Yes, Virginia, It Rains (and Snows) in Los Angeles!

The "weather watches" on all local tv stations in which the weather reporters solemnly, gravely tell us of the dangerous rains coming to Los Angeles; It's too cold; It shouldn't be raining this much in November; This is unusual for this time of year; This isn't the weather I signed up for when I moved to Los Angeles.   Even CNN has their anchors soberly commenting on the impending rainstorms up and down the California coast while flashing on a California map.

People, you've learned a fact of Angeleno life:  it rains, often heavily in southern California.  In the mountains and high deserts, it snows most every year.  In Los Angeles, once every 30 years, there'll be measurable snow on the ground, sometimes a foot of snow.  That's something the Greater Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau doesn't want you to know.

The Los Angeles River is not a concrete ditch.  It might look like it.  Some parts of it have trees and grass growing inside it to make you think a pretty nothing of a stream is returning to its original state but the river has always http://www.youtube.com/embed/piRer4CFoWQ been and continues to be the outpouring of massive amounts of rain that hit Los Angeles, usually before Halloween and lasting until early April.  Like most Americans,  Angeleno's memories can be very short.  Only last year did we have one of the heaviest rainfalls ever
http://www.youtube.com/embed/9Z9OI3s5iG0.   This is not merely global warming or climate change.  El Nino and La Nina are bywords of life in Los Angeles.  These alternate 7-year cycles bring chains of record rainstorms, flooding, and snowstorms.  They are the lifeblood of all 17 million of us who live in the Los Angeles area to allow us and the neverending supply of newcomers to live the California lifestyle that films and fiction have created.

Along with Standard Oil and General Tire killing off the Red Car and all L. A. women looking like Pam Anderson on "Baywatch" along Santa Monica Beach, another long-running L. A. myth is that Los Angeles is a desert and would have stayed a desert without importing water.  Go back to Gaspar de Portola's journal description of the San Fernando Valley (hot, dry desert that so many people believe it is) when he and Father Serra first walked through it in 1769, claiming the land for Spain, "...We came upon a valley so full of oaks and junipers that we couldn't see the sun for miles upon miles, so restful and pleasant was our journey through it..."  The San Fernando Valley, covered with oaks and junipers?  It was. 

Rodeo Drive wasn't called Rodeo Drive because either rodeos were held there or because an early fashion designer named Rodeo opened the first store there.   Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas was one of the richest and longest-lasting ranchos and prime Beverly Hills real estate not because movie stars were moving there but because of a group of springs that opened up water to the intersection of Sunset Blvd. and Beverly Drive, right where the Beverly Hills Hotel is today, provided abundant water for settlement.  Slauson Creek, Ballona Creek, Rio Hondo, the San Gabriel River, Big Dalton Wash, Pacoima Creek.  These are not the hallmarks of a desert.  The Los Angeles River used to receive so much rainfall that the river jumped its banks, spilled over and created the riverbed it has today.  It's old riverbed we now know as Ballona Creek. Most streams in and around L. A. still run in the very dry summers in Southern California, even if just a trickle. 

The San Fernando Valley is hot because so many people moved here:   the oaks, junipers, and the wildlife it supported were removed and paved over, denuding the land and making it hotter for people to live.  The same is true for all of the Los Angeles Basin, which used to support forests, abundant game, and a lot of bodies of water before land developers did to it what was done to the Valley.  It became a desert by land development until city governments began planting trees and residents added their own gardens to the mix.

Los Angeles has a Mediterranean semi-arid climate.  That means hot dry summers, mild fall and spring weather, and mild winters, though very wet ones and often cold enough to bring on weeks of sweaters and coats (although no matter how cold it gets, transplants from the East Coast have created L. A. cold weather gear:  down jackets, ski hats, and flip flops).
Yes, the sun is out most days of the year.  Yes, we can have 85 degree clear weather on Christmas Day and New Year's Day that tricks people into believing Los Angeles is a sun-drenched paradise with no other weather.  Guess again!

The Land of Eternal Summer also sees its ground covered with snow, approximately every 25 years. My parents and other relatives would comment about the Great Snowfall of 1949, when they threw snowballs at each other and recorded it in photographs.  Pecos Bill's BBQ on Victory Blvd., near Western Ave. in  Glendale still has photos that it's founder took of the snow surrounding his business in 1949.  By the way, some of the best bbq in this city can still be found there.  I kept waiting and waiting for the next snowfall.  My grandmother had told me about the 1931 snowfall that actually shut down some roads in the city.  By my calculations, I would expect snow in Los Angeles approximately every 20 years.  1969 came and went.  So did 1979.  I thought the snowfall was a great big myth until February, 1987, there was a Los Angeles Herald-Examiner photo of snow patches on the sand at Huntington Beach.  There was a film of snow on my car and those of everyone on my block.  Within two hours of it falling, it melted but it was snowfall.

One of the joys of living in Los Angeles is the beautiful, warm days with clear skies that let you see Catalina Island from Mt. Wilson, fall foliage from the native willow and cottonwood trees in the canyons, and the lush green mountainsides with wild mustard yellow and fire-engine orange poppies carpeting those mountains.  It happens every late fall-through early spring and it's a gorgeous sight to behold.   Skater boys, club hounds, aspiring actors, musicians, and anyone describing themselves as trendy and living from Silver Lake west,  realize the beauty that we Angelenos are given at this time of year is here for everyone to enjoy and that it comes from the sometimes heavy, cold rains that mark our rainy season, which usually runs from just before Halloween to just after Easter, though we can get occasional tropical storms during the summer.  Next time you're "hit unaware" by the rain and you don't understand why there's so much rain, remember,  it rains (and snows) in Los Angeles.  That's something I'll always "sign up" for, although I only want to enjoy the rain from the comfort and reclined position of my bed looking out the window and not on the 405-10 Interchange.

Happy New Year! Here Today, Gone Tamale!

Hola, Everyone!







Happy New Year to everyone! I've been late to post because of recovering from two long flus and the holidays. I didn't let the flu deprive me of a true Los Angeles tradition. No rain, nor sleet, nor visits to the bathroom would deter MrLA from having, eating, and enjoying tamales for the holidays.







As anyone who's lived here for more than 3 months knows, tamales in Los Angeles are as common as actors answering casting calls at Paramount Studios. You can't say you've eaten Mexican food in Los Angeles without eating a tamale. True Angeleno hipsters call it by it's Spanish name: "tamal", which itself came from Nahuatl, the Aztec language that also gave us such other delicious foods as cocoa, tomato, and avocado, all part of the Mexican and Latino food scene in Los Angeles. But you don't have to be a hipster to enjoy the seemingly endless varieties of tamales now for sale at your local Mexican restaurant, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods or Bristol Farms, or the way hipsters in Echo Park, Boyle Heights, and Silver Lake eat them: from men and women who sell them on street corners, piping hot, from Igloo coolers.







MrLA grew up with tamales being only corn patties with chunks of braised pork in red chili sauce, pork in green chili sauce, and greasy (forgive me, Grandma!) sweet tamales studded with raisins, cinnamon, peanuts, and sugar, all wrapped up in corn husks and steamed for hours. Pork tamales were the only ones served in restaurants when I was growing up back in the Jurassic Era of the 1960's and 1970's. They were all covered in red chili sauce (Las Palmas Chili Sauce, which you can still find in L. A. supermarkets), and shredded cheddar cheese. This is what passed for good tamales when I was growing up. It's a wonder I grew up at all with those "artificial" tamales.







Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers (I should get a royalty check for giving some new musicians to LA the name for their band, after they answer casting calls at Paramount and live off of tamales until they crack the Big Time) would yell and tell me otherwise but the GREAT LATINO IMMIGRATION WAVE of the 1980's brought real and varied and creative tamales to Los Angeles.







Just for starters: tamales were not just Mexican anymore. With the refugees from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua came fat pillows of corn patties made with chicken, seafood, beef, blended with sliced green olives? capers? bell peppers? chunks of potatoes? and, most shocking of all, wrapped in banana leaves and tied in string? You betcha, as Sarah and some of her Tea Partiers would say. Add to that the immigrants from smaller though consistent streams of Colombian, Ecuadoran, Peruvian, Chilean, Cuban, Honduran, and Argentinian immigrants to Los Angeles and you had the beginning of the endless "tamale wars" amongst LAtinos. They may have fought amongst each other and put down their "competitors' " tamales but all Angelenos benefitted from the "fight". Now you had seafood tamales, cheese and green chili tamales, vegetable tamales, pureed raspberry and goat cheese tamales, and for the very vegan in the city (and one of my two favorite tamales): green corn tamales, served Salvadoran-style, with pureed refried beans and Salvadoran rice. By 1985, an Angeleno could walk a 10-block square of Hollywood and eat his or her way across 10 Latin American countries just by eating tamales. Yummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!







Tamales became a Bel-Air sensation thanks to the nannies and gardeners that care for the Bel-Aireans' homes. The damas of the multimillion-dollar casas loved the taste, wrappings, and stories of their nannies and gardeners pasting and wrapping hundreds of tamales with their families, assembly-line like, at Christmas. Before you could say "Montana Avenue", Los Angeles Magazine, LA Weekly, and the Times were all publishing where to buy the best tamales and sharing tamale recipes. Tamale parties given by people whose ancestors ran away from the Czars of Russia, the grand dukes of Italy, and the sultans of Turkey were hosting tamale parties in Mandeville Canyon, Beverly Hills, and Tarzana as if they were Frida Kahlo's grandmothers. Along with the burrito, cheeseburger, and Dodger dog, the tamale (and the parties to make them) became as Angeleno as I am.







Owing to the overwhelming numbers of Mexicans living in Los Angeles, the city has seen the richness, creativity, and profusion of the thousands of varieties of tamales found in Mexico. Koreatown in December would be unthinkable without tamales de mole at Guelaguetza, a chain of restaurants serving the foods of Oaxaca, Mexico. Lines that would make the Olympic Games green with envy are found on weekends and in December at Liliana's Tamales, Sandra and Lolita's, Mama's Hot Tamales Cafe or any of the street vendors selling tamales throughout the city. The Border Grill girls, Susan Feniger, and Mary Sue Milliken, made their empire based on tamales that no one had ever seen before, not even in Latin America :-). The greater, more recent immigration of southern Mexicans has brought an array of vegetarian tamales with pungent aromas, often seasoned with mole or sauces of various colors and spiciness. A tamale filled with huitlacoche, corn fungus that has the smokiness and texture of wild mushrooms, topped with a white cream sauce, garnished with sesame seeds is to know Heaven.







There have been tamale festivals in various parts of the city at different times in the last 10 years but they've all bowed out before the granddaddy (or is it el abuelito?) of all tamale festivals: the annual Tamale Festival held in Indio, California. There are literally dozens of vendors spread out of a half-mile square area selling from the most traditional to the most avant-garde. Goat cheese tamales? Beer batter tamales? Mango and green chili tamales? Go east, young man! Go east, young woman (or any man or woman) to Indio and park with thousands of tamale fans, fiends, and Facebook friends, all savoring, enjoying, weirding out (sometimes), and eating L. A.'s very own snack: the tamale.







Happy New Year! Many Tamales To You!

The Best Tamales in Los Angeles, 2011:

Mama's Hot Tamales Cafe

2122 W. 7th Street, just w. of Alvarado St.

Los Angeles, CA 90057

http://www.mamashottamales.com/

Liliana's Tamales

(two of four locations in East L. A.)

4629 E. Cesar Chavez Ave.

Los Angeles, CA 90022

(323) 780-0829

3448 1st Street

Los Angeles, CA 90063

(323) 780-0989

The Border Grill

various locations in Southern California

http://www.bordergrill.com/

Antojitos Bibi (Honduran Tamales)

2400 W. 7th Street, Suite 109

Los Angeles, CA 90057

(213) 385-8595

La Adelita Food Company (Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, and Mexican Tamales)

1287 S. Union Avenue, cr. Pico Blvd.

Los Angeles, CA 90015

El Caserio (Ecuadoran Humitas)

Two locations in Silver Lake

http://www.elcaseriola.com/

Rincon Chileno (Chilean Humitas)

4354 Melrose Avenue

Los Angeles, CA 90029

(323) 666-6075

La Casita Colombiana (Colombian Tamales)

4903 Melrose Avenue

Los Angeles, CA 90029

(323) 463-8542

Venezuelan Hallacas

Michelangelo Ristorante, Silver Lake

2742 Rowena Avenue

Los Angeles, CA 90039

(323) 660-4843

http://www.michelangelo-silverlake.com/

Michelangelo is an Italian restaurant run by a Venezuelan family, in which the matriarch of the family is a Venezuelan lady who immigrated to Venezuela as a child from Italy. Off the regular menu, if you ask her (Domenica), she prepares Venezuelan foods, especially hallacas, for sale. Each hallaca costs approximately $4.00.

Indio Tamale Festival

http://www.tamalefestival.net/

New York Thin Crust or Chicago Deep Dish? In L. A., Fuggedaboutit!!!!

If I had a dollar for every transplanted Easterner or Chicagoan who claims there are no good pizzas in Los Angeles, even to say that Angelenos don't know how to make pizza, I'd be living in a gated community in Bel Air and putting a down payment on another mansion. Especially in communities east of La Brea Ave. and east of the Ventura County line in the Valley, one-time New Yorkers, Bostonians, Phillies, and Chi-Towners all swear that pizza only exists in their respective cities and NO ONE else knows how to make a pizza. Someone's grandmother always made the best sauce; someone's aunt carried the recipe for pizza dough to her grave and they wished they'd asked her for it. At parties I'm invited to, the Transplant moans that no one serves a pizza like they used to get back home. They also whine about there are no four seasons in Los Angeles and that the city doesn't have culture (i. e., Broadway theaters, museums, supper clubs, great restaurants within seconds of getting off the subways) but the No Pizza in L. A. story gets more performances than "The Phantom of the Opera".







First and foremost, Los Angeles and Italians go back almost to the founding of the city. Francesco Fiore, a northern Italian vintner, bought land from the Mexican government around what is now Little Tokyo and planted wine grapes. He adopted Mexican citizenship and married into the prominent Coronel family (Antonio Coronel would be the last Hispanic mayor of Los Angeles until Antonio Villaraigosa). Italians married Mexicans in Los Angeles. They did it a lot in 1835 and they do it a lot today.







The Italian-Mexican legacy in Los Angeles is what the Italian-Irish connection is in New York; what the Italian-Polish connection is to Chicago. But, for many recent Angelenos, Mexicans only came to Los Angeles one day before they hired them as nannies, gardeners, and maids.





The Italians were so ingrained into early California and early Los Angeles life that the houses on Olvera Street, the oldest street in Los Angeles were built by Italians. Next time you eat at the ancient Mexican restaurant on Olvera Street, La Golondrina, know that it was the home of one Antonio Pelanconi who built his adobe in 1850. Italians came in large numbers in the late 19th Century and settled along with the Spanish speakers in their own Little Italy, right where Chinatown is today. The Italian Hall was the centerpiece of Los Angeles' Italian community for decades. It is on the corner of Cesar Chavez Ave. and Olvera Street. It's becoming the long-overdue Los Angeles Italian-American Museum. ANYBODY who lived in Los Angeles until 2000 remembers Little Joe's Italian Restaurant. People, even MrLA himself, questioned what an Italian restaurant was doing in Chinatown. The answer is that, at 102 years of age, it was there BEFORE there was a Chinatown. It had unquestionably great Italian food. One thing about the marinara sauces in L. A. Italian restaurants: they are fragrant and tomato soup-like that is unlike any other marinara sauces. Again, the types of tomatoes grown here plus the influence of Mexican cooks, with cilantro, played no small role. Little Joe's outlasted them all the great Italian restaurants of the '30's, '40's, '50's, and on to the present. Say LARUE'S, PERINO'S, PATSY D'AMORE'S, VILLA D'ITALIA to people who remember them and you'll see misty-eyed people who remember their great Italian food and glamour well. Oddly enough, the suburban Italian restaurants survived longer and better than the purely L. A. Italian places:





Petrillos, in San Gabriel and Glendora, since the early 1950's; Casa Bianca, still thriving in Eagle Rock, since 1955; Andre's in the Fairfax Shopping Center, across Farmer's Market, serving Italian food since 1962; Barone's, with three locations in the San Fernando Valley, since 1945.  The tasty mini-chain, Tomato Pie, in South Pasadena, Silver Lake, and Fairfax District serve great, diverse pizzas, not to mention the venerable Scarantino's  Italian Inn in Glendale, an institution in the Northeast Los Angeles area since 1967.





The two oldest Italian food establishments are still located in Los Angeles in the old Little Italy, which went from Chinatown northeast to Lincoln Heights, off the 5 Fwy. and south of Dodger Stadium. From the 1880's to the 1960's, Lincoln Heights was Little Italy, along with Little Croatia and Little Mexico. There stone houses all over Lincoln Heights, which Italian stonemasons built and lived in. They built 108 year-old Sacred Heart Catholic Church. They built the Di Biasi Building, across the street from the ancient/now hip, slick, and cool Airliner Lounge, where alt and indie rock bands play. MrLA, as a child and teenager, remembers seeing the Frank Pozzo Italian Sausage Company's building right next to the Starlight Movie Theater on North Broadway, the commercial heart of Lincoln Heights.





When Little Italy was at its height (World War I-World War II), there were wineries everywhere. By 1930, with Prohibition having been the law of the land for 10 years, wineries were all but a thing of the past in Los Angeles. The land became too valuable for factories, railroads, and diners to worry about preserving farms on the edge of the Los Angeles River. The San Antonio Winery held on supplying sacramental wine, then (after Prohibition) providing real wine to the Italians and French in Los Angeles (and those that love their cultures). For years, people would ask, "How can that winery still stay in Skid Row and expect to make a profit?" Make a profit it has and under the Riboli Familly, the San Antonio Winery is not only a major historical/cultural landmark, it's a thriving "port of entry" for people who wish to know about wine but don't have the money, gas, nor courage to travel out to the vineyards of Napa, Sonoma, or Temecula Valleys. The San Antonio Winery is the great-grandmother of all the boutique wine shops sprouting all over upscale Los Angeles. Their restaurant serves excellent Italian dishes, naturally paired with their wines. The Riboli Family truly welcomes their customers and sees that you all are treated as extensions of their family. MrLA and his friend, Michael, were unexpectedly given a private tour of the winery simply because they wanted to. Normally, such tours are scheduled far in advance and in large parties but MrLA literally stepped into an equipment check that the vintner (winemaker) for the San Antonio Winery was about to do before the dinner-commuter rush appeared.



If a fancy meal is not your thing or in your budget, turn back on one-block-long Lamar Street from the San Antonio Winery, turn left and half-block to your left, next to a decrepit smoke shop, sits Lanza's Italian Market, on North Main Street, literally a stone's throw east of the Los Angeles River, serving amazing, tasty, meaty, dripping, too-large-for-your-mouth-to-get-around-them sandwiches since 1926. Everything inside the market is time-traveling you to 1926, or at least, 1946. The deli counter looks as if it welcomed Truman on his campaign tour in '48. The sandwiches all come on an L. A.-style Italian bread that you have to taste to understand. MrLA has eaten Italian bread in major Italian-American cities, such as Chicago, San Francisco, and New Orleans but their bread doesn't have that fresh, spongy, doughy, springy, slightly fresh talcum-powder taste that old-time Los Angeles Italian bread has. Lanza's sandwiches are $4.75 and come with pickles so deli, they taste like they came from Canter's on Fairfax, but they didn't :-). The Italian Wedding Soup and Minestrone served there is heaping and cheap at $2.75, an enormous, delicious, satisfying, one-of-a-kind meal that takes you away to another world, a world that only exists at the remaining Little Italy eateries in Los Angeles: Lanza's Italian Market, the San Antonio Winery, and some of the most mouth-watering, gigantic sandwiches created in Los Angeles at the Eastside Market in current Chinatown/Echo Park.



This may not be kosher but anyone who can wangle an invitation to the annual Polenta Dinner at the mother church for Italians in Los Angeles, St. Peter's Church in Chinatown will discover one of Los Angeles' truly undiscovered culinary ecstasies. Screw Ford's Filling Station, Grace, and any "4 star" restaurant in this city, the polenta with sausage and marinara sauce is culinary orgasm, heaping plates full of this and other foods for the price of $25, benefitting the programs at the church. There was so much food left, complete polenta dinners, almost spilling out of their styrofoam containers, were being sold for $5.



Since pizza was the lure to get people to read about Italians in Los Angeles, to all those Easterners and Chicagoans, not to mention the "We Are All Northern Italians" of San Francisco and the good Neapolitans and Sicilians of Chicago: quit your whining and get aboard the reality that Los Angeles has some of the best pizza in the world, even inside Italy.
I can see the thousands of flexed hands flipping me off, Sicilian-style for saying such "heresy" but...................IT'S TRUE.


Pizza, pizza, EVERYWHERE in Los Angeles, and much of it is Italian food esctasy.

GREAT L. A.-STYLE PIZZA:

Michelangelo's Ristorante-www.michelangelo-silverlake.com

Casa Bianca-www.casabiancapizza.com

Petrillo's-www.menuism.com

El Morfi-www.elmorfigrill.com

Tomato Pie (Melrose/Fairfax and Silver Lake)-www.tomatopiepizzajoint.com

Johnnies-a chain throughout Los Angeles, predominantly Hollywood, West L. A., West Valley

Scarantino's Italian Inn-jamesscarantino@gmail.com

GREAT OLD-STYLE L. A. ITALIAN FOOD


Lanza's Italian Market-www.yelp.com/biz/lanza-market-los-angeles

San Antonio Winery-www.sanantoniowinery.com

Palermo's-www.palermorestaurant.net

Scarantino's Inn-www.scarantinos.com

Barone's Italian Restaurant-baronesfamousitalian.com

St. Peter's Italian Catholic Church-italianolosangeles.com

I Panini di Ambra-www.thepaninilady.com

Eastside Market-www.eastsidemarket.com

The Glory That Was, Is, Still Is, Maybe? Venice, CA

We, Americans! We, of the Walmart ("if it's bigger, cheaper, it's gotta be better") School of Life are the only people who dreamed of taking wonders of the world and copying them in 1/10 the time of the original and build it cheaper in America so that we, Americans, wouldn't have to leave our "bubbles" in life and experience the world: cheaply, safely, and American-ly (aka, "non-foreign", "just like us", antiseptic and conflict-free). America is the capital of the self-created Wonderland. Who else but an American, Walt Disney, would've dared a Disneyland, a self-contained world of worlds past, present, and future, all a 30 minute drive from a Los Angeles suburb and (until recently) worth the price of a ticket (not an airline ticket)?

Abbot Kinney, another wealthy American, that's who. Disney was still learning how to draw Mickey Mouse when Abbot Kinney created a wonderland that was so "virtual reality" that it's become it's own wonder of the world. Kinney called it "The Venice of the Americas"; the post office reads, "Venice, California" today. When an Angeleno (like myself) talks of going to Venice, a 20-minute drive down the 10 or the 405 from most anywhere is the longest one has to travel to sample the beach and the freaks on the boardwalk, not the pigeons at the Piazza San Marco nor a villa with the view of the Doge's Palace. Abbot Kinney had other ideas.

Mural of Abbot Kinney, Creator and Founder of Venice, CA

Out of marsh and sand, he used a portion of his millions to build a replica of Venice, Italy. There was a smaller scale replica of St. Mark's Cathedral but what would a Venice be without its canals: At one time, Venice of the Americas, CA had 10 miles of canals built out of the dunes and marsh of the Ballona Wetlands. Just as in Italy, Venice of the Americas had its Grand Canal, with bridges reminiscent of the Rialto. Grand shops lined the new thoroughfares of Pacific and Windward Avenues, leading to the sea, just as the ones in newer, grungier, non-touristy, more deadly suburban sections of Venice, Italy do. Kinney spared little expense in recreating Venice in America but it was definitely an American idea of Venice he created, not the original.

It was the early 1900's when Kinney designed and constructed Venice of the Americas. Like so many of his time and place, Kinney was a strict Protestant who, while he took drinks on occasion himself, was a prohibitionist, blaming drink for the problems of poverty and "moral decay". He was not going to have his Venice serve alcohol, unlike the centuries-old lifeblood of Italy. He was also Utopian, believing that a communal society where everyone knew their place and did their job would create a socially harmonious, dry, heaven on earth where no problems would be easily solved and the residents of Venice would be fed a steady diet of opera, lectures, educational courses, and grand theater. Hey! Sounded like fun..............and it did work for a while,.....................................

but not for long.

Like a good American of his time and place, Abbot Kinney was good at making money. He was one of the major tobacco importers of the United States. When he came to California and slept in the pure(?huh!) air of southern California, his chronic asthma was cured. He bought acreage in what is now Sierra Madre and laid the framework for that city. His wife not liking the area, he went in and bought land that he developed into "Santa Monica Heights". That became the what is now Ocean Park. He, then, bought the marshland that became "Venice of the Americas". Though he tried to make his cultural utopia by the sea, it lost $16,000 the first summer it opened, not in sales of home lots but in attractions. It was then that sword swallowers, three-headed women, and burlesque queens became the cultural offerings for the native and immigrant laborers that Kinney hired to build Venice and live there. Next came the roller coasters and the games where you shoot or throw balls to win and Venice was now like every amusement park in the United States, not a Venice of the Americas, or rather it was, like the Venetian and Bellagio Hotels in Las Vegas reflect the real Italy: sociology as sideshow.

It would be very mainstream media of me if I left out a very important part of Kinney: conservationist. He bought land in Santa Monica Canyon to create the U. S.'s first legally protected forest. He conducted tests to see if eucalyptus trees would grow in southern California. He conducted the first official governmental survey of the Yosemite Valley and also of Sioux villages in the northern Plains. He was on a first-name basis with John Muir and Helen Hunt Jackson, the author of Ramona, a book that practically created Los Angeles but that's another story for another time.

Most of the Venice canals began to stink, just as Kinney's vision of Venice of the Americas did. In 1929, 2/3 of the canals were paved over. The rest were allowed to create small islands of simple two-room cottages where Venice's workers lived. For years, Venice sank deeper and deeper into a pit, both literally and economically. Some of L. A.'s earliest gangs formed in Venice and are still there today. Oil wells churned and spewed gas in the air; transients, prostitutes, and drug addicts were drawn to Venice to enact their own "Summering at the Shore"; cheap rents and cheap people were everywhere. My grandmother reminded me of the rope that divided Venice Beach: one side for whites (the side closest to Manhattan Beach); the other side (closest to Santa Monica) for everyone else.

Starting with Goldie Hawn and Matt "The Simpsons" Groening in the 1980's, celebrities and the wealthy moved into the Venice Canals. True to Venice's own nature, the gangbangers and the poor didn't all go away. They stayed almost side by side with the wealthy new neighbors. The new neighbors didn't go away. Instead, Venice is truly a creation of its own. Someday, somewhere, some 21st Century Abbot Kinney will create a Venice to emulate Venice, CA.

"Baywatch" and every other beach cop show since show the bikini'd rollerbladers and the freak vendors on the Venice Boardwalk. Los Angeles Magazine sings the praises of Rebecca's or Il Pane but the glories of Venice are the way people of different races, classes, life experiences, lifestyles, and jail records all interact and make Venice a fascinating, weird, if not safe place to hang out and live.

Here are current views of Venice: a little, teeny, tiny glimpse of Abbot Kinney's Venice of the Americas, a glimpse of Barrio Venice, and the Venice Canals, in all of their unique beauty.

By the way, don't miss Abbot Kinney Blvd., through the heart of Venice. One of a kind gelato, day spas worthy of the French Riviera (at Barrio Venice prices), Roosterfish (Venice's only gay bar and one of the last reminders of Venice being one of the earliest So Cal communities to be gay friendly), teahouses and art galleries galore, not to mention amazing architecture of various styles, especially taking old, discarded items and fashioning them into stunning buildings. Words alone cannot describe the funky glamour of Abbot Kinney Blvd. or of Venice, California. Come and find your own words!

The Big Orange-Part One

September is a majorly busy month for MrLA. For one, September 11 is my birthday. I'm now in my 18th year of celebrating my birthday for the entire month. As anyone who is MrLA's age (born 1959, do the math!) can understand, Einstein was right: the more time one lives, the more warp speed time passes. It seems like there are 1,000,000 + 1 choices for anyone to choose and live by. And, so it's been for me this month. Lots of fun, lots to do, lots to fulfill me.

Last Wednesday, under the guise of "lots of fun" and "lots to fulfill me", I convinced my friend, Amy, to take her on a cruise to a land that existed long ago and far away. New York is The Big Apple. Chambers of commerce and LA Times reporters tried calling Los Angeles The Big Orangebut it never caught on. Anyone younger than I am might say, "Who cares?" but there likely would've been no Los Angeles had there not been oranges.

The Spanish who founded Los Angeles might well have been the first ones to call their new settlement, La gran naranja (The Big Orange). Because one of the reasons for creating Los Angeles was to establish a settlement for the Spanish Empire, the settlers needed to open a Gelson's or Trader Joe's. Had they existed, that would've ended my post. Since food had to be grown back then, the Spanish grew the things they knew best back home and in the other areas of their empire:

pears, apples, peaches, sugar cane, plums, lemons, wine grapes, and ORANGES.

From the moment, the horses, oxen, donkeys, and settlers said, "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!" after months of hot, dusty, grimy journey, oranges represented the good life for Californians. Fresh-squeezed orange juice was the order of the day from then on and few things spelled Southern California more than the orange. To the Americans that came slowly but steadily through the next 50, 60 years, oranges were like the best sex and the most divine orgasm (oops, one-track mind :-) rolled into one: a delicacy and an experience beyond description. Then William Workman and William Wolfskill had to "throw a monkey wrench" on the whole thing and turn it into the McDonald's of fruit by being the first large-scale growers of oranges in California. They even had the gall to pack them in iced boxes and ship them off to other parts of the United States by train. Those "delicacies" woke up the "meat and potatoes" diets of the United States and truly created what the Gold Rush of 1849 had started: the idea that California was the Golden State because of the climate and the fruits, vegetables, and geography that you could only find there, nowhere else. Gold was the orange ranch that could turn you into a millionaire like Workman and Wolfskill and you'd live the life of an emperor, an Orange Emperor!

The rest, as they say, is history!

The Orange Empire, it was called. That was the ad copy given to tourists the world over who could ride a streetcar from Downtown Los Angeles to Riverside, then San Bernardino, then back to Los Angeles, most of the way smelling orange blossoms, seeing orange groves for hours on end, and eating delicious sweet fruit or drinking freshly-squeezed juice at roadside stands. The entire American habit of drinking orange juice for breakfast came out of the advertising that said orange juice from California made you strong, happy, and was just plain delicious, so why wouldn't you want to drink this "food from the gods". Los Angeles County, until 1950, was the largest orange-growing producer in the United States. Sunkist was created here and made California oranges synonymous with sunshine, Mediterranean climate, having it all in California, and living the good life, and health.

When I was a child, the Orange Show in San Bernardino was as much a Southern California ritual as the Rose Parade or the L. A. County Fair. There was an Orange Queen and there were floats as intricate and as spectacular as those in the Rose Parade, even though orange groves were becoming vestiges of the past, "things that aren't there anymore. There was a reason why the county was named Orange County.

I'd always wanted to visit that Los Angeles, that Southern California that I was too late for. So Amy and I visited two of the many communities that, if oranges didn't build them, they made them prosper: Whittier and Fullerton.

Whittier is approx. 20 miles southeast of Downtown Los Angeles. It was an agricultural community founded by Quakers. In 1907, when Whittier was laid out and incorporated, it was as rural as rural could get. Even a family named Nixon farmed there, with the middle son, Richard, doing everything he could to get away from farming. He grew up to be President of the United States. While Whittier grew exponentially, as did everywhere in Southern California, it's as if 3 Whittiers existed: the newer suburbs, looking as if tract-home seeds were spread and cookie-cutter, same floorplan, no-character Home Depot-approved houses sprang up; the area on and just off of Whittier Blvd., from the San Gabriel River and 605 Fwy. to the Orange County Line looked as if Nixon were still Vice-President under Eisenhower and 1960 were still in the future. Never had I seen an entire area look as if it had been frozen in time more so than traveling large stretches of Whittier Blvd. to Fullerton. Then, there's Uptown Whittier, where the city began and one can see the 1907 village that grew wheat and oranges that was Whittier: Craftsmen houses, many with orange trees; 1920's multi-story Spanish colonial banks, shops, and the Hoover Hotel. The 1920's street lamps are there, intact. The newest thing in Uptown seems to be the "Public Parking" sign that the Harry Truman for President campaign would've seen in 1948. To be sure, Uptown has a mix of the funky, grungy, pretty, sleepy, and the party-hearty but it's all housed in a neighborhood that someone in a covered wagon in 1910 could still recognize. What they wouldn't recognize would be the Golden Triangle, one of two Burmese restaurants in Southern California.

The Golden Triangle is a portal to a tasty, sensual, mouthwatering, sultry Burma of 50 years ago, a paradise that offered a tropical feast of the senses. Anyone familiar with Indian, Thai, and Chinese food will see elements of them in Burmese food: fruit-tinged curries, sticky rice, coconut milk sauces, tropical fruit shakes, fragrant, subtle teas, pungent, garlicky, lemony, spicy fish, lamb, goat, and chicken dishes all with Indian-style flatbreads and even "falafel", fried fava bean patties wrapped in phyllo dough. As if Burmese food weren't enough, the owner's Thai wife features even more Thai dishes, with a smattering of Laotian dishes there, too. Lunch is a bargain at less than $7.00 for any combination plate there. An incredible deal to sample one of the least-known but most sophisticated cuisines of the world! And, it's in Uptown Whittier!

After showing Amy around the Craftsman homes and Whittier College, a highly-regarded junior college with an Ivy League reputation, its buildings are what a Hollywood film of the '30's would've pictured the typical college to look like: stucco, white, ivy-covered and vaguely Mission Revival. It's school of law is one of the most famous in the country. It is the same school of law where that boy who hated farming, Richard Nixon, became a lawyer, met his wife, Pat, there, and headed out of Whittier for good to became president.

By this time, 3:00 was rolling by and there mas more Big Orange/Orange Empire to cover. Next stop, Fullerton!

Fullerton is so Orange Empire that one its most elegant building is still the Sunkist Exchange Building, where orange farmers sold their crops and Sunkist made them rich. It's elegant, sexy Spanish colonial building with wrought-iron grill doors has the words "Sunkist Exchange Building" chiseled into the top of it's doorway. It is now a public art gallery, displaying any and all art made by local residents.

Fullerton has done a great job of harking back to it's Orange Empire days by having the downtown area saving and restoring it's World War I/Roaring Twenties buildings while, surprisingly, offering some avant-garde eateries and, who knew Fullerton had a long-time, highly-developed theater and art scene going on. In October, there is a month-long festival of the arts in Fullerton: dance, theater, film, and art exhibits going on all month.

London may have its tea time at 4 but I'm sure few Britons have experienced tea at the Tea Fusion, a tea bar that looks like a club in Hollywood, except you can tie one on on Oolong and white teas rather than beer and vodka shots. The whole decor and vibe owe more to the trendiest such places opening up in Downtown Los Angeles but it is in Fullerton, where you can have dozens of varities of teas from several countries in Asia plus freshly-made mochi ice cream, creme brulee, and other great accompaniments to the phenomenal teas. I defy anyone to try the white tea and not become a committed teaholic!

Already, Fullerton is the first Amtrak stop if you leave Los Angeles and head to San Diego. It is also a Metrolink stop, so, if you live in the San Fernando Valley, you can take the Orange Line to the Red Line to Metrolink or Amtrak to the 1930 Pueblo Indian-inspired Santa Fe/Amtrak Station and easily walk into your own Orange Empire tour. If you truly want to experience the Los Angeles that made Los Angeles grow from 50,000+ inhabitants in 1880 to 1.2 million in 1930, a Big Orange/Orange Empire tour will let you know what the people saw (and what they created) when they came out here to stake their own claim to the good life.

No Big Orange/Orange Empire Tour is complete without visiting the town that was so essential to the Orange Empire that its very name says it all: The City of Orange. If you've never visited The Orange Circle, then you're not a true Angeleno.

More on what makes that city so important to any understanding of Los Angeles and Southern California, along with great restaurants, the best tea room in Orange County, coffeehouses, art galleries, antique shops galore, and Chuck Jones.

As our governor used to say in his movies (what else is more L. A.?):

"Hasta la vista, Baby!"

Happy Belated Birthday, L. A.!

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Latino Heritage Month is well underway.  Independences have been celebrated.  Excuses for celebrating good Latino music, liquor, and hot people continue! I was hip, slick, and cool enough to begin my blog by posting my first post about Los Angeles on the city's 234th birthday. I had a beautiful tribute all set up (which you will see in a minute :-)) and, after 1.5 painstaking hours, I lost it all when my server decided to get hardening of the arteries and freeze.

Since I believe in second (and third and 87,659th) chances, here is my tribute to the city of my birth, youth, and middle age:

Happy Clumpeanos, L. A., El-Lay, 80 Suburbs in Search of A City, The Big Orange (incomprehensible to anyone under 40), Land of No Culture and Where NoOne Walks, Entertainment Capital of the World, the World City, el Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula:

LOS ANGELES

The city where Calvin Klein model lookalikes climb up mountains, pubs. city staircases (and over each other :-)) in search of a careerhttp://www.facebook.com/MrLAToursHappy Cumpleanos, El-Lay! and where selling and buying multimillion dollar homes is as "whatever" as shopping at Walmart, was, 234 years ago,  a Tongva Nation village, "Yang-na". Yang-na was laid out in four smaller communities governed by a chief. The villagers cut oak and cottonwood trees from Elysian Park and the Los Angeles River; used that same river water to grow corn, squash, and other vegetables; hunted rabbit and deer that lived where goodtimers splatter beer on each other for $35 a pop at Dodger Beach; protected themselves from bear and mountain lions that lived nearby. What they couldn't protect themselves from was Antonio de Bucareli.

Antonio de Bucareli was a man, like fewer of us in America today, who had to please his boss to keep his job. Antonio's boss was King Charles III of Spain. Charles hired Antonio to carry out what he wanted in his part of the Spanish Empire called New Spain (what we know today as Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Costa Rica....not to mention Florida and everything from Texas to the Pacific Ocean). Charles definitely knew his real estate! Antonio de Bucareli was managing those lands for Charles. By 1780, Charles knew the Russians (even then called by non-Russians, especially non-Russian kings, as the "Evil Empire") were settling on the west coast of North America. Charles didn't want anyone cutting in on HIS territory (never mind that his ancestors killed native Americans to get HIS territory, it was HIS :-)). Charles told Antonio to get people up to the Pacific coast to keep the Russians out as soon as possible. Antonio palmed the job off to one of HIS men, Felipe de Neve, who was already building new towns, new churches, and new communities along the Pacific.

Rather than recruiting Spain's greatest families, minds, and movers and shakers to carry out Charles' plan, Felipe de Neve practically chained and held guns to a poor, isolated, illiterate group of racially-mixed farmers and craftsmen from the high deserts of what is now Sinaloa and Sonora, Mexico to make a 5-month trek across the Sonoran Desert, through Arizona, the Colorado River and the Imperial Valley, leaving corpses bleaching in the sun, until they arrived at the San Gabriel Mission in August, 1781. After eating off the orange, pear, peach, plum, and other orchards, feeding off beef, mutton, being tended to for wounds and diseases caught on the trail, the 44 families (+1 baby born on the way) making the trek gathered their oxen and horses, escorted by Spanish soldiers along what is now Mission Road in San Gabriel and Alhambra, Alhambra Avenue and Valley Boulevard past Lincoln Park and L. A. County-USC Medical Center, crossing the full, lush, wooded river to the riverbank on the other side (what is today the train tracks at Union Station). The heads of the families said their prayers of thanks to God, on behalf of their families and the Charles III of Spain.

Owing to the Catholic custom of saints days on the calendar and naming everyone and everything for a saint, the naming (renaming, but the Tongva were not consulted) of the new Spanish settlement was named after Our Lady, Queen of Angels, of Porciuncula (a city in Italy where this virgin was said to appear). So, on September 4, 1781, one of the most beautiful, desired, improbable, spectacular, cosmopolitan, avant-garde, maligned, degraded, raped, underestimated cities in the world turned from Yang-na into Los Angeles, the city that New York and San Francisco never forgave.

Families with surnames such as Rojas, Villavicencio and Quintero turned the earth and built the first European-style homes in the area. The Avila Adobe, on Olvera Street was built 37 years after the city was founded but is an excellent and rare survivor of the earliest years of the city, when the flag and language of Spain spread throughout California. If any of you trace your families to those 44 that founded the city, I would love to hear from you.

To you, Los Angeles! Para ti, Los Angeles! Salud, amor y pesestas y el tiempo para gozarlos! Health, love, and money, and the time to enjoy it all! You and your inhabitants have been doing that since September 4, 1781. Que viva!!!