Important Setback for Homeless Housing
Architect’s rendering of proposed Lorena Plaza, 3407 E. 1st Street, Boyle Heights
Leslie Evans
The Los Angeles City Council’s Planning and Land Use Committee (PLUM) on August 16 rejected a plan from the highly regarded A Community of Friends (ACOF) to build a 49-unit affordable income apartment house in Boyle Heights, half of whose tenants would be mentally ill homeless.
The contested property, a one-acre empty lot at 3407 E. First Street at the corner of Lorena Street in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles, is a one-acre empty lot owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. To the west is the Evergreen Cemetery. To the east is El Mercado, a combined market, restaurant, nightclub, and craft store. Read more
ESCAPING THE RAT PACK AT EL COYOTE
By Bob Vickrey
It seems that just about every legendary Los Angles restaurant our monthly lunch club has visited in the last couple of years, staff members invariably claim Frank Sinatra and his “Rat Pack” once hung out there.
So, fearing an uprising from our readership about overworking the “Rat Pack” theme, I decided to call ahead to our next destination and make sure Sinatra and his entourage had never held target practice in the back room with their plate of chicken enchiladas. When the host of El Coyote failed to understand my “Rat Pack” reference, I realized he had perhaps confused me with the city health inspector. Nevertheless, I knew we had found our spot for August. Read more
The Affordable Housing Crisis Won’t Be Over Soon
Mija Town Homes, 4501 S. Figueroa, Los Angeles 90037. One of the all-too-few affordable housing complexes in Los Angeles.
Leslie Evans
A daunting complex of causes stands behind Los Angeles’ crisis-level lack of affordable housing. Too few houses and too expensive ones, along with very low wages, are the single biggest causes of the city’s huge homeless population. According to Professor Dennis P. Culhane, an authority on homelessness at the University of Pennsylvania, “It’s not personal vulnerabilities of drug use or illness driving homelessness. It’s a lack of access to housing. If there were lots of available housing, all of these vulnerabilities would be hidden.” (8-2-2017 LA Times) Read more
DODGERS’ MANIA HOOKS A RELUCTANT FAN
Dodgers Pitcher Clayton Kershaw
By Bob Vickrey
The Dodgers were down 4-1 to the Diamondbacks in the bottom of the ninth inning with no outs and no one on base. That ominous situation made me wonder why I was still standing in my living room holding the remote control instead of going to bed.
But since I’m not really much of a baseball fan, the larger question was why I was watching the Dodgers game in the first place. In recent weeks, that’s also what my friends have wanted to know. “What’s gotten into Bob?” they ask. They know I’ve always claimed that watching baseball is about as exciting as watching grass grow.
So, just as I started to click off the game and head toward the bedroom, right fielder Yasiel Puig hit a leadoff single and the Dodgers’ crowd slowly began to stand and cheer as if they had seen this scenario before. Read more
More than 120,000 Students Are Homeless in LA County
Leslie Evans
The number seems shocking. Even impossible. The total homeless in LA County from the January 2017 official count only came to 57,000. But the number is real and actually understates the total, as it does not include UCLA, USC, or the Claremont colleges.
The disparity is because the county’s K-12 system, the Community College District, and the Cal State University system have a more inclusive definition of homelessness. The official counts by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority are run under the federal HUD rules, which include only people living in a homeless shelter, or a place not intended for human habitation. The school districts include students with no permanent address, sleeping on someone’s couch or in motel or garage. Read more
LUNCH CLUB BRINGS ALONG A PROFESSOR
The Proud Bird restaurant reopens. All photos: Barry Stein.
By Bob Vickrey
The recent reopening of The Proud Bird Restaurant on Aviation Boulevard near LAX offered a different kind of experience for our monthly lunch group with its reimagined “Food Bazaar” and interactive aviation exhibits.
As we entered the open-air food hall with a giant replica of a P-40 Flying Tiger hovering above us from the vaulted ceiling, I thought perhaps they had misspelled the word “bizarre.” Communal tables, lounge seating, and the Mile High Club Bar surround the open kitchen area. The presentation appeared to be “Snoopy and the Red Baron buzz Grand Central Smorgasbord” with a little dash of “Admirals Club” thrown in for good measure. Read more
Toilet Crisis on Skid Row
Leslie Evans
In January and February, 24 people from 15 organizations, calling themselves the Los Angeles Central Providers Collaborative, conducted an audit of toilets available to the homeless in Downtown’s 50-block Skid Row. Their shocking findings became headline news when they released their 64-page report, “No Place to Go,” in late June. For a nighttime unsheltered population they listed at 1,777, they found only 9 working public toilets, all of them at a single location: the Midnight Mission shelter, 601 S. San Pedro Street. This is eight blocks from the northeast and northwest corners of Skid Row and 9 blocks from the southeast border. A long walk at night. The number of estimated users was taken from the 2016 homeless count, and is today more than 2,000. Read more
DINAH’S EVOKES DINER MEMORIES OF YESTERYEAR
Photo by Barry Stein
By Bob Vickrey
Entering Dinah’s Restaurant brought back youthful memories of my hometown diner where I hung out with friends and routinely argued about how much each of us owed after the bill arrived.
Back in the day, my evening hangout was Angel’s Grill in Pasadena, Texas (yes, we also had a Pasadena.) The place had red-pleated vinyl booths and a mini-juke box on every table—to which we repeatedly fed nickels and dimes to hear Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” and the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.” The seasoned blue-haired waitresses patiently tolerated our excessive behavior while we stared at the cute girl with a ponytail in the corner booth who looked like Sandra Dee. (But on second glance, we realized all the girls in that booth had ponytails and looked like Sandra Dee.)
Our monthly lunch club group thought a trip to Dinah’s Family Restaurant on Sepulveda Boulevard might rekindle some of the “diner” nostalgia of our past—hopefully, without the ensuing traditional battle over the bill. Read more
Lionel Rolfe’s Letter to the World
By LIONEL ROLFE
Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia, Bulgaria. Photo is by Lionel Rolfe
I am a retired journalist in Los Angeles and book author who wants the world to respond to America under the would-be dictatorship of Donald Trump, a man who is out to destroy this country and the world—all for the sake of Trump’s power and money.
It is important to explain that the sudden appearance of fascism presented by Trump was not unexpected. Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel during the Great Depression about a fascist government in the ‘20s called “It Can Happen Here.” America has always had to deal with a nativist kind of fascism. Its always been a powerful minority and remains so under Trump in this day and age. Read more
Second Wave Feminists Get Together in New York – Still Feisty After All These Years
Carole DeSaram, left, and Barbara Love, organizers, during the reunion of second-wave feminists at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. Photos by Tequila Minsky
BY MARY REINHOLZ
The pictures flashing across a wall inside Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village showed icons of the women’s liberation movement from the last half of the 20th century: famed activists like Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Shirley Chisholm and Flo Kennedy, all of them taking aim at varied forms of gender inequality in America. Many used their printed words as weapons.
A couple of venerable speakers, who lived through the movement’s early triumphs and disappointments, delivered stinging attacks against Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States. Kate Millett, 82, author of the best selling “Sexual Politics,” a 1970 critique of misogyny she found in esteemed works by male literary lions such as D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer, needed assistance in walking to the open microphone but sniped at Trump in her opening remarks. Read more
Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
