Honey Gives A Guest A Chance To Write About A New Jersey Utopia
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Editor’s note: Honey is offering Tammy Williams-Anderson her column this month in order to learn that some tried to build a utopia in an unlikely place – New Jersey.
WAS THE HOMESTEADS OF ROOSEVELT A UTOPIA, AND WHAT HAPPENED TO IT?
From personal collection (no date): The home of the Fuchs family in Jersey Homesteads, Roosevelt, New Jersey. Photograph taken about 1941.
Urban Planning attracts idealists. Idealists are always looking for utopia – the opportunity to make improvements in the lives and environments of humans. As an adjective the word utopian is defined as,”Excellent, but existing only in fancy or theory; ideal.” Read more
Edendale: Chapter 2
Vero Beach, 1945 –courtesy Los Angeles Public Library
By Phyl M. Noir
Vero Beach, Corralitas & Venice
After the wedding ceremony, Dr. Bissell snapped a photograph of Sid in his dress uniform. Justina wore a suit with cloth-covered buttons and held Sid’s arm. The suit was a light brown, which Mrs. Bissell called “mousse,” and Justina understood her to have said, “mouse.” Mrs. Bissell wore a Prussian blue suit with a straight skirt and fitted jacket, a hat that looked like a soup bowl with turkey feathers coming from its inverted bottom, and the hideous fur boa that ended in terrible little animal heads with glass eyes. The women wore white cotton socks and saddle shoes because the War Defense Board had commandeered first silk and then nylon, so they did not wear dress shoes and stockings. Read more
How the LA Times After a Hundred-Year Love Affair with the City of Vernon Decided It Really Hated the Place All Along
A more balanced look at the industrial town’s history and at some of the (often ill considered) proposals for solving the Vernon problem.
By Leslie Evans
Vernon, California, is an odd little town. Five square miles of meat packing plants, warehouses, and industrial enterprises where 50,000 people work during the day while only 91, belonging to just 23 families, live at night. There are only 26 homes within the city’s borders, virtually all occupied by city employees or relatives of the long-serving members of the city council or other city officials.
Vernon lies on the southeast side of Downtown Los Angeles, bounded roughly by Washington Blvd. on the north and Slauson on the south. Its main arteries are Santa Fe Avenue, Soto Street, and Bandini Blvd., the last best known for the fertilizer company of the same name. Read more
Huntington Exhibits Honors A Madman
By LIONEL ROLFE
For me, one of the great unanswered puzzles about Charles Bukowski, the bard of San Pedro, was his love of classical music. I assumed it was because he was born in Europe. And after a visit to the “Poet on the Edge” exhibit at the Huntington Library in San Marino, I can say most probably that was the case.
This was one of many riddles about the great poet and novelist the exhibit answered. 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.
