Arteries of Memory: The Ghosts of Jefferson... Boulevard, Part One

Where Tara Plantation and witches were burned

Part One: Westward Expansion

Indian Wood Road and Jefferson Boulevard, Culver City

This wall here, seven or eight feet high in spots and in the sandy hues of concrete bricks meant to imitate some sort of imaginary native stone, this wall is anonymous. Designed to protect the housing on the other side of it from the noise and pollution of the street it borders, to provide privacy, nothing about this wall betrays its past marker, a fence made of wide planks painted forest green. The fence did little about the noise but it did provide a different sort of privacy, serving as a curtain that hid the magic taking place on the other side. Native trees acted as a buffer between the fence and the randomly strewn clumps of building facades with names like Tara and Salem Village, Rainbow's End and Raintree. These names, and the faint echoes of their old dirt roads, live on though few who pass them by know their origin. This housing subdivision full of well-kept suburban homes and condos behind the anonymous wall was once MGM Lot 3, the largest of the open air backlots in Culver City. The names recall the movie sets they once contained, mythical places from another time that have since been covered over with concrete and asphalt and turned into yet more homes and shopping centers for a growing populace.

At 10786 Jefferson Boulevard, Culver City

This cross street here, nothing really special about it. One long block of lower income apartment buildings this direction, a couple blocks of single family homes the other direction. Easily passed, easily ignored. Kinston Street. I once lived on this street, a mere blip of a cross street along Jefferson Boulevard as it cut from east to west across Culver City. Like any thousands of streets over time its name has changed. It used to be called Hazelton, another unassuming name. How often do we wonder about the origins of street names, who (if any) were the people behind the names? Honorifics to national heroes and historical figures, like Jefferson and Washington and Martin Luther King, populate every major metropolitan map. Other names come from more local sources, names of city founders or the landowners and rancheros who once possessed large tracts of land. Some streets carry numbers, others the names of flora and fauna, and there's the time honored tradition of building developers naming streets after daughters and spouses and financial backers. The reasons for the change, now decades past, seem unimportant. Only those who once lived there carry the old name with them like the passport to an Old World country that no longer exists on a map but can still be visited.

Cota Street to Sawtelle Boulevard

Locals called the shopping plaza The Village to keep confusion down. If you talked about Studio Village most people thought you were talking about Studio City and would ask if you've seen Johnny Carson on his way to “The Tonight Show.” To locals, Studio Village was the neighborhood that bordered Ballona Creek between Overland and Sepulveda and was more frequently called Lindberg Park for the local playground. 
If the Studio Village Shopping Center can be said to be enjoying an renaissance this wouldn't be its first rebirth. In the 30's this plot had been a six-hole golf course, built for the convenience of Hollywood stars and producers looking to get a few holes in on either side of their busy schedules. Then, as a post-war shopping center it boasted the “big name” department store, Newberry's, that had its own lunch counter. Smaller retailers filled the gap leading toward the Safeway supermarket, another post-war marvel that heralded a new age essentially across the street from Jack's Ranch Market. Jack's represented another time, a place where produce was displayed in slat bins and farmers bushels, a large open-air affair that was slowly being surrounded by more modern commercial development. But in the mid 60s Jack's Ranch Market burned down due to a combination of bad wiring and being constructed entirely from wood, a smell that drifted south toward my elementary school, El Rincoln, that lingered for days over the playground. Another ghost rising from the ashes of Jefferson Boulevard.

Discount shopping courtesy Two Guys from the East

But Studio Village is currently experiencing another renaissance as chain stores stake a foothold in formerly mom-and-pop businesses. No one remembers the Ponderosa Steak House, with it's pine trees and wagon wheels protecting its large sloped roof, long since leveled for a nondescript box containing a PetSmart. The space currently occupied by a Target seems perfectly constructed for a big box retailer of the late 1990s but thirty years earlier it was a just an East Coast discount department store chain  named Two Guys that carried everything from cameras, guns and camping gear to household appliances and a grocery store, to an auto center. There is a secret rule to all this urban renewal however. A new store goes in where and old building has existed for decades and suddenly its as if the building had never been there before, but only if the structure is as blank as a canvas; any building or structure with character fades away or is destroyed to remove the taint of history...

-- David Elzey

In Part Two: West to the Pacific

(backlot photo from www.thestudiotour.com/forum)
(Two Guys: http://pleasantfamilyshopping.blogspot.com/2007/10/tale-of-two-guys.html)