Edendale: Chapter 3
UNION STATION, 1947, Courtesy of Los Angeles Public Library
By Phyl M. Noir
UNION STATION
This is the third chapter of “Edendale.”
Justina Anna put on the mouse suit she had worn at her wedding. She tied a black band around one arm of it.
She looked at herself in the mirror and pinned a black felt hat to her black hair with bobby pins and pulled the little net veil over her face. She put on white cotton gloves and lifted her suitcases by their bone handles, and walked down the green check carpeted hotel stairs.
The air was balmy, and the sky looked like light shooting off metal. Butterfly palms with orange fruit grew on each side of the hotel’s front doors. Red azaleas grew in the hotel yard. Mature water oaks cooled the street with their deep shade. Read more
Honey Climbs The Stairs Of Darkness
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
The term “the Commoners” derived from the ancient rights English peasants had in large areas of land called Commons to graze their animals, gather fire wood, and gather hay, and these rights are related to the common law right of all people to walk across privately owned land.
Between 1760 and 1820, village after village lost its common law rights. Marxists called these losses a case of class robbery. Henry VIII obtained laws that required any landless peasant to be put to work, and the consequent acts were the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and Capitalism. 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.
