Wrigley Field was built to resemble Spanish-style architecture and a somewhat scaled-down version of the Chicago ballpark (known then as Cubs Park) as it looked at the time. It was also the first of the two ballparks to bear Wrigley’s name, as the Chicago Park was named for Wrigley over a year after the L.A. Park’s opening. At the time, he owned Santa Catalina Island, and the Cubs were holding their spring training in that island’s city of Avalon (whose ball field was located on Avalon Canyon Road and also informally known as “Wrigley Field”).

Coincidentally, one of Wrigley Field’s boundary streets was Avalon Boulevard (east, behind right field and a small parking lot). The other boundaries of the block were 41st Street (north, behind left field), 42nd Place (south, behind first base), and San Pedro Street (west, behind third base and a larger parking lot). Not only did L.A. Wrigley get its name first, it had more on-site parking than the Chicago version did (or does now).

200px-Wrigley_field

For 33 seasons, 1925 to 1957, the park was home to the Angels, and for 11 of those seasons, 1926 through 1935 and 1938, it had a second home team in the rival Hollywood Stars. The Stars eventually moved to their own new ballpark, Gilmore Field, just west of the Pan Pacific Auditorium.

With its location near Hollywood, Wrigley Field was a popular place to film baseball movies. The first film known to have used Wrigley as a shooting location was 1927’s Babe Comes Home, a silent film starring Babe Ruth. Some well known movies filmed there were The Pride of the Yankees and the movie version of the stage play Damn Yankees. The film noir classic Armored Car Robbery had its title heist set at Wrigley. It later found its way into television, serving as the backdrop for the Home Run Derby series in 1960, a popular show that featured one-on-one contests between baseball’s top home run hitters, which had a brief revival in the 1990s when it aired on ESPN Classic. Episodes of shows as diverse as The Twilight Zone (“The Mighty Casey,” 1960), Mannix (“To Catch a Rabbit,” 1969) and The Munsters were also filmed there. Some closeups were filmed there for insertion into the 1951 film Angels in the Outfield, a film otherwise set at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh.

Wrigley was used for other sports as well. Six world title boxing bouts were held there, including the 1939 Joe Louis-Jack Roper fight. On May 28, 1959, the park hosted the USA-England soccer friendly where England won 8-1 in front of 13,000.

Dodger Stadium
Dodger Stadium

L.A. Wrigley’s minor league baseball days ended when the Brooklyn Dodgers of the National League transferred to Los Angeles in 1958. The use of Wrigley was studied by the Dodgers, but they opted for seating capacity over suitability as a baseball field, and instead set up shop in the 93,000 seat Los Angeles Coliseum (which had a 251-foot foul line in left field) while awaiting construction of the baseball-only Dodger Stadium, which has a set capacity of 56,000.

In 1961, a new L.A. Angels club, named after the minor league team Los Angeles Angels (PCL), joined the American League as an expansion team, and took residence at Wrigley for just the one season. The team set a still-standing first-season expansion-team record with 71 wins. Thanks to its cozy power alleys, the park became the setting for a real-life version of Home Run Derby, setting another record by yielding 248 home runs. That 248 mark would stand for over 30 years. After the 1961 season, the team moved to Dodger Stadium (or Chavez Ravine, as it was known for Angels games), which was the Angels’ temporary home while Angel Stadium was being built. The new Dodger Stadium also “took over” for Wrigley Field, as the site of choice for Hollywood filming that required a ballpark setting.

Martin Luther King spoke at Wrigley in 1963
Martin Luther King spoke at Wrigley in 1963

There were no more regular tenants after 1961. By then the park was owned by the city, and various events were staged. On May 26, 1963, a large crowd attended a civil rights rally featuring Martin Luther King, Jr. By 1966 the park was being used for soccer matches and the like. Demolition began in March 1969, to make way for a new recreation facility called Gilbert Lindsay Park. The park has a ball field in the northwest corner of the property, which was once a parking area. The diamond is locally known as “Wrigley Field,” and is the home of Wrigley Little League baseball and softball. The original site of the Wrigley diamond and grandstand is occupied by the Kedren Community Mental Health Center and another parking lot.

The ballpark’s dimensions were cozy but symmetrical, giving a nearly equal chance to right and left-handed batters in the Home Run Derby series. The only difference was that the left field wall was 14.5 feet (4.4 m) high, whereas the right field fence was only 9 feet (2.7 m) high.



 

L.A.’s Farmers Market

L.A, L.A. Remembered, Uncategorized

FarmersMarket

The Farmers Market is an area of food stalls, sit-down eateries, prepared food vendors, and produce markets in Los Angeles, USA. It also a historic Los Angeles landmark and tourist attraction, first opened in July 1934.

The Farmers Market features more than 100 restaurants, grocers and tourist shops, and is located just south of CBS Television City. Unlike most farmers’ markets, which are held only at intervals, the Farmers Market of Los Angeles is a permanent installation and is open seven days a week. The dozens of vendors serve many kinds of food—both American cuisine from local farmers and restaurants and Los Angeles’ variety of local ethnic foods from the many immigrant communities of Los Angeles, with many Latin American and Asian cuisines well represented.

Farmers Market is located at the corner of 3rd Street and Fairfax Avenue in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, California, USA. It is adjacent to The Grove outdoor shopping mall; an electric-powered streetcar runs between the two sites.

The market is a destination for foodies in search of the market’s ethnic cuisines, as well as its specialty food markets and prepared food stalls. The front of Farmers Market displays a sign saying “Meet Me at Third and Fairfax.”

vintage_farmers_market1

The market started when a dozen nearby farmers would park their trucks on a field to sell their fresh produce to local residents. The cost to rent the space was fifty cents per day.

In 1870, when they moved west from Illinois, Arthur Fremont (A.F.) Gilmore and his partner bought two sizable farms, one of which was the 256-acre (1.04 km2) dairy farm at this corner. Gilmore gained control when the partnership dissolved later.

Gilmore Oil Company replaced the dairy farm when oil was discovered under the land during drilling for water in 1905. Earl Bell (E.B.) Gilmore, son of A.F. Gilmore, took over the family business. The younger Gilmore started midget car racing and brought professional football to Los Angeles. He built Gilmore Field for the Hollywood Stars baseball team, which was owned by Bing Crosby, Barbara Stanwyck, and Cecil B. DeMille.

When CBS Television City opened next door in 1952, the Farmers Market provided those working or visiting that television studio a convenient place to shop or eat.

In the 1970s The Country Kitchen, a restaurant owned and operated by Jack and Eileen Smith (located next to the still-operating Du-par’s), was popular with stars and their fans alike. Mickey Rooney could sometimes be found working behind the counter. Other customers included Elvis Presley, Regis Philbin, Rip Taylor, Mae West, Johnny Carson, and even The Shah of Iran on his visit.

Koning Eizenberg Architecture, Inc. devised a major renovation, expansion, and master plan for the Market in the early 1990s. The project was initiated to provide new retail, office, and services spaces and reconfigure circulation and parking for the historic site.

In July 1934 a contingent of farmers pulled their trucks onto an expanse of empty land at the property known as Gilmore Island at the corner of Third and Fairfax in Los Angeles. They displayed their produce on the tailgates of their vehicles; to their delight customers quickly arrived and parked their cars on a hastily created dirt parking lot in spaces designated with chalk. They strolled among the trucks purchasing fruit, vegetables and flowers.

The atmosphere was casual, the open air commerce enticing, the goods fresh, and the result remarkable. Farmers Market became an instant institution.

With a partner, Arthur Fremont Gilmore purchased two ranches in the Los Angeles vicinity. The purchase inaugurated a string of serendipitous events that not even the far-sighted Gilmore could predict. When Gilmore and his partner elected to dissolve their arrangement, they drew straws—Gilmore’s straw secured 256 acres on which he created a successful dairy farm. A.F. Gilmore had no plans for a world-renowned institution when he moved to Los Angeles from Illinois in 1870. Rather, he was seeking a better life on the promising West Coast. When he married Mary Elizabeth Bell in 1882, the small adobe on the property became the new home for his family.

At the turn of the century, while drilling for water for his herd of dairy cows, A.F. Gilmore hit oil. By 1905, the dairy was gone and the Gilmore Oil Company born.

Earl Gilmore, son of Arthur F. Gilmore later developed Gilmore Field and the Pan-Pacific Auditorium on the site.

Inside the LAPD’s elite airborne unit

Cop Stories, L.A, Los Angeles, , ,

lapd

 

(Originally published in the Palisades Post online, January 3, 2013, by staff writer Reza Gostar)

 

Negotiating traffic on Sunset Boulevard and PCH may be challenging for police officers on the ground, but not for officers piloting the airborne units of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Air Support Division (ASD).

These elite helicopter units have become legendary not only in movies like ‘Blue Thunder’ and ‘Terminator 2,’ but also on the streets where they are often referred to as ‘ghetto birds’ by the criminals they chase.

Somewhere over southeast L.A. on December 20, LAPD Pilot David Swanson is flying a AStar B-2 helicopter to the scene of a potential robbery. The victim’s neighbor has spotted the two suspects, Swanson tells a Palisadian-Post reporter who is along for the ride.

Tactical Flight Officer Renee Muro, a veteran LAPD officer and one of only seven women in the ASD, is listening to several police radios simultaneously as she coordinates the response. In less than four minutes, the helicopter arrives at its destination and, down below, neighbors are peeking out of their homes to see what all the commotion is about.

Swanson keeps the helicopter at 600 to 700 feet in elevation as he circles the perimeter. This is standard practice for LAPD helicopter pilots, who avoid hovering in one place. They keep the aircraft moving because in case of an emergency, such as a malfunction, there needs to be enough wind speed built up for the blades so the pilot can attempt to land. News media helicopters fly 500 feet above the police to avoid interfering with any activity.

On the streets below, the scene is chaotic. Curious neighbors have started to come out of their homes, adding to the number of bodies visible by air. Suddenly, Muro, who is not using binoculars, spots two pairs of sneakers underneath one of the home’s overhangs and quickly coordinates with the officers on the ground. Within minutes, the two suspected robbers are placed in custody.

Not three minutes go by before Muro picks up another call over the radio’this time a gunshot victim. The helicopter is again the first to arrive and quickly directs the first responders to the victim.

‘This is a known gang and drug area,’ Swanson says, adding that it is unlikely that any witnesses will come forward. After he and Muro canvas the perimeter, the calls begin to slow and the helicopter sweeps over congested freeways to Venice, and then to Pacific Palisades.

‘I landed there once when I had engine trouble,’ says Swanson, pointing down to the Field of Dreams at the Palisades Recreation Center. He was one of the units that responded to a burglary call at a home on Alma Real Drive last August. (The Post ran a photo of the downed helicopter.)

Established in 1956 by a group of Korean War veterans, the ASD units are in the air 20 hours a day patrolling L.A.’s 470-plus square miles of steel, chaparral and concrete landscapes. ‘We try to be as proactive as we can,’ said Lt. Phillip Smith, assistant commanding officer.

‘The helicopters get up to 140-150 miles per hour,’ Smith said. ‘If I leave the deck here [at the LAPD Hopper heliport near Union Station] and get a call way out in Chatsworth, it’s probably going to take me seven or eight minutes but that can still seem like forever when you have an officer screaming for help.’

Separated by the Santa Monica Mountains, there are two police helicopters patrolling at any given time. One works the San Fernando Valley and the other handles everything south of the Cahuenga Pass, Smith said, noting that rapid response is the reason why the helicopters remain in constant flight.

‘We are a force multiplier’that’s really what we do,’ Smith said. ‘We do the job of between six and eight police cars out there. ‘

Smith said that ASD helicopters are able to quickly determine if indeed there was a crime and whether or not additional units are needed. ‘Our big thing is getting to the scene and offering some security, and painting a visual picture for the officers responding.’

The Air Support Division, which averages more than 300 police car pursuit calls a year, currently operates 19 helicopters, including 14 Eurocopter Astar B-2s, four Bell Jet Rangers, and one recently acquired Bell Uh-1H (Huey) that is replacing an older one that retired about four years ago. The Huey is used by the division’s special flights section for special operations, which involve such missions as rapelling Special Weapons and Tactics officers onto the tops of buildings and other operational activities, Smith said.

The ASD staff and personnel include 35 police officer pilots, 10 sergeants who are pilots, three lieutenant pilots, 28 tactical flight officers, which totals to about 100 staff members, counting civilian employees and support staff. Some officers serve as both tactical flight officers (TFOs) and pilots, Smith said. However, all of the TFO and pilots have to serve as regular patrol officers for at least five years before being considered for a position in the elite division.

How effective is the ASD? Of the 51,000-plus incidents that the ASD responded to last year, ‘probably 16,000 times we were the first on scene,’ said Smith, who moonlights for the security firm ACS in the Palisades once a week.

Many aspects of the ASD’s missions are classified, such as their special radiological equipment (which can be used to detect terrorist activity), monitoring for environmental dangers, and high-altitude surveillance flights, which involve multimillion-dollar cameras and other equipment.”

The helicopters are also equipped with the famous ‘Nightsun’ spotlight, which is linked to the helicopter’s 360-degree infrared camera system that is mounted underneath the aircraft. During night patrols, the spotlight can be activated to track the camera’s position, which is remotely controlled by the tactical flight officer inside the helicopter.

However, the officers themselves are the most valuable aspect of the arsenal. Accumulating thousands of hours of flight time a year (about 18,000 hours in 2011), the ASD pilots are some of the most experienced aviators in the world. Subsequently, the ASD trains multiple other agencies from around the country, including foreign allied military units in their use of special police tactics, especially the ‘Nightsun’ spotlight. The instruction room is located on the aircraft carrier-size heliport on top of the Piper Technical Center in downtown.

Yet, despite all the technical gadgetry and their elite status as one of the largest and most sophisticated airborne law enforcement forces in the nation, the ASD’s humble motto exemplifies their commitment and attitude to the job: ‘The mission is the same, only the vehicle has changed.’