• Los Angeles’ Arts & Crafts jewels are in … Garvanza?

    LAist‘s "Neighborhood Project" feature included a report this past week on a part of Northeast LA that I’m not at all familiar with – I always assumed that was Highland Park – and found extremely interesting:

    Once the heart of the Arts and Crafts movement in Los Angeles and a
    bohemian artists’ colony, Garvanza is today one of Northeast LA’s
    hidden treasures seeking to retain its turn of the century identity
    while creating a liveable neighborhood for the twenty-first century.
    Although many consider Garvanza to be just a part of Highland Park,
    this small and hilly area brimming with historic buildings has more
    than enough charm and character needed to stand out on its own. Named
    for the wild sweet peas (garbanzo beans) that used to grow on the
    hillsides, Garvanza itself is much like a hearty wildflower, blooming
    stubbornly amidst the dominant concreted landscape, unabashedly
    colorful and pleasantly surprising to discover.

    Check out the whole story for plenty of photographs and maps and a reasonably complete history of the region.

  • how to live within history – not on top of it

    This is one of the most delightful things I’ve read in a newspaper since long before the current war began, and it’s almost enough to distract me for a few minutes from Kurt Vonnegut’s death, the rising toll of wounded and killed overseas and the idiocracy we seem to have saddled ourselves with in Washington.

    For today’s Los Angeles Times, William Deverell, a history professor at USC, has written a quiet and beautifully moving paean to his home, his neighborhood and how he has learned to "live amid history:"

    Houses and neighborhoods seduce us. They always have. What
    starts with limitations — cost and location — often blossoms into
    habits of living and cherished memories. Our love affair began in
    Pasadena eight years ago.

    It was the fall of 1999. We knew we
    wanted to be close to Caltech, where I was teaching at the time, and
    near the Huntington Library, where my wife, Jenny, works. So we drew an
    imaginary rectangle on a map of Pasadena, hoping that somewhere inside
    this space we would find our perfect home and our perfect neighborhood.

    When we first saw it, the house hid behind 20 years of benign neglect.
    It was a Mission Revival with old wooden awnings sagging atop wrought
    iron braces. In the yard, worn-out grass fought a losing battle with
    brown spots and weeds. Here and there, a few succulents hung on.

    Built
    in 1923, the house was tired. The bathrooms needed work — a lot of
    work. Every window had heavy iron bars on it. An apartment attached to
    the garage was decrepit, and a freestanding building out back, with an
    incinerator plunked down in a corner, was a mess.

    The owner
    had been in the leather business in downtown Los Angeles. He had
    retired years earlier and brought his inventory home with him. Bolts of
    leather stood stacked in rooms and corners of the house: raw leather,
    finished leather and leather in some stage in-between. A couple of
    rooms were off-limits because we couldn’t open the doors; leather was
    in the way.

    Our real estate agent apologized to us on the sidewalk as we left.

    "I really like it," Jenny whispered to me.