What We Lost

The New York Times has an interesting story about “the legal battles and innovations behind 42nd Street” that includes this interesting tidbit:

“Speaking of wholesome, an interesting issue that arose was where the adult entertainment businesses would go. The city decided to enact what some of us in the land use field refer to as ‘erogenous zoning’: prohibiting adult entertainment uses from residential areas, some manufacturing and commercial districts, requiring that they could locate no closer than 500 feet from schools, day care centers, houses of worship. That ordinance was challenged on constitutional grounds, because adult entertainment also has rights under the First Amendment free speech clause.”

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Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

💦 The sign used to read MindGeek. "MindGeek is a privately held Canadian company that focuses primarily on Pornography. Though legally registered in Luxembourg, it operates mainly from Canada with headquarters in Montreal and additional offices in Dublin, London, Hamburg, Bucharest, Nicosia, Los Angeles, Miami, and San Diego." In 2015, revenue was $460M.

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An excerpt:

“Not that long ago, I read something that said Brazzers was in Burbank. Brazzers, if you’re not aware, is an adult production company, and I live in Burbank. I had a hard time believing that Brazzers was based in such a sleepy part of the San Fernando Valley.”

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Who's Listening?

The other day, I found myself walking past these monstrous satellite dishes in Burbank. I think they are there for a TV studio to broadcast from? But I’m not sure. I’d walked by them several times in the past, but getting closer to them required walking onto private property. This time, I decided to investigate by walking up the driveway and then snapped a few shots of two big dishes that I could see on the other side of a hedge. Then I kept walking down the street.

As I walked past another driveway, I saw there were more dishes, and I could get closer to them. So I walked towards them. There were a series of large dishes, and some other smaller things doing I don’t know what. There was also a small building with a sign that read 2901 SATELLITE BUNKER. It all felt very @socialistmodernism. I wondered if the dishes were transmitting information or receiving information or both. I snapped more pics. Then my phone rang, and a woman walking by asked me if she was going the right way to the Chick-fil-A, and I walked back to my car.

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Black & White

🖤 #midcenturymodern

Love the architecture in Burbank. This is a dingbat, isn’t it? From my Instagram.

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Los Angeles Colorized

I love these renderings of Los Angeles by George Townley. What you see here is a dingbat, an architectural style found across the city that features living spaces above parking spaces. Found via California Sun.

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How Journalists Can Think Like Scientists

#philipjohnson

6 Likes, 1 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "#philipjohnson"

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the Russell Sage Foundation’s Social Science Summer Institute for Journalists. Helmed by Nicholas Lemann and Tali Woodward, it’s an intimate seminar that teaches journalists how to write about the social sciences and think like social scientists. Guests speakers included Andrea Elliott and Shamus Khan. It’s held in a Philip Johnson building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. I’m already using the tools I acquired there. I highly recommend it for everyone: from graduate students to veteran reporters.

[Image via my Instagram]

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Where Deckard Lived

"I'm not in the business. I am the business." - Blade Runner #bladerunner #ennishouse

12 Likes, 1 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: ""I'm not in the business. I am the business." - Blade Runner #bladerunner #ennishouse"

I made a quick detour up to the Ennis House today, in the hills above Los Feliz. This is the house where Deckard lived in "Blade Runner." Oh, and it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It's one of my favorite residential homes in the world. I used to live nearby and would walk by it regularly. Before they stopped doing so, I went on a tour of the place. It is truly extraordinary. For a time, it appeared that it would fall into ruin, but billionaire Ron Burkle bought it, and he saved it. It's still standing.

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Green

Instagram post by Susannah Breslin * Dec 7, 2017 at 10:28pm UTC

8 Likes, 0 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram

I don't know anything about this architecture, but it looks modernist. Green dots on a grid. Seemingly without any other function than to be aesthetically pleasing.

Black Thursday

"The Black House was a building that formerly stood at 6114 California St. in San Francisco, California, in the United States. The house was used by Anton LaVey as the headquarters of his Church of Satan from 1966 until his death in 1997. LaVey conducted Satanic seminars and rituals at the house; one of the most notorious such rituals was the Satanic baptism of his daughter Zeena Schreck in 1967, punctuated by LaVey speaking the words 'Hail Zeena! Hail Satan!' over the nude body of a female acting as the 'Satanic Altar.'" -- Anton LaVey's Black House rendered in #lego by @artofcoop 🖤😈🦃

11 Likes, 1 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: ""The Black House was a building that formerly stood at 6114 California St. in San Francisco,..."

I had a very cool Thanksgiving dinner with Coop and his delightful family and got to see his Lego version of Anton LaVey's Black House Church of Satan headquarters.

SciFi Cali

I've been reading BLDGBLOG for I don't know how long. Like Kottke, it's an original blog, steadfast despite the churn around it, and focused on something very specific, which, considering the diversity of the "content," could be categorized as that which delights. At least, that's my experience of it. In any case, Geoff Manaugh has a delightful post up today about a class he's teaching at my alma mater, UC Berkeley, and how California is science fiction incarnate.

"Robinson explained to Boom that, in the blink of an eye, California became a 'completely different landscape. At that same time I started reading science fiction (…) and it struck me that it was an accurate literature, that it was what my life felt like; so I thought science fiction was the literature of California. I still think California is a science fictional place. The desert has been terraformed. The whole water system is unnatural and artificial. This place shouldn’t look like it looks, so it all comes together for me. I’m a science fiction person, and I’m a Californian.'" 

Spider in the Sand

🕷 #paulrudolph #architecturelovers #walkerguesthouse #sanibelisland #aspiderinthesand

See this Instagram photo by @susannahbreslin * 17 likes

I had the great joy recently of seeing this house: the Walker Guest House on Sanibel Island. Designed by Paul Rudolph, it has famously been described thusly: "It crouches like a spider in the sand." Months earlier, I'd seen the delightful replica in Sarasota. In person, the real thing feels more secretive, more special. The gulf is a few yards away. I'd like to own this white box, one day.

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The Florida Percent

Down at the bottom of Southwest Florida, it can feel as if the one percent has eked out its own private orange grove. Take a drive along the coastline, and you will find yourself dodging Maseratis, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis. There's a glut of millionaires and billionaires, wealthy folks who can afford to buy second houses, and the immigrants who service them. Many of the homes have been built inside gated communities: mechanically-mapped imaginary moats wrapping around plots of land cut off from the rest of the world by gates and fences. Half the year, the place is besotted with the so-called snowbird population fleeing the snow up north. The other half of the year, it's humid and deserted. In the margins, there are bears, bobcats, alligators, turtles, dolphins, otters, pelicans, panthers, egrets, and rays. Take a walk along the beach at sunset, and you'll see how many of the high-end condo towers are mostly dark. These days, their owners can't be bothered. It's just nature and some tourists and what you get when you live in one of the United States that makes you feel like you're about to fall off the end of the world.

Whither Le Sex Shoppe?

After I landed at LAX, I steered clear of the highways and drove through the city. I wanted to see what had changed. At the east end of Hollywood, I pulled over to the curb and tried to figure out where Le Sex Shoppe used to be. Once upon a time, it looked like this. Before that, Charles Bukowski was known to patronize it. Above, you'll find what's left. I mean, I think. I wasn't even sure, as I stood in the street, taking photos and trying to avoid getting hit, where it had been. I kept looking for a trace of it, but it had vanished, it seemed.

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Le Sex Shoppe, Hollywood, CA / Photo credit: Susannah Breslin

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Florida Foreclosed

Foreclosure, Naples, FL / Photo credit: Susannah Breslin

What's more interesting than the subdivisions of affordable suburban tract homes in Florida that went to apocalyptic hell in the wake of the Great Recession are the mega-mansions worth many millions that to this day sit in a state of lush green decay like concrete block Miss Havishams. Once upon a time, you can see by their Zestimates, they were worth $1M, $2M, $3M and more. In dated photos on listings that have long since expired, before banks came along and foreclosed on them, you can see them at their thousands of square feet glory: the many-tiered tray ceilings with custom lighting, the acres of travertine set on the diagonal, the luxury showers that accommodate three at a time. Today, they are worth half their previous values or less than that. Tucked between neighboring homeowners that wish they didn't exist, their filmy windows gaze blankly at those who bother to peek over their dilapidated gates. Inside, you wade through the flooded swamps that were their manicured lawns, peer inside at their ceilings falling from leaks that make puddles on their granite counter tops, gaze into the putrid vats that used to be their swimming pools with spas and wonder where, when, and how it all went so wrong. The families aren't totally gone: the aluminum baseball bat left on the greening lanai, the stuffed yellow duck forgotten in the dust, the box of letters filled with unpaid bills from banks looking to collect and Happy Father's Day cards addressed to a head of household who must have found, to his surprise, his American Dream had fell to rot, and who, not knowing what to do, simply left.