pjthompson | Entries tagged with developers

Some soul on Twitter posted this with the caption “Somewhere in Los Angeles”:

To which I felt compelled to reply:

That would be Venice, corner of Pacific and…Brooks?

Then I felt compelled to do a quote retweet:

My old neighborhood, Venice CA, corner of Pacific and Brooks. I passed this intersection almost every day for decades and this box with its rotating wonderful messages for maybe 10 years. I miss it. I miss that place.

And added:

This is what that lovely old brick building looks like now, I’m afraid. They did a high end refurbishment and tore out that lovely old wooden door, destroyed the character of the place. It used to be an artist’s studio and sometimes I would see a gray cat sitting in one of the windows taking in the world. The box with the message on it is gone now, too. Of course, it’s always possible I’m remembering the wrong intersection. There’s a similar building on the corner of N. Venice Blvd. and Pacific. It’s been a few years.

But it was bugging me because in the original post there was a tall brick building looming behind the smaller building. As you can see from photo 2 there is no such building behind this one. I got a little obsessed with it and started searching.

Yep, Pacific and N. Venice. I used to live two blocks from here, right across the street from Billy Al Bengston’s studio but that was a hoary great age ago.>/i>

I think this is the box from the photo but I may be an unreliable narrator.

I “drove” down Pacific via Google maps. In my defense, the building on Brooks and Pacific used to look virtually identical. There was an old wooden door, a cat who sat in the high windows, it was a studio, and it broke my heart when they “upgraded” it.

Further obsessive compulsive behavior led me to find out that the Canal Club, which was housed in the N. Venice Blvd. behind the wooden door, is now permanently closed. A victim of COVID, perhaps. The Ace Gallery used to be a few doors down from there on Venice, but it’s also now permanently closed (although I believe it moved to Downtown before finally closing).

The palimpsest of all these old neighborhoods is strong in me, though perhaps not as strong as I thought. I lived nowhere else but Venice until I was in my thirties when it got “discovered” by developers and I could no longer afford the rents. I miss it a great deal sometimes, although I know it’s been “upgraded” away from the place I knew and loved. The old down-at-the-heels, funky, bohemian Venice was infinitely preferable to its current incarnation as Silicon Beach. Alas. The place I almost remember is long gone.

This is another day of remembrance, but I won’t go there.

Requiescat in pace.

The purpose of this post is mostly to call attention to this fascinating and readable academic article by Katharine Luomala from Pacific Studies, 1983. Ms. Luomala does a thorough—and nonjudgmental—investigation of the widely perceived phenomena of Night Marchers, torch-bearing spirit processions which are still being perceived today in the Hawaiian islands. These processions seem to share similarities with the trooping fairies of Ireland, as well as other marching “beings.” There may also be something of the Wild Hunt in this mythology, as well.

The Night Marchers, however, are distinctly Hawaiian, incorporating in their processions the ritual of taboo, where it was on pain of death that ordinary people looked upon the being of sacred chiefs.

As Ms. Luomala explains:

The most sacred chiefs and chiefesses were carried in litters because their feet would taboo the ground. They seldom went out except at night, thus preventing the disruption of daily labor and the chance of a polluting shadow falling on anything or anybody. A taboo-breaker might be killed or seized for a sacrifice at a high chief’s heiau (place of worship). Sometimes the penalty was extended to the violator’s entire family group.

Even in spiritual form, it is widely believed, if you look upon the Night March, you will die—or be kidnapped and forced to march with them for eternity. Whenever you see a line of torches flickering in the distance and dark, folk of the islands say it is best to run as fast in the opposite direction as you can. If flight isn’t possible, hide—but by all means, do not do any curious peeking from your hiding place or you are doomed. If even hiding is not possible, prostrate yourself on your face on the ground and do not look up until you have heard the sound of marching feet pass you by and disappear in the distance.

Here’s the testimony of a limpet picker from 1970:

Suddenly I heard the sound of a conch shell blowing in the distance. Keoki heard it too. I thought it was the wind. Then a little while later we heard it again. This time it was a little louder. It was spooky because we didn’t see anything. Then we heard it again. We looked toward Ka-wai-hae side and then we saw it. It looked like a procession. At first we saw a line of torches in the distance. The procession was moving along the coastline. The conch shell blew again.

I took out my knife and Keoki got the rifle. We went seaward and laid down on the lava rock. We knew about night marchers from other fishermen. We knew you aren’t supposed to look upon the marchers and to lay on the ground face down. We did this. The marchers passed about fifty yards in front of us on the sand path. As they passed we could hear the sound of a drum pounding beat by beat. We didn’t look up until they were farther down the coast. All we could see now was the line of torches, and all we could hear was the far away sound of the conch shell. We didn’t know if they were going to come back that night, but we didn’t want to stick around and see.

Ms. Luomala recounts many such reports—from native islanders, tourists, European explorers—and places them within the context of Hawaiian belief. Like I said, a fascinating article.

I shouldn’t confess this, but I have a terrible addiction to junk TV. I saw a recent episode of Ghost Asylum, one of the stupider ghost hunter shows on the air. They did an investigation of the abandoned Coco Palms resort, reportedly built over one of the well-known pathways of the Night Marchers of Kaua’i. Many locals believe the resort was cursed from the start and is badly haunted. They won’t go there after dark, and say Night Marches are common on the property. It was destroyed by Hurrican Iniki in 1992 and never rebuilt. Some locals say this was a curse visited on them for the sacrilege of building on sacred land. But…developers are currently planning to tear down the Coco Palms and rebuild a new, grander resort. This would bring much needed jobs to the island, but local sentiment is mixed. It’s not for me to say whether development on a sacred site is a wise plan or just more developer hubris, but the investors have pledged to respect the land. They also brought in a shaman to do a blessing, just in case.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

What do Howard Hughes and the Gabrielino-Tongva Indians of Southern California have in common? It happens they shared a plot of land on the Westside of Los Angeles, separated by eons of time and circumstance. And they may also have shared a plot or two in the Otherworld.

While doing research on ghost hunting for a novel, I came across a book called Ghost Hunter’s Guide to Los Angeles by Jeff Dwyer. It’s part of a series, each set in a different city, and basically gives a brief overview of ghost hunting techniques and equipment followed by a long list of “haunted” locations.

Imagine my peaked interested when Playa Vista was listed, a stretch of land just down the hill from where I live, and part of the rampant development of the Ballona wetlands which once peacefully coexisted with the undeveloped runway of Hughes Aircraft. Howard Hughes refused to develop this land—the last piece of prime, “under-utilized” property on the desirable Westside of Los Angeles. At his death, the moneymen were wetting themselves in anticipation of the plunder. Because Hughes’s will situation was in chaos at the time of his death, it took many years, many lawsuits, and countersuits to get things squared away. The abandoned Hughes site contained old office buildings and engineering buildings, massive aircraft hangers (including the one where the Spruce Goose was assembled), and a runway. Movie companies were the only ones using this property for a long time, the empty hangers becoming sound stages. Parts of Titanic were filmed there, among other blockbusters. Raleigh Studios still retains these hangers, but the rest of the property has been highly developed.

Hughes Aircraft/Raleigh Studios hangers.

Enough strange things happened in these buildings that paranormal investigators came to check it out. Reportedly, the abandoned office buildings were especially active. A memorable episode of the paranormal T.V. show, Dead Famous, comes to mind, in which the intrepid investigators had many spooky adventures at the old Hughes complex. (I’m ashamed that I remember this—and so many other stupid-spooky shows—but I am a ghost show addict. I can’t help myself.) An anthropologist who worked on site reported the ghost of a small 1950s era white boy seen by many of the folk on the property. This little ghost even followed her home upon occasion. They also repeatedly saw “something colored bright white moving along just at the corner of their vision… For reasons that she was never quite clear on, she and the other workers came to the conclusion that the white shape seen moving in the lab was another spirit, specifically the ghost of Howard Hughes. As far as she knows, people on the project continue to see it.”

Finally, the lawyers and the moneymen stopped arguing and settled things in the courts. It was decided by the victors that the Hughes property would become a new live-work-play development (mixed residential, business, and entertainment) called Playa Vista. This was a massively controversial project from the start, as many wanted to protect the wetlands and the openness of the area, but the LA Board of Supervisors caved, as they always do when massive amounts of development money are involved. The Playa Vista project was bulldozed through the approval pipeline and the bulldozing of the Hughes property began.

Imagine everyone’s chagrin when the excavations uncovered human remains: what was left of a massive Gabrielino-Tongva Indian village and cemetery that had occupied the site for centuries (some say thousands of years) before Hughes got ahold of it. The developers were required by law to call in archaeologists, and tried to pass it off as a few paltry bones that they flung into a storage shed, treating them with great disrespect. It turned out this was a major archaeological site and around 411 bodies were recovered. The problem, as far as the Gabrielino-Tongva were concerned, is that their tribe is not federally recognized. This means they are not legally entitled to “repatriation”—that stipulation in U.S. Federal Law which requires Native American graves and artifacts to be treated with respect and reburied with tribal ritual after being disturbed. You can read about the whole sordid story in detail here and a more condensed version here.

Eventually, and with many years of pressure from Indian activists, the Playa Vista people agreed to set aside a memorial place where the bones could be shuttled out of the way of the development, out of sight of the rich folk, and reinterred. If this city blog can be believed, this took place on December 11, 2008. (I leave it to you to decide whether this memorial is cheesy.)

The Tongva Memorial

Now, as many a paranormal investigator will tell you, disturbed Indian gravesites are just asking for trouble. Some will say this attitude is racist, “blaming” the Indians for every weird quirk that happens on a property they once occupied. There are others who don’t look upon this as blaming the Indians, but perhaps as a matter of the disturbed dead seeking redress for the genocide visited upon them by Europeans. I probably fall into this latter camp, although it’s possible I am an unwitting racist. I would not be the first middle-class white girl reluctant to confess to that particular sin.***

Regardless, Mr. Dwyer (you remember him from way up top at the start of this post?) states that, “Disturbance of these graves may be linked to strange mists that have been seen in the area. Small blue clouds float a foot off the ground and rise to a height of about four or five feet. At times they are stationary but sometime (sic) they move, slowly, against the wind.” Those pesky orbs so beloved of paranormal investigators have also been sighted and “there are reports of electrical and mechanical problems” at the construction site. “It is anticipated that occupants of several new homes and offices in this development will experience paranormal activity…”

I will confess that having lived in this area all my life and passed through that particular stretch of highway more times than I can count, “tooley” fog (aka tule fog) has always been prevalent on that road between the Westchester bluffs and La Ballona Creek (no more than a quarter mile north). This is one of the only places I know of on the Westside of LA where this fog happens and I’ve seen it many times, usually late at night. Although I don’t remember it ever being blue or moving against the wind. Mostly, it just sits like the spirit of malcontent, thick as dread, hugging the ground while ten feet off the earth the air is clear. The Ballona wetlands have always been an eerie place. Back in the day there were no streetlights, and at night that part of Lincoln Boulevard tended to be as dark as the heart of a developer, with nothing but empty fields, scattered and abandoned buildings, and that ground-hugging fog in the right weather. Driving through there late at night by myself really gave me the shivers. Not hard at all to imagine uneasy spirits even before they dug up those graves.

The development has civilized it somewhat, lifted the highway ten or fifteen feet (which was a good thing as it flooded rather badly when we actually had rain), put in streetlights and masses of butt-ugly buildings. The land west of Lincoln Boulevard was set aside as protected wetlands and a bird sanctuary, but Playa Vista continues to screw with the land and undercut the natural habitat of the wetlands. They have to be continuous monitored by environmentalists and activists. Besides all that, they ruined a perfectly good scary place and I will never forgive them for it, but I have to say, strange fogs are not particularly convincing to me as evidence of spirit activity.

Restored Ballona wetlands with southern range of butt ugly buildings.

Eastern reach of butt ugly buildings on the Hughes property.

Orbs spotted with the naked eye? Maybe. (On digital cameras—no, I don’t think so. Too many rational explanations.) Electrical and mechanical problems? Maybe. Or maybe not. Things flying around a Playa Vista apartment and horrid noises in the night? Now that I’d like to see—if anything like that had been reported. Which, as far as I know, it has not. And maybe that’s all the Playa Vista stories are at this point: resentful people like me who didn’t like to see that rapacious development and would enjoy casting a ray of darkness upon it for spoiling our fun.

But, aesthetic principles aside, I would not be caught dead living in one of those butt ugly buildings. Just in case.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

***ETA 6/8/19: In the intervening years I've moved more towards the "this is racist" camp. Whereas I think it's possible that the spirits of Indians pissed off because their resting place was desecrated would haunt a location, I don't believe it's any more likely than the pissed off spirits of white folks or any other ethnic or racial group.

Yes, I know. There are so many charities asking for your financial support these days. But here's a chance to save some lovely wilderness and an iconic bit of Hollywood history. We only have until April 30 to do it.

Howard Hughes originally bought Cahuenga Peak, the land on which the Hollywood sign sits, to build a mansion for Ginger Rogers, but when they broke up, he let the land sit there, as he did so many of his plots of land around L.A. That's why a number of them, like Ballona Wetlands and the Cahuenga Peak, have been saved from the rapaciousness of developers. In 2002, the Hughes estate decided to sell off the Peak. The city of Los Angeles and the Trust for Public Land wanted to buy it and save the land in its wilderness state, making it a part of Griffith Park, the large wilderness area inside the city. But the Hughes estate was asking a whopping $22 million dollars. L.A. and the Trust tried to raise that much, but were unable to, and a group of Chicago vultures swooped in with a plan to build butt-ugly McMansions on the site. The bottom fell out of the real estate market, as you may know, and the Chicago syndicate couldn't march forward with their plans. Another chance arose to save the site, at the now "reasonable" price of $12.5 million dollars. The Trust for Public Land, some big donors inside and outside of Hollywood, plus a lot of little Jo/Joe Average donors have managed to raise $11, but the deadline for raising that other $1.5 million is April 30. One of the big donors has put up another $500k as a matching fund, so every donation from the public is worth that much extra.

From the Trust for Public Land site:

Individuals may donate online at www.savehollywoodland.org, or with their cell phones by texting the word LAND to the number 50555 to give $5. When prompted, reply with YES to confirm the gift. Standard messaging and data rates may apply.

Save this:

From this:

In my apparent research into ghost hunting for my next novel, I came across a book called Ghost Hunter's Guide to Los Angeles by Jeff Dwyer. It's part of a series, each set in a different city, and basically gives a brief overview of ghost hunting techniques and equipment followed by a long list of "haunted" locations.

Imagine my peaked interested when Playa Vista was listed, the rampant development taking place where the Ballona wetlands once peacefully coexisted with the undeveloped runway of Hughes Aircraft. Hughes refused to develop this land—the last piece of prime, undeveloped land on the Westside of Los Angeles—so at his death the money men were wetting themselves in anticipation of the plunder. It was a massively controversial development from the start, as many wanted to protect the wetlands and the openness of the area, but the LA Board of Supervisors caved, as they always cave when massive amounts of money are involved. The Playa Vista development was bulldozed through the approval pipeline.

Imagine everyone's chagrin when the excavations of this property uncovered human remains: what was left of a massive Gabrielino-Tongva Indian village that used to occupy the site. The developers were required by law to call in archaeologists, and tried to pass it off as a few paltry bones which they flung into a storage shed, treating them with great disrespect. It turns out that this was actually a major archaeological site and nearly 400 bodies have been recovered so far. You can read about the whole sordid story here. (Long story short: the Indians got shafted yet again.) You can see pictures of the development and surrounding lands at

doisneau's LJ here.

I remarked in this blog at the time that I really would not want to be part of that development or live in those units. Disturbed Indian grave sites are just asking for trouble. Mr. Dwyer states that, "Disturbance of these graves may be linked to strange mists that have been seen in the area. Small blue clouds float a foot off the ground and rise to a height of about four or five feet. At times they are stationary but sometime (sic) they move, slowly, against the wind." Those pesky orbs have also been sighted and "there are reports of electrical and mechanical problems" at the construction site. "It is anticipated that occupants of several new homes and offices in this development will experience paranormal activity..."

( In which PJ undercuts the Halloween spirit somewhat. )

I did a slight variation on the drive home last night because I needed to go by the Mecca of bargains fabrics here on the Westside: Lincoln Fabrics. It's a seedy store in a seedy section of Venice, but the prices can't be beat. The place is a complete fire hazard, with material stacked nearly to the ceiling in a profusion of piles. But it's quality stuff, if you dig for it.

( Read More )

The other day I was driving home from work through Venice—Venice, California—as I do most every night. It used to be my home town, but I haven't lived there for several years now. I can't afford it. So I moved further inland, a few miles and a whole different mindset away. I wasn't sorry to go, though my love for my home town had once been intense. It just wasn't the same place anymore....

In which I wax philosophical in both a narrower and broader context.

In the late 80s and early 90s, Venice went through an intense yuppification, and the shabby bohemian funky splendor of the place was force-marched into the land of McMansions, snooty condos, and obscenely priced apartments. They dredged the soupy old canals that Abbot Kinney built to replicate Venice in Italy, and restored them to a fit state for developers to latch onto. Soon the down-at-the-heels California bungalows which lined the canals were replaced by gardens and huge vanity single family residences with !open floorplans! and !cathedral ceilings! and !cavernous master bedrooms! and kitchens with !stainless steal appliances! (What architectural writer Sarah Susanka calls "Starter Castles.")

Some very pricey real estate there now—none of it bad in and of itself. Nice homes are nice, more power to their owners. Just not my personal style. And the old come-as-you-are, live-and-let-live mindset of Venice was precious to me. Former boho residents who walk these high-tone neighborhoods (as I still sometimes do) find themselves peered at through louvres, watched suspiciously from behind window treatments, invited by the looks of those watering their landscaped gardens to kindly loiter elsewhere.

Venice used to be a place where you'd see crusty old sailors wearing dresses, people driving down the street in hand-painted VW bugs crammed with canvases, street mimes having a cup of java at the local breakfast shop and loudly discussing politics. The tradition of bohemianism was long and venerable in Venice; it's always been someplace Other and unique. After it's fashionable heyday in the early years of the 20th Century, Venice became a place where poor folks lived. Because of its unique turn-of-the-century Italianate buildings, its network of canals and fantasyland bridges, artists were attracted to the place. The beatniks had their Gas House in the 50s; the hippies had their happenings in the 60s; the street performers, poor artists, and fortune tellers came on strong in the 70s. But those things faded as yuppies and beachies moved in. Now bohos are mostly confined to the thin strip right along the beach, Ocean Front Walk, where an infamous flea market/street carnival flourishes every day of the week all year round. The artists and bohos have been forced out of actually living in Venice unless they are rich bohos and artists.

So I'm driving through Venice the other day and someone drops off the curb at Main Street to walk across the street. It's a girl, wearing jeans, and jean jacket, and a bright red tutu over the jeans. I laughed out loud. She headed into one of the last of the funky neighborhoods, the one hugging the edges of the "slums" in the Oakwood section, and I thought, "It's still here, still trying to hold on by its red tutu."

Artists improve neighborhoods, or make them arty, thereby making them hip and acceptable. Then the developers come in and make these neighborhoods safe for Yuppykind. It reminds me of what Westerners do when we invade a less-developed country. "Ooo, we must do something about these tatty natives, take away their rich traditions and replace them with our own." Yeah, it's a double-edged sword. Westerners bring improved healthcare, science, technology—which I happen to think are good things. But we can't seem to do it without bludgeoning what's individual about the cultures we invade, without turning them into McCultures.

And yeah, I would like to see some cultural traits stamped out for good: female circumcision, female infanticide, women denied education and the choice to go to work, genocide, rape and torture as a political tools. But when you tell people they are wrong in the way they approach everything, without giving them some wiggle room and some say in what their cultures are going to be, they pretty much stop listening to anything you have to say and hold on to their bad old ways as the last true vestige of their identity. Holding on to what used to be is an instinctual human trait, and "progress" can be both good and bad. Cleaner, brighter, newer is just that—but it should always be accompanied by a respect for what was good about the old ways. That's how humans integrate experience and make something strong out of the new.

I'm not generally a nostalgic person—the past is dead and doesn't always smell sweet. I don't long for things to be the way they used to be. My heart aches sometimes for that old hood of mine, forever lost. But I also think Tibetan Buddhism has it right: all things change, nothing lasts forever—and you'd better accept that about life. Often, the things we've lost come again and maybe next time they're stronger and stay longer. Or fade again as fast. That's the way the world is made. And remade.

But what do I know? These days when it comes to Venice, I'm just passing through.

Some months back, I was ranting about a development going up in the last remaining wetlands along this part of the Southern California coast. A few months later, I had to retract retract my rant because I'd discovered my basic premise was, well, in a word, wrong. Ahem.

Anyway, I was oh-so-innocently scanning Yahoo! news [broken link] the other day when I came across an article about the very development project I'd been ranting and retracting about. It seems that during their excavation for the project, they've uncovered an...Indian burial ground.

My golly, that's almost proverbial. What's really bad is that they've put these bones in a shed until they decide what to do with them. Even if I had been interested in buying one of these gracious living joints at Playa Vista (even if I could afford one), this would probably queer the deal for me. I do not need any disturbed spirits taking out their anger on me. It's like Mark Twain said, "I do not believe in ghosts, but I am afraid of them."

Except on alternating Mondays and Sat-Sun matinees, I think I kind of do believe in ghosts. Sometimes. But maybe not. But that's a whole other journal entry. In fact, one of my first.

p.s. On a writing note: I know I owe a ton of crits, and I feel really guilty about that, but between crashing to get my rewrite done by the end of September (when I expect a serious disruption of my writing schedule) and being busy at work, I don't seem to have much left over except for the occasional irrelevant journal entry. I keep setting deadlines for myself that I fail to meet and it’s really torquing my mind into uncomfortable positions—but there isn’t much I can do about that now. I’m feeling rather forsworn, to use an old-fashioned term. Sorry. I'm downloading everything posted and hope to get to everything eventually either online of through email. But I am not setting any more deadlines for the time being.

Again, something anyone with even a passing acquaintance of me has probably already realized. But in this instance I'm publicly full of #$*! in the pages of my very own blog. (Well, I guess that's not so unusual, actually.) In my entry of February 3, I was whinging and whining about the development of a tract of wetlands, one of the last wild stretches along the SoCal coastline. I was deploring the "improvement" of said wetland to make it more palatable for the rich folk who were encroaching on it, how it had scared away all the wild birds I used to see there. I still maintain that the condo complexes going up across the street are hid-e-ous. . . but I saw a great gray egret while I was driving by there Saturday night!

I was so excited I told my dinner companions that night. Ann, who goes birding now and then and is friends with rabid birders, said, "Oh yes, I know X, one of the environmentalists who got the Playa Vista people to agree to leave the wetlands alone. He says the first couple of years, when they were cleaning out the soil contaminated by Hughes aircraft and bulldozing and improving the drainage, there were far fewer birds. But now that everything's been fixed, they're seeing birds that they haven't seen in twenty years—tons of them."

Ahem. Just not by the side of the road, I guess.

Okay, so I believe in admitting when I'm wrong, and I was wrong about this. If Playa Vista had gotten their way there would have been condos all the way to the sea, but once they committed (were forced) to the preservation of the wetlands, they did a good job.

What do you know? Sometimes the good guys do win. That same day, we learned that a stretch of pristine grassland up near Calabasas that environmentalists have been fighting for years to save from another damned golf course (a Bob Hope production) was officially declared wilderness land. Huzzah! A wonderful place for horseback riding, hiking, and natural things.

We were wondering, though, over dinner as we looked out over the harbor at Marina del Rey watching a seal sport in the water, how all those birds who had been gone for the last twenty years found out about the improved conditions in the wetlands. Is there some kind of secret bird email network? Do they each have their chatty or confessional or ranting blogs where they catch each other up on what's going on in their lives and their environments? Or perhaps a Ballona Creek Wetlands web site just for birds? Or maybe it's something more basic and old-fashioned: psychic emanations from the Bird Star Squawkidon? Personally, I'm putting my money on the crows, which are ubiquitous creatures, spying and scouting everywhere. If you've ever looked one of them in the eye, person-to-crow, you get to know very quickly that there's a keen intelligence behind those eyes and probably a whole secret world going on inside their heads. And furthermore (nevermore?) they're always squawking about something. Kind of like jungle drums, maybe, with secret coded messages in the rhythms?

Squawkidon rules.

I'm not against progress. I don't think things were better in the old days; I believe science has given us the potential to live stronger, longer, healthier lives. Being human, of course, we don't always avail ourselves of that opportunity. We reserve the right to do as we will, despite the blandishments of cancer researchers, nutritionists, and other preachers of the Word. No, progress isn't the culprit. But I don't necessarily think development is always progress. Often development is more about greed and vulgar pride.

The developers couldn't wait to get their hands on one of the last stretches of unexploited land along the Southern California coast—the Ballona Creek wetlands near Marina del Rey. It'd been protected through most of the high-development decades of the 20th Century by crazy ol' Howard Hughes, who owned a vast chunk of it. He preserved it because he'd built Hughes Aircraft on the part of the property east of Lincoln Boulevard. He liked to fly experimental things off his runway there, and kept the lands vacant on the west side of Lincoln almost down to the beach at Playa del Rey in case he crashed one of those somethings. Plus, he was a stubborn old coot. Long after he'd stop flying things, he held onto the land despite developers salivating and the urging of the money men to sell it off. Maybe because they insisted, but who knows? Howard moved in mysterious ways.

Then Howard died and the developers saw their golden moment come at last. They purchased the land from the Hughes estate, planning to rip it all up and build a shiny new planned richfolk community called Playa Vista. Only the dedicated and persistent yelling of environmentalists slowed that process down. The County of Los Angeles owned some of the parcels on both the west and east sides of Lincoln. Under pressure from environmentalists, the County got the developers to swap some of the western parcels for the eastern ones. The developers could put in their shiny new Playa Vista in the east, the wetlands would be preserved in the west. Everyone huzzahed—a rare victory for the forces of conservation.

But every silver cloud has a dark lining. What the County didn't tell the environmentalists, at least not at first, was that they planned to "improve" the wetlands.

It used to be when you'd drive up that stretch of Lincoln, about a mile from Los Angeles International Airport, you'd see the incongruous sight of wildlife in the middle of a sprawling city: wild ducks, pelicans, hawks of many varieties constantly circling in the sky, a plethora of doves, songbirds, finches, and most miraculously to me, herons. I mean, where else could you drive through the heart of an urban landscape, just a few miles from a major airport, and suddenly be in the heart of the country?

The parts of the city directly before and directly after the wetlands are especially blighted pieces of urban landscape—chock-a-block with storefronts and parking lots. But you passed under the bridge from Culver Boulevard to Jefferson and magic happened. You were suddenly on the bridge over the vast flood control of the Los Angeles River and open fields and wild things were just on the other side. It only lasted a couple of blocks, this countryside, but there it was, a miracle of survival. In inclement weather, the fog hugged the ground like a blanket, in the springtime the fields blazed with wildflowers: yellow and orange, pale blue, purple and white. And the view from the bluffs was clear all the way to the sea, a vast wave of green in springtime, golden in the fall and winter.

Two blocks, in the heart of the city: changed now. My favorite hillock, rising up to hold the Culver Boulevard bridge in place, a glorious crown of orange and yellow in the spring: cement now. Buildings line the whole eastern side of Lincoln where once farmers planted crops. One particularly hideous nouveau apartment block looks rather more like a prison or a mental institution than someplace to live.

Since they started grading and dredging and making nice in the wetlands, I haven't seen much wildlife. The doves and finches are ubiquitous everywhere in the city, so they haven't gone. I still see wild ducks flying overhead now and then, on their way to roost elsewhere. There is the occasional pelican, but I almost never see hawks circling in the sky, waiting for an intemperate mouse to show itself far below and provide it with supper. And I haven't seen a heron in years.

But the County has made lots of sparkling pathways for the humans who inhabit the Playa Vista development to tourist through the wetlands on; the County made nice-nice so the people who have live in McMansions on the bluffs above the wetlands don't have to look down on that tatty, chaotic mess that teemed life. They're currently grading the last bit of undeveloped bluff--no more poor folk allowed up there for a view to the sea. They're putting up more of what architectural writer Susan Susanka calls Starter Castles, perched precariously on the hillside on stilts. And when the next powerful earthquake jiggles through those bluffs and turns that beachy soil bubbly with liquefaction, I expect the richfolk will be imposing themselves upon the wetlands below in yet another way.

Everything changes. Nothing remains the same. The world is an illusion. But some illusions nourish the soul. Others don't look much like progress to me.

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Echoes in a Hollow Space

I'm here because I'm here because I'm here

Entries tagged with developers

The Rondel of Memory

The Night Marchers of Kaua’i

Indians and the industrialist: the haunting of Playa Vista

Putting your money where your mount is

I told you so: a semi-Halloween story

Journeys, forward and back

That Old Hood of Mine

Angry Spirits

I'm Full of #$*!

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July 2025

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