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

The wall of neon

Part Two: End of the Line

Next to 11111 Jefferson Boulevard, Culver City

Did you blink? Right there next to the Culver City Main post office? That street called Machado Lane, named after one of the original Mexican settlers, that was the exit to the Studio Drive-In. A beacon in the night, the backside of it's screen was a wall of vertical neon lines so bright they could probably be seen from space. A quaint holdover from the days when Americans believed so much in their cars that they couldn't bear to leave them even for a night's entertainment. No one misses them, not even the adults who were hauled by the carload as children to watch double features of Disney's Robin Hood with Million Dollar Duck. The clunky speaker boxes that hung on the car windows, the obstructed views from the back seat where the claustrophobia mixed with sibling proximity, where human exhaust clouded windows with condensation, none of it missed. The playground which consisted of a rusted swing set, a splintery teeter-totter, and a sandbox frequented by local cats, also not missed, and more importantly not frequented even when it was there. But it was there, once, a testament to another time, and an optimism about our marriage of autos and family entertainment.

"For Mountainous Appetites"

Technically 5529 Sepulveda Boulevard, Culver City

On the last day of school the sixth graders of El Marino Elemenatry School would dress nice for their end-of-the-year field trip and party. After a morning of formalities that seemed to take forever the sixth graders would line up in pairs and proceed to the service entrance near the lunch patio. Three classes worth of students then made the processional down Berryman Street to where it met Sepulveda Boulevard and the home of Woody's Smorgasburger.

Woody's was the sort of pastiche restaurant that seemed the providence of people who lived to build their businesses around themes. Woody's a-frame décor and Alpine mountaineer mascot would suggest something more in keeping with Germanic food, while a smorgasbord speaks to Scandinavia, but what Woody's served up was nothing less than an American classic charbroiled burger. Overdressed, sitting on the enclosed dining patio, frantically scrawling our farewells in handmade autograph books given to us courtesy of the PTA, we sixth graders sat and inhaled soft-serve sundaes and devoured burgers that became the bar all future burgers would be measured against. In truth the burgers may not have been that special, but the thing about memory is that when and where they were formed has as much to do with the emotions the memories conjure. Those memories are born of a moment in time and place but are held in reserve in a private memory vault. The memories are as much ghosts as the events and places that created them.

About that Sepulveda address above...

That stretch of Jefferson from where it first meets Sepulveda to where it branches off at Playa and continues west a few blocks later isn't technically Jefferson. Like a stream rerouted beneath the streets in culverts, Jefferson simply disappears while Sepulveda takes over. When it picks back up again Jefferson takes a shift and makes a b-line for the Pacific, one final mad dash out of town.

Home of the Spruce Goose, Jefferson borders on the right

Starting from 12100 Jefferson Boulevard

Past the Westfield Mall (formerly the Fox Hills Mall, formerly the Fox Hills Country Club), past the 405 and 90 interchange (does anyone still call the Marina Freeway the Nixon Freeway? Did anyone ever?), Jefferson becomes West Jefferson and travels almost two miles alongside the largest ghost of them all, the former Hughes Aircraft plant. Subdivided, it's airstrip torn up and streets laid in place for the new Playa Vista development of condos and light industrial, you'd hardly guess a good deal of aviation history was made on the site. Howard Hughes built his Spruce Goose here, and his avionics division developed a number of military crafts including the Apache helicopter. But the last aircraft left the airfield in 1985 and slowly the plant was reduced to a ghost town of empty hangars and unused asphalt. In time this large expanse of open land will fill in, and West Jefferson will claim another orphan of time.

Where Mr. Jefferson meets Mr. Culver

End of the line

Finally, crossing Lincoln, West Jefferson enters the protected Ballona Wetlands and succumbs to a merger with Culver Boulevard. Like a weary pack mule forced to carry its burden far too long,  Jefferson/West Jefferson, comes within sight of the Pacific and is content to buckle at the gates of heaven. At the point where Jefferson ends – or begins, depending on your point of view – there is no one alive who can claim to remember the surrounding landscape differently. Driving that stretch of road today looks no different than it did when I last drove it in 2000, or when I drove it in 1980, or when I was sitting on the bench seats of our family's '57 Ford Ranch Wagon and heading to the beach in the mid 1960s.

Roads, memories, dreams and development, all settle into the golden embers of a western sunset.

-- David Elzey

(Studio Drive-In: Bob Richardson, http://culvercity.patch.com/articles/looking-back-the-studio-drive-in)

(Woody's image http://www.culverhighalumni.org/)

(Hughes Aircraft: http://www.aviatorhowardhughes.com/images/aircraft-largestrip.jpg)

(Ballona Wetlands: http://www.cnsm.csulb.edu/departments/geology/people/bperry/AerialPhotosSoCal/NorthBayCoastalCities.htm)

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)