Curbed LA: All Posts by Tess BarkerLove where you live2016-09-08T10:00:03-07:00https://la.curbed.com/authors/tessbarker1570337/rss2016-09-08T10:00:03-07:002016-09-08T10:00:03-07:00Time traveling on the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway
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<p>How to find snow and other unexpected things in the California desert</p> <p>A robotic phalanx of windmills marches in place outside of Palm Springs. This crop of turbines in otherwise naked soil is the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm. Wind is harvested on those huge spinning blades. Wind that is fast and hard because there is nothing to stop it. Wind that shoves my car to either side of the lane as I grip the wheel. This is what I came for, to be overpowered and wicked dry by the desert. In Los Angeles, it’s never so hot that I have to stop running. I need to be scorched into inertia. Pool water feels best when it’s your only option. Cucumber water tastes crisper when there is sand at the back of your throat. You come to Palm Springs, largely, so you can escape it.</p>
<p id="WRuv7y">"You’re going to freeze." warns a woman at the Valley Station at the bottom of the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. I’ve passed this place several times on my way into writing retreats or coming home from vodka-soaked girl’s trips. It’s a gondola in the middle of nowhere off Highway 111 that climbs the sheer cliffs of Chino Canyon. I don’t know where I thought the tram would take me. Maybe a good view to more desert nowhere. Certainly not the freezing cold. I am wearing shorts and a t-shirt. This felt like too much on the walk from the car.</p>
<p id="P43wYG">The Aerial Tramway was conceived on a high noon in 1935, when electrical engineer Francis F. Crocker was driving down Highway 111 with a friend. Uncomfortably hot, he looked up at the snowy peak of Mount San Jacinto, the way a kid eyes ice cream that isn’t theirs. "I want to go up there where it’s nice and cool."</p>
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<p id="31JpP7">Crocker wanted to go up there immediately. So he spent the next 28 years making it happen.</p>
<p id="BmhQYK">Crocker hatched an idea to build a train in the sky. He teamed up with O. Earl Coffman, a prominent figure in Palm Springs, which had only recently been habituated to by white people. (The region’s Native Americans had been decimated by smallpox 46 years prior.) Crocker and Coffman rallied the desert people around their idea. Then World War II broke out and the people forgot. Crocker pressed on. Through peace, the Korean War, peace again, a delay in groundbreaking—Crocker remained singularly focused on this idea he’d had in 1935 (which was really just small talk about the weather).</p>
<p id="WCK2gz">By the time construction commenced in 1960, the use of helicopters had caught up with Crocker's plan. Long before wind turbines were planted on the other side of the highway, these propellers descended into the desert. Their claws were laden with material for the tram’s concrete pillars.</p>
<p id="n1czD3">Cooper’s hawks, golden eagles, and violet-green swallows are some of the wild animals Palms Springs visitors—now celebrities in hiding and the nouveau riche hoping to be seen—could see when Crocker’s tram opened in 1963. He had finally realized his dream to ride to the top of Mount San Jacinto. He never walked completely away from it. Until his death in the early 1990s, Crocker was known to regularly stop by for a ride on the toy he’d needed for so long.</p>
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<p id="dAKddr">In Palm Springs, the still mornings keep the mountains clear. The quiet night sky keeps the stars visible. The shops keep everyone busy. On the main drag, breezy sarongs tempt, everywhere, as they wave on sale racks. There is an entire store devoted to moccasins. And one for paintings of golf courses. And one for organic dog food. Sofas in showrooms are called "pieces"—beautiful, modern works that are curated by a dealer and serve no real function other than to make you wish you were the type of person who could afford them. Everything looks more attractive in the desert because nothing, really, should be here at all.</p>
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<p id="I9yJZ4">There’s a gift shop at the Valley Station and I want everything in it. The comically oversized mug that’s shaped like a coiled rattlesnake—but my coffee would get cold. The long feathered earrings—but I have enough earrings. The painted rock that says "Be the type of person your dog thinks you are," but my dog would never guess that I'd rather be left alone in this room full of crap than with my thoughts or stuck talking to the other tourists.</p>
<p id="7wJ8Wm">As we wait in the boarding area, a few other passengers and I stare through a plexiglass cutout in the floor. Here, we have a view of the live mechanisms that move below us, steel rope feeds methodically into yellow, blue, and red gear wheels. This same cable shoots out of the building and up the long chasm outside.</p>
<p id="IPAgAr">It is crowded when we step onto the tram. The doors close, but there is plenty of air from the open windows that line the interior. The car begins to ascend. A recorded voiceover warns us to hang on. The floor rotates slowly so we can consume a gradual panoramic view as we are lifted. Our hands grip bars on the stationary walls and slip, over and over again, away from us.</p>
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<p id="BksBvZ">We feel safe because the doors are locked tight, but actually, there have been disasters up here. In 1984, a woman died when a shock absorber snapped and a 30-pound piece of metal came smashing through a car window. In 2003, one of these steel cables broke and 50 passengers were stranded midair for four and a half hours.</p>
<p id="79DoAi">"The car may rock as we switch cables," warns our virtual guide. It does. We all grab the safety bars harder, like they’ll save us if the cord snaps. Stretched out ahead is the desert floor. Cracked across the baked dirt is the San Andreas Fault, which we usually try to forget about because it threatens, in the back of our minds, to cleave the state in two.</p>
<p id="Qly4xt">The narration tells us to look out for a waterfall. There isn't any water. Instead, a stream of bright vegetation paints the tan earth where the water used to be. The promise is there, still, that we are headed where there is innate life, where it’s nice and cool.</p>
<p id="QeORLj">There is plenty of borrowed water below us in Palm Springs. The city is turquoise with swimming pools and fountains and damp with mists that blow delicately from hoses as you wait with a cocktail for brunch. The golf courses are saturated with a uniform green. There is a placid denial, everywhere, that water is in short supply, that anything could threaten the slow leisure of this indistinguishable perfect day. The plastic monotony here is both comforting and a little sickening, the way chain restaurants are when I’ve been away from home for too long.</p>
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<p id="RfRPGc">But wildness also charges constantly through the carefully planned strip malls and outside of the steakhouses where the menus never change. The soundless hills that surround the city are a license to dress loud and party louder. Late at night, barefoot women stumble through karaoke songs. The young bars—the new ones, the gay ones, the hip ones that serve good dessert—light up with last call shenanigans. It’s too hot to sleep and too easy to order another round. We are all here because we want to get away. And up in the San Jacinto Mountains a couple miles away, bobcats stalk their prey in a frigid patch of forest.</p>
<p id="iO31MT">The alpine air hits at my bare legs when we step off the tram at the Mountain Station. Pine trees blanket the hillside. It feels like we’ve traveled not just 6,000 feet, but through time and into winter. It reminds me of a commercial for Santa’s Village in San Bernardino that played ad nauseum on the shows I watched as a kid: over bad footage of reindeer and rides, a voiceover promised, "You can see Santa in the summertime!" The kids here run up and down the uneven concrete steps that lead to paths and vistas. There are coin-operated telescopes. No one uses them, the view from our bare eyes is fine. The dichotomy between the wooded mountain we stand on and the blank desert below informs each vista with a pleasant sharpness.</p>
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</div> <q class="left">It feels like we’ve traveled not just 6,000 feet, but through time and into winter.</q> </div></div>
<p id="m63G3L">"The Accidental Sea" is what the basin to the west of Palm Springs is called, according to an informational sign on the ledge. In 1905, the Colorado River swelled so full that its contents spilled into the region, creating a temporary lake.</p>
<p id="u8qXZK">The water is gone, but Palm Springs is still a sea of accidents. Creatures swim together whose paths would never otherwise cross. Every Thursday at the weekly street fair on Palm Canyon Drive, hand-painted lamps illuminate a booth across from a boutique full of sequined drag queen dresses and a table full of Donald Trump supporters. In a tract home on a cul-de-sac near the aerospace museum, Cheeta, an octogenarian chimpanzee who starred in several Tarzan movies, lives with his grandson Jeeter and their human handler Dan Westfall. For a small donation, you can visit them and watch Cheeta play the piano.</p>
<p id="xDyICe">"I only buy two things when I travel," says a woman standing next to me on the mountain. "Christmas ornaments and flamingoes. I get a flamingo everywhere I go." Finding a flamingo in Palm Springs seems easy. I wonder, though, how she accomplishes this elsewhere. Another woman nearby wobbles in her wedges as she makes her way up the steep and lopsided stairs.</p>
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<p id="hGqoo4">A man with poles pops up over the safety railing. "I hiked here from Palm Springs!" He announces. We tourists crowd around him. I look down the rocky drop he’s just scaled. "Nine miles of gain," he tells us, of the trek he’s just completed—the Skyline Trail. The Skyline Trail is one of the steepest, most difficult hikes in California. He started this morning at 5 a.m., at the trailhead that picks up behind the Palm Springs Art Museum.</p>
<p id="GmxKK3">"You don’t smoke," says one of the tourists.</p>
<p id="tsOWHl">"Not cigarettes. I won’t comment on the other stuff," the hiker replies.</p>
<p id="v2OOsf">I follow him. He can’t explain the path he took. It’s best, he says, to go with someone else your first time. Every weekend, dozens of people conquer this hike. It’s good training, he says, for something like Mount Whitney. That's what I'm going to do, I decide. Get some poles. Learn how to use them. Find a few extra hours—in between working and sleeping and drinking and running and yoga and walking my dogs and going to Trader Joe’s—to conquer the Skyline Trail. You can see Santa in the summertime.</p>
<p id="MQ5iV2">This hiker is going to ride the tram down with the tourists, but some people stay up here for days. There are trails of varying lengths and skill levels, and rustic camping for those who haunt them.</p>
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<p id="sHz0BY">"People die doing it all the time," a docent at the visitors’ center tells me when I ask him about the Skyline Trail. "It’s very dangerous. We don’t recommend it." He’s much more enthusiastic when he tells me about the WiFi service that will be coming to the mountain soon. "We’re missing out on a million Instagrams a year," he explains.</p>
<p class="c-end-para">Heat usually rises. On the aerial tram, you descend into it on your way down. When I get back to my car, the air inside is stale. It feels like a fever in here. I get back on Highway 111 toward Palm Springs. I roll down my windows, it's hardly cooler outside.</p>
<p class="c-credit-paragraph"><em>Editor: <a href="mailto:adrian@curbed.com">Adrian Glick Kudler</a></em></p>
https://la.curbed.com/2016/9/8/12821034/palm-springs-aerial-tramway-hikeTess Barker2016-02-02T14:51:59-08:002016-02-02T14:51:59-08:00Come Along on the Unofficial OJ Simpson Tour, Led By a Brentwood Native
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<p>We stayed in our car with our headlights off for a few minutes before meeting up with the others. It felt like one of those nights in high school, when you and your friends, with nothing better to do, would spend entire evenings parked on some suburban street and cruising for trouble. We were not in the suburbs though, we were in Brentwood. To our left was Paul Revere Middle School, a location that we would soon learn was a pivotal setting in one of the most widely publicized trials of all time, or, as our tour guide Adam Papagan would phrase it, "The last big media circus before the internet arrived."</p>
<p> The white van pulled up in front of us. We stepped out of the car and into the cold. Several other people, all in their twenties and thirties, waited to get into the van. "I'm guessing you guys are here for the same reason as us?" my friend asked sheepishly.</p>
<p> "Let me put it this way," said one man, "I'm wearing my <em>gloves</em>."</p>
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<p> We loaded in. Papagan got into the front seat, put on a Madonna mic, and asked us if we were excited for the Super Bowl. So began the OJ Simpson tour—a macabre and homegrown operation in which, for $15, you too can recreate the brutal events that transpired between OJ Simpson, Nicole Brown, Kato Kaelin, and Ron Goldman on that fateful night of June 12, 1994. This would be Papagan's fourth time giving an official version of the tour, but he has been giving informal versions of it since high school. He inherited the tour from a friend of his family's, Stu Krieger, the screenwriter behind movies like <em>The Land Before Time</em>, and <em>A Troll in Central Park</em>. For years, Krieger gave the tour to visiting friends and relatives before passing it on to Papagan. The narrative would be laid out "as though OJ did it," said Papagan. A few people chuckled.</p>
<p> Like the rest of the passengers squeezed together in the van, Papagan was a child when the Simpson trial happened. He is also a Brentwood native, who, although knowledgeable about the case now, remembers it primarily as "Something the adults were going crazy about." Papagan's<br>tour is, in many ways, a nostalgic look at his own youth, and passengers are encouraged to see it through the same lens. We were invited to shout out any random thoughts or degrees of separation we had from the murder. (Apparently there had been a casting director in the last tour who had auditioned Kato Kaelin several times.)</p>
<p> While we waited for our final passenger, Papagan told us a little about the significance of Paul Revere Middle School. It was here, on June 12, that the entire Simpson family had gathered to watch OJ and Nicole's daughter Sydney perform in a dance recital. He pointed out the entrance to the school auditorium, where OJ and Nicole, who were on tenuous terms after the most recent of several separations, had put on game faces for the kids' sake. After the recital, OJ reportedly asked Brown if the group could all go out to dinner. Nicole had turned him down, saying she didn't think that was a very good idea, given the split. The scorn OJ felt from this rejection is believed to have been what incited his alleged plan to murder his ex-wife.</p>
<p> The final passenger got in the car. It was a young woman named Mallory, who Papagan knew. "Mallory actually has a special connection to the case," said Papagan, "she was actually <em>in</em> that dance recital. Mallory did not recall many specifics about the recital, given that she was six years old at the time, but did say that she "thought she remembered what her costume looked like."</p>
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<p> As we made our way through the pricey neighborhood's sleepy streets, Papagan gave us some background on OJ and Nicole's relationship—one that he described as fraught with "some issues of domestic violence." We made it to the next stop—the Gretna Green condo.</p>
<p> The Gretna Green condo is in a two-story building built in the breezy pseudo-European style. It was bought by the Simpsons after their first separation so that Nicole could have a place to live away from OJ. It is from here that, in 1989, Brown placed a chilling call to 911 saying that OJ was going to kill her. Papagan pointed out a large window at the front of the condo where, allegedly, Nicole had at one point given oral sex to a man after realizing OJ was spying on her. The condo is also historically significant because it was the first Los Angeles home of Kato Kaelin, who OJ and Nicole had met in Colorado. Papagan was unsure as to how Kato had come to befriend the Simpsons, but noted that Brown was a housewife who had plenty of time to meet cool people like Kaelin.</p>
<p> After the Gretna Green condo sold, Brown moved to the Bundy condo where she would eventually be murdered. This new home did not have a guest house for Kaelin, but Brown offered to let him move into her second bedroom. OJ, who was not very good friends with Kaelin, offered to let him move into the guest house at his mansion instead. The move, postulated Papagan, was a jealous means of keeping Kaelin away from Nicole.</p>
<p> Since Kaelin was not allowed to move in with Brown and her kids, the family allegedly named their new dog after him.</p>
<p> We all agreed that Kaelin was our favorite OJ character. "At least something good came of this trial," Papagan said of, Kaelin's … career? He then pointed out a building to our right that used to hold the gym where Brown had met fellow murder victim Ron Goldman. There also, noted Papagan, was the very first Coffee Bean.</p>
<p> Next up was a Peet's Coffee, which used to be a subpar Italian restaurant called Mezzaluna. It was there that Brown dined on the last night of her life, and also there that Goldman worked as a waiter. Papagan's father had apparently been waited on by Goldman at one point; he remembered him being "cocky." After the murders, the restaurant became a popular tourist attraction. It was also suspected among locals to be a drug front—in the two years after Goldman's death, two other Mezzaluna waiters were also murdered. This, said Papagan, was the basis for one alternate theory to the idea that Simpson was guilty.</p>
<p> To our left, there was the Ben & Jerry's that Brown had taken her kids to for dessert after dinner. The next morning, when police found her body, there would be a melted cup of cookie dough ice cream nearby. "I used to go to that Ben & Jerry's too," recalled Papagan. "Pretty solid ice cream. Also, there's a Jamba Juice, which used to be Juice Club. You guys remember Juice Club?" None of us did.</p>
<p> Up ahead was also a McDonalds, said Papagan, where OJ had eaten with Kaelin right before killing Brown and Goldman. Simpson, allegedly planning on killing Brown, had supposedly gone home to tell Kaelin he was "going to McDonalds," so that he would have an alibi. Kaelin invited himself along. The two then ate a rushed meal at the restaurant before Simpson dropped Kaelin back off at home, which added an extra 20 minutes to his already rushed plan.</p>
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<p> Next was a trip by Goldman's old apartment. "He had a pretty good life here," said Papagan of Goldman, who lived walking distance from his waitering job. His old building was nice enough, but big and impersonal. I have known plenty of struggling actors—who are paying more than they should for rent, because the illusion of affluence is part of what brought them to LA—who worked in restaurants exactly like Mezzaluna and lived in buildings exactly like Goldman's.</p>
<p> During his shift at Mezzaluna that night, said Papagan, Goldman had received a call from Brown—her mom had left some sunglasses there while they'd been in for dinner. Could he bring them by her place after work? Papagan then pointed out the staircase Goldman had apparently come down after taking a quick post-shift shower, before heading to out to do this simple errand for his friend.</p>
<p> We arrived at what Papagan said was his favorite part of the tour—the Bundy condo where the murders occurred. We were instructed to step out of the car. We all made our way up to the condo, which has had its address changed so that tourists will not visit.It is a generic, nondescript condo, and I recognized it immediately. The walkway also resonated with me as one of the more familiar images I had from watching the trial. There were the same tiles on which puddles and footprints of blood had been broadcast into my family's living room on a near daily basis for 134 days.</p>
<p> Retracing Simpsons's steps, we walked around into the alley behind the condo, where Simpson's Bronco had been parked. One thing a lot of people don't realize, said Papagan, is that there were two Broncos involved in the case: Simpson's, which contained drops of blood that had DNA from him, Brown, and Goldman; and Al Cowlings's, which was driven in the infamous car chase. Ford discontinued the Bronco the year after the trial. (<a href="http://la.curbed.com/archives/2016/02/oj_simpson_map_murder_sites_los_angeles_brentwood_bronco_chase.php">This map</a> traces the sites of the infamous white Ford Bronco chase a few days later.)</p>
<p> Back in the alley, there was the gate, which had, on the morning of June 13, been found smattered with blood that contained Simpson's DNA. On the concrete where the Bronco had been parked, change had been haphazardly dropped, possibly after Simpson took off the bloody track suit he had worn to both McDonalds and the murders.</p>
<p> Once back in the van, we pulled back into this parking spot so that we could exactly trace the route Simpson had allegedly taken post-homicide. His alibi that night was to be that he was on a flight to Chicago, so he had to quickly make his way back to the house, where a limo was waiting to drive him to LAX. During the trial, the prosecution faltered when the route they claimed he had taken from the crime scene to his mansion was proven unrealistic, given the time frame.</p>
<p> The route Simpson took, said Papagan, was along a winding side street that only a true Brentwood native would know about. We turned up a dark intersection. As we drove up to the site of Simpson's old mansion, Papagan emphasized the time crunch Simpson had been under: the trip to McDonalds with Kaelin had made Simpson late for his flight.</p>
<p> As we pulled up to the old Rockingham house property, Papagan recalled the 1998 demolition of Simpson's former home. Tourists had gathered not only to watch, but to take pieces of the rubble home with them. "Some people have the Berlin Wall, some people have OJ Simpson's house," said Papagan.</p>
<p> What was still intact was the tall gate over which Simpson had allegedly jumped, since walking through the front entrance would have meant being spotted by the waiting limo driver. During the trial, Kaelin would testify that he had heard this jump as a loud "thump" while he was watching <em>The Mary Tyler Moore Show</em>. Papagan then revealed that once, when he was in high school, there had been a private school party at the new house on this site. He and his friends had crashed the party by jumping over this very same gate.</p>
<p> As we all looked on at this last stop on the tour—where Simpson had emerged through the front entrance and gotten into his limo sweaty and breathless, Papagan asked us to consider that the Simpson trial had occurred before much had been made public about the effects of head trauma on professional football players. It was possible, he said, that brain injury may have driven Simpson to kill. "OJ was a victim too," he offered.</p>
<p> On the ride back home to Paul Revere, we reminisced about other stories that had played out on the grocery checkout covers of our childhoods: Lorena Bobbitt, Tonya Harding, JonBenét Ramsey. We all agreed that 1994 was a good year for gossip.<br>· <a href="http://la.curbed.com/tags/curbed-features">Curbed Features</a> [Curbed LA]</p>
https://la.curbed.com/2016/2/2/10942460/oj-simpson-murder-tour-los-angelesTess Barker2016-01-28T13:37:32-08:002016-01-28T13:37:32-08:00A Trip to the LA County Line and Its Unlikely Hangout For Tourists, Surfers, Celebs, and Outlaws
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<p>Los Angeles ends at County Line Beach. Cars perpetually round the blind corners of this strip of Pacific Coast Highway—Porsche Carreras, rented Camrys, beat up Volkswagens with longboards strapped to the roof—any of which could brake abruptly to snag a spot on the shoulder so that their driver can jump out and into the waves. On one side, County Line is rocks and rotting staircases you have to negotiate to get to the water. On the other, brush and hillsides that are prone to erosion and fire. There is also one restaurant here, at the overgrown border of Los Angeles and the rest of the world: Neptune's Net. It's a crumbling and colorful building that is mostly patio: a daytime watering hole for bikers, local surfers, and other divorcees who are married to the sea.</p>
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<p> The parking lot smells of cigarettes and sea breeze. Topless construction workers lean against truck beds and sip from six packs they've purchased inside. Tourists pose next to the iconic sign, with its whimsical font. Immediately beside them are stalls where the Harleys park. On your way up the steps of the outdoor patio, a sign asks (and then tells): "First time? Here's the plan," and instructs you to claim dibs on a seat before ordering from one of the place's two sides: <em>seafood</em> or <em>restaurant</em>. This is the core of Neptune's Net's philosophy: All are welcome. Now act like you've fucking been here before.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> The "restaurant side" is the original part of the building. It was built in 1957 and has housed the same deep fryers in the same location for the past 50 years. The back wall is a long refrigerator filled with rare IPAs and seasonal microbrews. As might be expected from a restaurant where shoes but not shirts are required, domestic tallboys are the hot ticket item. After you've grabbed your own drink, you head to the counter, where a laid-back cashier in a t-shirt will ring you up for that and whatever greasy bullshit you've decided you deserve.</p>
<p> Signature menu items on the restaurant side include fish & chips, a crab cake burger, and clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl. The chowder bowl is the only meat I've eaten since becoming a vegetarian at age eight. When I was a teenager ditching school there with a surfer I had a crush on, he convinced me to try a bite, on the grounds that clams don't have faces. I helped him eat the entire soppy bowl.</p>
<p> </p>
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<p> Neptune's Net is, and always has been, a safe place to play hooky. No one will ask what you're doing on the patio, where you can hide outside with the other outsiders. You take your time dipping fries in ketchup or tartar sauce, which, of course, you pumped yourself at the metal counters, where you also got your own plastic utensils and opened your own bottle too. The ocean is directly before you, framed by cliffs and that gravel artery the PCH, where, on weekends, bikers from Germany and France and the hills above roar by, popping wheelies for show. A few times a year, lucky audiences on the patio catch a high-speed police pursuit or other evidence of what the world has to offer while everyone else is busy following rules.</p>
<p> The beach break that is Neptune's Net's front yard is surfed mostly by locals, who will be cool with interlopers so long as they don't try to steal their waves. To get back and forth between the beach and the restaurant, you have to jaywalk across the highway. There is a steady flow of foot traffic in each direction. Coming in: surfers with wet stringy hair and half-unzipped wetsuits. Going out: voyeurs carrying tacos they'll eat while watching others in the water below. County Line is world-famous: The Beach Boys sang about it. Bodie surfed it in <em>Point Break</em>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> The restaurant itself is also featured in <em>Point Break</em> and many other movies, including <em>The Fast and the Furious</em> and <em>Iron Man 3</em> (which didn't film there, but replicated it as part of a fake Malibu that was actually shot in Florida). TV shows like <em>Gossip Girl</em> and <em>The Hills</em> have shot there, and, according to one employee, <em>Keeping Up With The Kardashians</em> has planned to film there multiple times, but always backs out. In the most recent iteration of <em>Grand Theft Auto</em>, you can wander around a video game version of the Net called Hookies (the game did not get permission from the owners), complete with accurate depiction of the outhouse restrooms, which seem to be there less out of logistical necessity than as a way of weeding out patrons who are too good to cop a squat and hold their breaths.</p>
<p> For all of its unapologetic, undusted ceiling fans and pigeon droppings on the outdoor rafters, it is not unusual to spot a celebrity at Neptune's Net. Barefoot counts and countesses who have eaten at the place include Pierce Brosnan, Owen and Luke Wilson, Cheech Marin, Pink and Carey Hart, and the Neptune's Net of stars: Pamela Anderson.</p>
<p> The aggressively relaxed people who are indigenous to the area may come for the "seafood side"'s colorful crab, lobster, and clams, which are chilled on ice and sold at market price. All of it is quality. None of it is fancy. In the background, the turning over of motorcycle engines punctuates the soundscape like a series of on-schedule trains.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> In the summer, as many as 10,000 tourists will line up in a single weekend to order things like the peanut butter stout and vanilla froyo float, but as long as the line may get, as much weight as the cement patio may bear, Neptune's Net belongs to its regulars. Ten to 15 locals show up here every day, with such consistency that employees worry if they don't see them. Another 50 or so can be counted on to stop by at least one or two times a week.</p>
<p> When I was last there, two regulars, both gray-haired and in leather vests, sat together in the far rear corner. They played dice and smoked cigarettes. Two other regulars, a dad and his school-aged son, arrived. They said hi to the old men. Both parties were pleasant and brief, like friendly co-workers. It was time for the kid to start his homework, for the dad in the cool sneakers to get himself a beer, for the men in the leather vests to roll their dice again.<br>· <a href="http://la.curbed.com/tags/curbed-features">Curbed Features</a> [Curbed LA]</p>
https://la.curbed.com/2016/1/28/10872358/neptunes-net-los-angeles-county-line-restaurant-film-locationTess Barker2015-12-08T13:52:18-08:002015-12-08T13:52:18-08:00Money, Murder, and Mystery: One Afternoon Inside Beverly Hills's Beautifully Creepy Greystone Mansion
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<p><a href="http://www.greystonemansion.org/">Greystone Mansion</a> was paid for with oil. Its value endures because of a murder. The estate's original 429 acres, resting at the actual crown of Beverly Hills, were purchased by oil baron EL Doheny as a wedding gift to his only living child, Ned. In the late 1920s, EL Doheny, under scrutiny from Congress for his role in the infamous Teapot Dome scandal, blew off some steam by bankrolling the construction of the best 55-room mansion that $1,238,378.76 (in 1927) could buy. In September of 1928, when the new palace was near complete, and the US economy was near ruin, EL handed over its keys to Ned, his wife Lucy, and their five children.</p>
<p> The young Doheny family spent one Christmas under a large tree in the high-ceilinged living room of the Beverly Hills castle. Then, in February, Ned Doheny was slain in its guest room. The killer was allegedly his secretary, war brethren, and close confidant Hugh Plunkett. Immediately after shooting Doheny, Plunkett reportedly fired a lethal shot into his own head. Some rumors posit that Doheny and Plunkett were lovers. Other historians suggest that the murder/suicide was related to the upcoming testimony both men were set to give at EL Doheny's federal fraud trial. According to a February 18, 1929 article in the <em>Los Angeles Times</em>, Leslie White, a forensic investigator involved in the case, questioned whether it was possible for Plunkett to have even fired the gun. Doheny's head wound was inflicted at close range, Plunkett's was not.</p>
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<p> After Ned's death, Lucy Doheny and her children continued to live at the house for another 30 years. She remarried to an investor named Leigh Battson, who, although he lived at Greystone for decades, is seldom mentioned in the mansion's lore. Greystone's intrigue is in the shots that were fired behind closed doors—that rang on the still-intact Carrara marble floors of the front hallway, on that winter night in Los Angeles; and the family that made a fairytale life for themselves on the site of their father's grisly death.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> The Greystone estate has been owned by the city of Beverly Hills since 1965. Its grounds are open to the public as a park, but its noir interior remains, for the most part, sealed behind its gray brick walls. Since 1982, when the American Film Institute stopped leasing the house from the city, the property has been rented out for film shoots, private cocktail parties, or, on rare occasion, magazine-sponsored events, at which interior designers are invited to take on a room in the house and imagine it in their own voices.</p>
<p> This was the case on a hot day toward the end of November when I visited Greystone, which had temporarily been made over as the Maison de Luxe (sponsored by <em>Luxe Interiors + Design</em> magazine). After making my way through the estate's terraced gardens—where the sprinkler system was in full use despite the drought, as some new plants were gaining a stronghold, thank you for understanding— and through the cobblestone courtyard, where six-dollar lemonades were sold under a pop-up tent, I stepped across the front threshold, which is perched above a tall wooden staircase that spills into the rest of the house. Even though it was 11 am on a sunny day, the landing, with its cathedral-high ceilings, was dim and lit by a chandelier—one of the few remaining original pieces left by the Dohenys.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> Families in khaki, new money couples, and even a sitcom superstar strolled down the stairs, taking in, as I did, the carved wood molding on the walls; the tall ceilings; and the enormous, neon pink curtains that had been draped across the second floor windows. Below us, the rest of the house had also been sectioned off into melodramatic vignettes, all of which offered a reimagining of the story of the charmed Dohenys.</p>
<p> "Mr. Doheny was killed in the last room on the left," a volunteer told me, so naturally I went there first.</p>
<p> The former guest room, where Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett spoke for hours before two shots were fired behind the closed door, had been renamed the "Murder Salon." Gold wallpaper hung on the simple room's panels. On it were hand-painted crows, the most salient visible feature of the space. I asked the representative from Redmond Aldrich Design to tell me more about the wallpaper.</p>
<p> "It's very expensive," she explained.</p>
<p> The dark curtains in the Murder Salon were open. Outside one window was the Los Angeles skyline. Through another was a shallow decorative pool.</p>
<p> Next door was the living room, where formal dinners had been served in the Doheny days. Here, throughout the Great Depression and beyond, oysters and fine wines had been offered alongside sparkling conversation. Against the back wall was a minstrel balcony, where a private orchestra would play for the Dohenys and their guests. Sara Story had worked against the seraphic tone of the room with modern pieces, like an art installation to the left of the entrance that featured an empty chair and a mirror that made it appear as though you were standing at the end of a long hallway and might in fact be an apparition yourself. The biggest mystery in the room, though, was why a giant yarn cube had been placed in the middle of the floor.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> "The Dohenys have left the dining room, and nature is taking over": a representative from Jane Hallworth explained the firm's concept for "Mrs. Doheny's Porcelain Room — The Dining Room," which, in my opinion, most captured the house's enchanting mausoleum vibe. Small metal butterflies had been strewn across the windowsill and floor. The fireplace was filled with what appeared to be insect exoskeletons. The table, with its decaying wood centerpiece and black back ties, appeared to be perpetually set for none. As is fitting for the dining room of a woman who successfully managed her late husband's multi-million dollar estate during a time when women had barely been granted the right to vote, a canvas, clearly depicting four vaginas, hung across from the fireplace.</p>
<p> "There are real spiders in that plant over there," the representative boasted to me, as I reluctantly headed elsewhere.</p>
<p> The solarium, a relaxing green nook off the breakfast room, was filled with stagnant heat. I took a seat on one of the benches to enjoy the view. Two faceless tourists approached behind me. I heard them shifting uncomfortably for a few moments before either of them spoke.</p>
<p> "It's pretty here," one offered. Then, after several seconds of silence, "Like, I bet at night it's really pretty."</p>
<p> Upstairs was the gun room, the walls of which were still lined with the original built-in weapons storage. Here, Kristen Buckingham had transformed the space into "Mrs. Doheny's Study." In actuality, the gun room had become a play area for the Doheny children in the years following their father's death by gun.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> In the five months he had been alive in the house, Ned Doheny had, according to a representative from the design firm, used the room's large window, which faced out to the hills on the other side of the estate, as a perching point from which to hunt animals in his backyard. When the urge to kill for sport struck him, he would call upon one of his servants to release some of his pre-stocked game. He would eventually shoot the animal from the comfort of his great indoors, and then send a servant to fetch the carcass and bring it to the gun room's adjoining kitchen for preparation.</p>
<p> "Was it a gun in this room that killed him?" asked a woman who sauntered up smelling like Chanel No. 5 in every sense imaginable. Then, regarding Mrs. Doheny, "Who did she marry after he died?"</p>
<p> "An investment banker," said the representative.</p>
<p> Chanel No. 5 shot me a knowing smile. "So she did well for herself twice," she concluded, of a person who had borne audio witness to her own spouse's violent death.</p>
<p> Near the children's rooms (also located off the gun room), was a secret staircase that coiled down through the middle of the house—the kind of clandestine passage every kid hopes to find in their own home, but only actually gets in their dreams and board games. At the bottom of the stairs, still the hallmark of any ostentatiously classy denizen of Beverly Hills, was a private bowling alley—complete with the original lanes, pins, lighting sconces, billiard table, and Prohibition-era bar that EL Doheny had commissioned for his son. It was not warm down there. The room's size and shadows had left it drafty.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> Eighty years after the completion of Greystone, EL Doheny would be the basis for Daniel Day-Lewis's Daniel Plainview character in <em>There Will Be Blood</em>. The film's iconic final scene, in which the criminally wealthy Plainview brutally kills his long-time, less fortunate associate before declaring "I'm done," was filmed here, in Greystone's basement.</p>
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<p><br> · <a href="http://la.curbed.com/tags/curbed-features">Curbed Features</a> [Curbed LA]</p>
https://la.curbed.com/2015/12/8/9894146/greystone-mansion-beverly-hills-interiorTess Barker2015-11-03T13:12:46-08:002015-11-03T13:12:46-08:00Locals Of Avalon: Living Full-Time On Los Angeles's Weekend Getaway Island
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<p>Arriving in Avalon, the only city on Catalina Island, feels like that recurring childhood dream where you suddenly find a room in your house that you hadn't realized existed. You have that sensation, that disbelief that this has been here the whole time as your boat finishes its 26-mile chug through the Pacific at Avalon Bay, with its cliffs covered in big bright beach houses and its elegant ambassador, the Catalina Casino, poised at the east side of the shore. The water is always crisp blue in Catalina. There are always a smattering of kayakers making their way away from the clock tower on the green fun pier.</p>
<p> Thanks to a successful "free ride on your birthday promotion," the island is now uncannily full of birthday boys and girls of all different ages on any given day. They wear happy birthday ribbons and greet each other joyfully. Fun is in the foreground everywhere. Whenever I'm in Avalon, I fantasize about hiding out there forever. I wonder what it is actually like to live on the island where it is always the second Saturday in someone else's favorite July.</p>
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<p> I headed to Avalon alone on a Monday, with a tent on my back, to meet some of the people who call this sunny snow globe home. Hermit Gulch, the campground where I was staying, is a mile's walk uphill from downtown (it's the only one of the island's seven campgrounds that is easily accessible from Avalon). I didn't get far before a friendly older man in a golf cart noticed me wearing two backpacks and asked if I wanted a ride. Golf carts are virtually the only mode of transportation in Catalina. There is a 35-year wait to bring a car onto the island, and some Avalonians have been rumored to put their unborn children on the list. The proliferation of golf carts, though, makes hitchhiking a refreshing and common possibility. I threw my pack on his cart and hopped in.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> The driver was the former owner of the liquor store in town. After 30 years, he had retired and taken up "golf cart patrol" instead. He was a native; his family had been in Catalina back to his grandmother, who was here in the 1890s, before William Wrigley, of Wrigley chewing gum fame, bought and glamorized the place. When I asked if he ever went to the mainland, he shuddered, told me not if he could avoid it, and to have a nice stay.</p>
<p> After setting up camp, I walked back into town to find trouble and dinner in no particular order. I landed on Maggie's Blue Rose Mexican on Crescent and took a seat at the bar. I was flattered when the bar-back noticed me easily putting away heaping mounds of salsa and asked if I wanted to try the real spicy kind, "Pedro's salsa." He nodded to Pedro, who was bartending. I accepted, of course. It had that nice delayed heat at the end of the bite—the kind you trick yourself into thinking you can end by eating more.</p>
<p> The young bar-back told me he'd just been to the mainland a few days before, to Santa Barbara, where his brother is in college. He liked it and could see himself living there someday. It reminded him of home. "Everyone leaves," he told me. "You get to a place on this island where there is nowhere else to go," he gestured claustrophobically with his arms. "You can't drive a car. You can't go to college. You can't own a home." What you can do here, though, is spear fish. He emphasized that when he spears fish, he only uses a slingshot (never a gun.) Like most people who grew up in these clear craggy coves, he knows every tucked-away place to grab them along the more remote parts of the island.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> The weedy wild of Catalina, which is most of the island, is primarily accessed by water or rigorous hike. Its jagged hills and rarely driven fire roads are home to 150 buffalo. The animals are descendants of a pack of bison that were allegedly brought to the island in 1927 for the filming of a western called <em>The Vanishing American</em>.</p>
<p> "You can't buy a home here?" I asked the bar-back, signing out my tab.</p>
<p> He shrugged off the suggestion. "I'm trying to start something real. With my girlfriend. We've been together four years." Everyone leaves, he told me, but then, he'd also said, "Everyone always comes back."</p>
<p> After dinner I wandered over to The Locker Room, a sports bar that is part of my own vacation routine when I'm here with my boyfriend for his annual birthday trip. Every year, after snorkeling or hiking, we come here to watch the Phillies game and put country on the jukebox. It's the one time of year that I root for the Phillies. The bartender working when I got there was a tall blonde named Sarah who was friendly and efficient. Not a glass was left empty for too long at her bar. She appeared effortlessly interested in whether we, the lone stragglers staring vacantly at the game, were okay.</p>
<p> The man hunched over the bar next to me, also alone, told me that he was a diver and a fisherman. He had been here for more than 20 years, after having drifted over from Orange County, where he left a wife and a 90-minute commute. "Everyone here has three jobs," he explained. "It's good, in a way. It keeps you out of the bars." He ordered us both shots. Captaining ships and running diving expeditions had given him the flexibility to focus on what he really wanted to do: deep-sea fish for yellowfin tuna. "This year, they've been incredible. Huge." Then he added, unnecessarily, "I'm very divorced."</p>
<p> I meandered over to Luau Larry's, where even on a Monday night the place was bursting at the seams with middle-class drunkards. Luau Larry's is, in actuality, a very small bar. It has a few booths up front, a handful of tables in a cramped back room, and a tiny private cave-themed nook. Five people make the place a crowd, and the crowd mostly comes for two things: "Wicky Hats," the free straw hat you receive when you get your "Wicky Whacked," (buy a stiff, sugary, nine-dollar cocktail) and cover musician Gill Torres, who plays five or six nights a week with his synthesized band.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> On any given night, Gill whips a pack of lushes into a sweaty, red-faced fury. The lushes, generally in Wicky Hats, are eclectic and homogenous at the same time: all fun-loving and over-indulgent. On this evening, the dance floor held a young giddy lesbian couple; a middle-aged man and a woman who looked like if Anthropologie made people; a lone happy woman in a romper; and a man in a canvas visor with sunglasses resting on it. This was clearly not the first time he had been out past 10 pm in a visor and shades. The motley crew danced to Gill Torres's Tom Petty's "Mary Jane's Last Dance." I took a seat at the bar.</p>
<p> A young man sat next to me. I asked what he did. He smiled mischievously, "I control here."</p>
<p> "What does that mean?" I asked, legitimately curious about who he was controlling and how. "It's something you should never ask about," he baited me, "I'm from Tijuana. We have a saying that Americans see Mexicans like clowns. Now I come here, and I'm the one laughing."</p>
<p> A few feet away on the dance floor, Anthropologie had taken off her vest and lent it to the lesbian couple. Romper floated back and forth between both couples and seemed content wherever she landed. "Have fun with me," Visor and Shades begged of no one in particular.</p>
<p> "I can't tell you about it here, because we're in a bar," added Tijuana. This was the first time I questioned whether he was talking about selling drugs—what drugs can't you talk about in a bar full of inebriated people? Then he walked up to Gill Torres, and I watched the man who controlled this town have his song request denied. Instead, Gill played "Margaritaville" by request of Visor and Shades. I would later learn that this lone drunk dancer, dressed for a weekend afternoon on a Monday night, had been boating and begging strangers to have fun with him in Avalon for the past two decades.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> The shores of Avalon, like Lover's Cove, the glassy little nook on the town's west side, seem designed to trap the passage of time in their folds. The water laps against the shore in small gurgles and bright orange Garibaldi fish glide through the water, but Lover's Cove always seems frozen. A small yellow submarine perpetually drifts around. The horizon in the background is reliably broken by parasailers floating back and forth. It is fitting that this spot, the perfect place to watch the sunset, is reminiscent of Mermaids' Lagoon in Neverland. Here, preserved in salty fog, is the real illusion that you never actually have to grow up.</p>
<p> "I've been here for 17 years," Gill told me after his set. "I came here on accident." When he'd first landed the job at Luau Larry's, after coming to Avalon on vacation, Gill had enlisted the help of a sound engineer on the mainland, who taught him how to orchestrate on a synthesizer. "In the future, no one will need bands," the man had told Gill. Gill mastered the use of the synthesizer and realized he could use it to manipulate songs to make them the perfect tempo for dancing.</p>
<p> He has, in the past, performed with a band, but Luau Larry's curtailed that after they noticed that people were coming to watch the band, but not buying as many drinks. "When it's just me, they buy twice as many drinks," he explained. Gill knows what the people want and when they want it. "No one liked 'Uptown Funk' until it was on the radio. Now they lose their minds over it. No one likes anything until they know it first." Gill shook his head, "I never get to play the stuff I want to play. No one wants to hear that. People just want to be reminded of last year."</p>
<p> The next morning, I woke up facing downhill and snuggled up to a can of Red Bull. I put on a pair of cut-offs and brushed my teeth in the campground sink. As I stumbled out to make my trek back down into town, the old-timey trolley bus that runs once an hour clicked by. I flagged down the driver, a warm middle-aged woman. I was the only one on her bus, but she told me that she would be busy this afternoon when the people from the cruise ship came ashore. We passed the preschool—her young grandson had just started there, "Gracias a Dios!" All three of her children had been raised here, and two were away now at college. "It is good to go. You have to leave. What do you do?"</p>
<p> "I'm a writer."</p>
<p> "Good for you! Good for you!" she exclaimed convincingly, then dropped me off at Crescent Avenue.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> I had heard rumor of a house that was selling for more than $8 million here in Avalon, and I was hoping to take a look at it, so I headed, with my hiker's pack, into Catalina Realtors to see broker Earl Schrader.</p>
<p> In addition to running Catalina Realtors, Earl is also the high school football coach. He started the team, back in 1995. "For 30 years now, I've been selling million-dollar houses in jeans that are dirty from football practice," he told me. His eight-man team plays other small schools, and football season is when Earl most frequently has to "go over town," as Islanders call going to the mainland.</p>
<p> Earl's office was cozy and held three desks, all of which were occupied by men who also appeared to be football coaches. They slouched in their chairs and wore gym clothes, and told me not to worry about my big intrusive backpack: "It's Catalina." Propped in the corner of the office was Earl's Les Paul. "If you buy the house, he'll throw that in," one of the other men joked.</p>
<p> "Sure," said Earl, and then immediately reconsidered, "Not really."</p>
<p> Earl is from the Bay Area and was a real-life rocker in his younger years, playing with Janis Joplin's old band. Seeking refuge from the excessive freedom that is a working musician's life, Earl came to Catalina, where he was able to kick his drinking habit. "Most of the crime here is bar fights and stuff like that," he told me, as we were riding his golf cart up to the mansion at 223 Beacon. "I tell people who complain, if you don't like that stuff, stay away from the bars." Earl still plays his Les Paul, but now it's just for fun.</p>
<p> The house at 223 Beacon was actually listed by Earl's colleague Kelly, a blonde stylish woman who met us in the driveway in her own golf cart. "How come your golf cart is nicer than mine?" Earl ribbed Kelly.</p>
<p> "It's called being in debt!" she retorted playfully.</p>
<p> The three of us walked into the mansion, which had been decorated and furnished with sturdy pieces from Asia and Africa. There were two elevators: a service one and a regular one, which was sparkly and reflective. You could see the ocean from every floor, and in the master bedroom, heavy curtains rolled back when you flipped a switch. They revealed the water like it was the set of an opera. In the entertaining room, there was a polished grand player piano. "You know how to play, don't you Earl?" Kelly suggested. Earl sat at the bench and tentatively played a chord.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> On the top floor of the house, there was a bar that opened out to an infinity pool, which opened out to the ocean, which opened out to the sky. "These windows slide open," Kelly gestured to the windows behind the bar. "I can show you if you want."</p>
<p> "That's okay," I told her.</p>
<p> "Open them," Earl said, smiling, and she did. The weather was perfect, as Earl and Kelly said it always is in Avalon—not too hot, not too cold, and for a few minutes the three of us stood there and enjoyed the breeze and the fleeting sensation that this place was ours.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> While Catalina is rife with luxury hotels and restaurants serving good wine, the extravagance of 233 Beacon is exceptional, said Earl, because of how cumbersome it is to bring anything to the island. Every mid-century trunk, every slab of fossil—(Oh yeah. There was a gargantuan square of granite on the wall inlaid with the beautiful skeletons of prehistoric creatures)—has to come special order by boat. The people on the island must consider the practical logistics of being isolated out in the open, too: in addition to health insurance, many Islanders carry helicopter insurance in case of a medical emergency that would require a lift to town.</p>
<p> Most people don't buy in Catalina because they're looking for opulence beyond their wildest dreams. They buy because they want a piece of their own past, said Kelly: "My clients are usually people who came here to visit their grandparents as kids, or maybe they met their spouse here."</p>
<p> Once again, I walked down that sugary stretch of Crescent Avenue. It was time to catch my boat. The same chain of scents has played out on this street, amid the t-shirt shops and tacky restaurants, since I was a barefoot, sun-blistered kid There was Big Olaf's ice cream, with its piped out waffle cones; there was Lloyd's Candy with its hypnotically spinning taffy and warm vanilla breeze; there was the sweet greasy waft of Picnic Fry; and then there was my port to back home.</p>
<p> There was a man behind me in line for the boat ride to Los Angeles who had been in Avalon for his birthday trip. A stranger asked him whether he'd had a good time. "Oh, yeah. I've been dying for a buffalo burger since the last time I was here, 25 years ago. This place is exactly the same." The hour struck on the clock at the fun pier. Different people paddled by on the same rented boards. <em>—</em><a href="http://tessbarker.com/"><em>Tess Barker</em></a><em>, </em><a href="https://twitter.com/TesstifyBarker"><em>@tesstifybarker</em></a></p>
https://la.curbed.com/2015/11/3/9905210/catalina-full-time-residentsTess Barker