“This city is going crazy,” my Lyft driver muttered, as we watched a car make a left turn right in front of a speeding ambulance, sirens wailing to wake the dead. “People have lost respect for order and laws, they’ve lost their human kindness and dignity,” he said. “And that hurts.”
It’s been more than six months since I wrote my last “Letter From LA,” and my only excuse: health problems and general ennui about life in Los Angeles. The first is easy to get over — and in fact is almost over — as I’m buttoning up a two month immunotherapy treatment after a mid-June weeklong stay at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital for bladder surgery (a stay that I would not wish on my worst enemy — the care and food was so bad that I’m still reeling).
The hurt from the treatment gets less and less as time goes by. But the worst hurt is what’s happening to my beloved Los Angeles and Hollywood.
This year began with torrential rains that were described as “atmospheric rivers” (relentless storms wreaked havoc on roadways — a massive sinkhole in one neighborhood swallowed a car and a truck, leading to a dramatic rescue by firefighters) — followed by wildfires; late in the summer we had a hurricane and then earthquakes. But what’s horrible is the rampant crime and disorder:
Smash & grab crime waves, also called flashmob crimes (30 to as many as 50 people, all believed to be between the ages of 18 and 25, barged into the Nordstrom at the Topanga Mall in Canoga Park, getting away with $300,000 worth of merchandise; trashed an Yves Saint Laurent store at the Americana at Brand; robbed a Nike store in East Los Angeles; a Costa Mesa Gucci store; and other, smaller high-end mom & pop jewelry stores on Melrose)
home invasions
violent dog-napping
a spike in arson attacks (car fires, dumpster fires, trash can fires)
roving gangs of catalytic converter thieves (who use a reciprocating saw and cut the unit right out of a car’s exhaust system in less than three minutes; the parts are worth up to several hundred dollars for the value of its precious metals, which are platinum, palladium and rhodium, all used in a broad range of high-tech applications)
now that gas prices in LA have risen above $6.00 a gallon, there’s been a rash of gas-stealing crimes in which intrepid thieves drill through gas-tank flaps/doors to siphon fuel
trash ridden streets (the city is being smothered in garbage from the proliferating homeless encampments)
homeless encampments popping up everywhere, mentally unstable men and women walking around everywhere — making the streets seem like a set for an episode of “The Walking Dead” (by the way,the LAFD estimates 54 percent of its calls are related to homeless encampments)
fentanyl overdoses by teenagers thinking they’re taking ecstasy
crazy, reckless drivers: with the proliferation of Lyft and Uber taxi services and pandemic-fueled home deliveries, double-parking has become a way of life, blocking streets and causing traffic jams. The proverbial rolling “California stop” has now become an epidemic. Tail-gating and crazy speeders have become the norm (According to Allstate, “when it comes to the worst cities to drive in, Los Angeles takes the top spot. Not only do its citizens have to endure long hours of traffic jams due to the concentration of cars, but they are also at a higher risk of getting into an accident. Nationally, Los Angeles is the sixth most likely city to be involved in an automobile collision. LA also has the highest rate of motor vehicle incidents resulting in injuries and fatalities”
copper wire theft: Copper wire thieves have targeted the Metro rail system and street lights on Los Angeles roads and freeways, costing the city about $4 million a year; Caltrans has spent about $24 million over the last four years in repairs according to the Los Angeles Times (I used to take my friend’s dog on walks through a grassy area in the Hollywood Bowl parking lot; one day some gigantic boulders appeared randomly in the green areas and I couldn’t figure out why until saw their exact placement — over the access panels to the park’s street lights)
bad air: A report by IQAir a company that helps track global air quality, found that LA has the most polluted air out of over 2,400 cities analyzed in 2022
LA is the second-most vulnerable city for rat infestation in the US, behind only NYC, according to a 2023 study by home service industry website Home Gnome
real estate developments all over the city are replacing smaller, older apartments with high-rise, mixed use “luxury” buildings with jacked up rents where renters pay $3500 a month for a one-bedroom apartment which, in turn leads to …
a dearth of affordable housing with apartments and homes priced out of reach for most middle and lower class residents; more than half of Angelenos are renters, and almost half of renters spend at least half their income on housing. That’s way beyond the federal definition of unaffordable housing (devoting over one-third of household income to housing). And it correlates with a rise in homelessness
The Los Angeles Next Door social media platforms are a hotbed of worried Angelenos citing muggings, break-ins, thievery, shootings, car-jackings, problems with the homeless — so much so that it’s amazing that anyone leaves their home. In fact, when I posted a complaint at Next Door Hollywood about some egregious homeless activity, Next Door lit up like crazy and my post received thousands and thousands of views and comments: there were 12.5K views in five days compared to 1.4K views over a photo and complaint about people not picking up their dog poop — right under a dog-poop-bag dispenser.
And some neighborhoods are more susceptible to crime. According to an article, “10 Worst Neighborhoods In Los Angeles 2023: Beyond the Glamour,” in the Southwest Journal web magazine, Hollywood is 109% more dangerous than the national average, total crime is 109% higher than the national average, violent crime is 231% higher than the national average, property crime is 84% higher than the national average and the chance of being a victim of crime in Hollywood is 1 in 21.
Despite the anecdotal, tabloid-like media reporting, crime in Los Angeles is actually down this year — and more than a little. Homicides are down 24%, from 269 in 2022 to 203 this year (through August 26). Rapes are down 17%, robberies 12%. Citywide, property crimes are level for the last several years. But personal and other thefts have increased 14% this year and are up 42% from this time two years ago, while motor vehicle theft declined by 27%.
Some of this is hyperbole but I really think that life in Los Angeles has hit a new low.
Which leads me to the “mean world syndrome,” first coined by mass media researcher George Gerbner, who developed a “cultivation” theory that postulated that long-term exposure to television shapes how consumers perceive the world; the more television people watch, the more likely they are to hold a view of reality closer to what television depicts; because of the violence on TV, people start to see the world as more dangerous than it actually is. He tested this hypothesis by surveying people who watched violent TV shows, assessed their views on violence in their neighborhood, then compared that to actual crime statistics. Invariably, TV watchers saw the outside world as much more violent than it really was. Though Gerbner did his research in the 1970s and 80s, it’s not hard to extrapolate his finding to the negative influence of violent movies, reality TV shows and video games, and the further amplification of a mean world via social media (Next Door, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.). And this doesn’t even take into account the myriad studies that make a direct connection between violent TV, games and movies with violent behavior. That’s for another day.
Not to be all doom and gloom: While in a garden near my apartment, I was surprised to see several Monarch butterflies fluttering around the bushes and trees. In the last decade, there was widespread fear that their numbers were precipitously in decline. But since last year, new data shows that Western Monarch butterfly numbers in California has increased to almost 250,000. This one-year trend doesn’t mark a full recovery since, historically, Monarchs numbered in the millions along the California coast. Still, that’s a bright spot in our current ecological disruption.
And those butterflies are emblematic of a Los Angeles-past, a time of happiness and endless possibilities for kids growing up on the West side of the city. In the 1950s and 60s, LA and Venice and Hollywood seemed like golden plains of never-ending fun; the beaches were glowing bastions of warms sands and cool waves; the streets were wide open and safe and beckoning to young drivers to find new vistas. Especially if you were white and middle class. And went to any of the West LA high schools.
This weekend marks the 60th reunion of my Venice High School graduation class, and though I won’t be attending — my immunotherapy treatments make traveling too difficult — I began to ponder lost dreams, lost desires and lost friends. Earlier this summer, before my treatments, I was driving on an errand, wondering what had happened to one or another of my classmates, when the Four Seasons came on the radio:
Sherry baby (Sherry baby) baby (Sherry baby)
Sherry can you come out tonight?
(Come, come, come out tonight)
Sherry baby (Sherry baby)
Sherry can you come out tonight?
(Why don’t you come out, come out)
With your red dress on
(Come out) Mmm. you look so fine
(Come out) Move it nice and easy
Girl, you make me lose my mind
Sheri S. was my first high school love. It was the summer of 1962 and I was just coming into my own as a social person. I had lost a lot of weight and began wearing fashionable clothes (button down pull-over shirts were popular that year). I was in an off-campus social club (The Escorts), getting ready to start my senior year and, best of all, I was driving. I was 16 1/2 and though my first car was a hand-me-down, beat-up 1951 four-door Chevrolet sedan (with a steering column mounted automatic transmission gear-shifter that rose and fell as the car accelerated), I was the king of the road. I don’t recall exactly how I met Sheri, but she was the younger sister — one year younger — of one of my classmates, Steven S, with whom I had been close with in Junior High but had kind of drifted away from … but still remained friends. Sheri was beautiful, lively and — to my eyes now — sexy, and older than her years. We hit it off right away and began dating. Sheri was an imp — one time, when I visited Steven on a Saturday afternoon, Sheri snuck into my car and hid on the floor of my car’s back seat, popping up to “surprise” me a few minutes after I had driven away. We dated for awhile during that senior year; sometimes we would just drive around, with her best girlfriend in the back seat, aimlessly cruising around the city. At one point Sheri started to go out with a rich guy from another school — he drove a gold-colored Corvette Stingray — and when I asked her about it she said she was just doing it to make me jealous. But then our dating went sour. She stopped accepting my date requests and returning my calls — and then I was informed that she just wanted to be friends. Bewildered, I asked a female friend to take her aside to find out what had happened. “I really, really liked Harley,” she said, “but he never kissed me.” I don’t know if I ever saw her again after that, but I think of her often — and my naivety haunts me to this day. Some broken hearts just can’t be mended.
Magnolia Pictures will release JOAN BAEZ I AM A NOISE in NY theaters on October 6, 2023
Expanding to LA & Additional Markets on October 13, 2023
Directed by Karen O’Connor, Miri Navasky, and Maeve O’Boyle
Executive Produced by Greg Sarris, Parri Smith, Josh Braun, Ben Braun and Terry Press
Neither a conventional biopic nor a traditional concert film, JOAN BAEZ I AM A NOISE is a raw and intimate portrait of the legendary folk singer and activist that shifts back and forth through time as it follows Joan on her final tour and delves into her extraordinary archive, including newly discovered home movies, diaries, artwork, therapy tapes, and audio recordings. Baez is remarkably revealing about her life on and off stage – from her lifelong emotional struggles to her civil rights work with MLK and a heartbreaking romance with a young Bob Dylan. A searingly honest look at a living legend, this film is a compelling and deeply personal exploration of an iconic artist who has never told the full truth of her life, as she experienced it, until now. Directed by Miri Navasky, Maeve O’Boyle, and Karen O’Connor, JOAN BAEZ I AM A NOISE is produced by Navasky and O’Connor, and edited by O’Boyle. Executive Producers are Greg Sarris, Patti Smith, Josh Braun, Ben Braun, and Terry Press.
In honor of Super Bowl Sunday and the Chinese surveillance balloons that flew across the country for several days two weeks ago, I decided to revisit John Frankenheimer’s 1977 “Black Sunday,” a thriller about terrorists who commandeer the Goodyear blimp with a plan to murder 80,000 spectators at the 1976 Super Bowl in Miami, Florida. The film stars Bruce Dern in his typical over-the-edge hair-flying wildly acting mode as an ex-Vietnam War POW who wants to wreak revenge on the American public for his mistreatment after seven years of imprisonment in North Vietnam; after he was brainwashed by the Viet Cong into making a filmed apology for the war, he was returned to the states and court-martialed. He now is a Goodyear blimp pilot for CBS News. Guiding him in this endeavor is Marthe Keller, a member of Black September, a Palestinian militant group that was responsible for the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. Hot on their trail is Robert Shaw as an Israeli counter-terrorist Mossad agent.
Frankenheimer, who was a master of a cinema of alienation and paranoia, was just past his creative peak with this film, having directed “Birdman of Alcatraz” and “The Manchurian Candidate” in 1962, “Seven Days in May” and “The Train” in 1965, “Seconds” and “Grand Prix” in 1966. After a string of mediocre outings he returned to boxoffice success with 1975’s “French Connection II”; as a reward, Paramount and producer Robert Evans gave him the helm of “Black Sunday.” One of his last films was the highly successful “Ronin” (1998), which featured great non-CGI car chases, a web of political intrigue, and an international cast that included Robert De Niro, Jean Reno and Jonathan Pryce.
“Black Sunday” was based on the 1975 book by Thomas Harris, who went on to pen “The Silence of the Lambs” (1988). The screenplay was co-written by Ernest Lehman (“The King and I,” “North by Northwest,” “West Side Story,” “The Sound of Music,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” “Hello, Dolly!”), Kenneth Ross (“The Day of the Jackal,” “The Odessa File”) and the great screenwriter and man-about-town Ivan Moffat (“Giant”).
The film is a pretty straight-forward thriller, with plenty of violence, blood, car chases, and a few twists and turns. The direction and editing are intelligent and about as fine-tuned as one can get on the big screen. The production had the cooperation of the National Football League, which allowed filming during Super Bowl X on January 18, 1976, at the Miami Orange Bowl. Dern held the film together with his performance as a deranged PTSD Vietnam veteran; Swiss actress Keller, who rose to fame in the US as Dustin Hoffman’s girlfriend in “Marathon Man” (1976), lacked charisma and depth in her role as a terrorist; she subsequently went on to work in the theatre and opera in Europe. Shaw — who played Israeli agent Kabakov as if in a trance — made his US film breakthrough with his role as a Russian assassin in the second James Bond film, “From Russia with Love (1963); he subsequently earned a Supporting Actor Academy Award for “A Man for All Seasons” (1966). He played mobster Doyle Lonnegan in “The Sting” (1973), a subway-hijacker in “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” (1974) and, of course, the shark-obsessed fisherman Quint in “Jaws” (1975), probably his best-known role. He died quite young — 51 — of a heart attack in August, 1978.
All in all, “Black Sunday” is fun viewing and will keep you on the proverbial “edge of your seat.” So after today’s game, crack open that last can of beer, open up that last bag of chips and wings, and enjoy the fictional mayhem. The film is streaming now on Amazon Prime; Arrow Video will release a special edition Blu-ray loaded with features on March 28.
The only thing missing from the film was the result of the day’s championship game: The Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Dallas Cowboys 21–17.
According to the online newspaper Alternet, “a study published in the journal Neuropsychologia has shown that religious fundamentalism is, in part, the result of a functional impairment in a brain region known as the prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest that damage to particular areas of the prefrontal cortex indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by diminishing cognitive flexibility and openness — a psychology term that describes a personality trait which involves dimensions like curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness.”
From writer Jill Lepore’s article about facebook in the July 26, 2021 issue of “The New Yorker” (“Mission Impossible: How Facebook’s pledge to bring the world together wound up pulling us apart”): “more than half of all Americans were getting their news from social media” and “studies have consistently shown that the more time people spend on Facebook the worse their mental health becomes; Facebooking is also correlated with increased sedentariness, a diminishment of meaningful face-to-face relationships, and a decline in real-world social activities.”
Back in my July 2021 Letter I lamented the introduction of the Lamborghini and Ferrari SUVs; now comes even more mind-boggling news on the automobile front. Apparently, Ford introduced an all-electric Mustang-SUV crossover in the 2021 model year; despite modest sales of 28,089 in the first nine months of 2022 (about a quarter of the sales of Tesla models) they have not been in evidence on the streets of Los Angeles. I finally caught sight of one — parked in front of a 99 Cents Only store in Hollywood — and I wasn’t impressed. The automotive press has had mixed feelings about the Ford Mustang Mach-E — “despite the name it’s no Mustang” and a “Mustang crossover is sacrilegious,” but Car and Driver was impressed enough to give it the magazine’s inaugural EV of the Year award in 2021. And this year’s version — with a starting price of $47,495 — has a GT Performance model that zooms to 60 mph in 3.7 seconds. Better to get the kids to school on time.
This issue of Letter From LA is being sent out via email and the Substack publishing platform. Substack, founded in 2017 in San Francisco, provides an easy-to-use publishing template that not only sends out professional-looking email newsletters and posts, but aggregates those emails in web-based archives. Substack has become very popular with mainstream and independent journalists, critics and authors; some of the writers that use the service include investigative journalists Glenn Greenwald and Seymour Hersh, culture critic Anne Helen Petersen, music essayist Robert Christgau, and food writer Alison Roman. The beauty of Substack is their hands-off attitude; there is basically no censorship. And it’s up to the writers whether or not they want to charge for their writing (Substack takes 10 percent of subscription prices).
Letter From LA on Substack will, of course, remain free. But there is also the option for readers to opt in for a subscription — it’s always nice for a writer to get paid for their work. So, unless I hear from you otherwise, I’ll port your name over into my Substack mailing list (just for Letter From LA; and, to reiterate, it’s still free).
Swaying palm trees, cool evening breezes, night-blooming jasmine, ruby red and purple bougainvillea, golden sun at twilight: these are some of the cliches that describe Los Angeles — and they’re true. But here’s another version of LA’s reality, from the famous French sociologist, philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard: “There is nothing to match flying over Los Angeles by night. A sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity, stretching as far as the eye can see, bursting out from the cracks of the clouds. Only Hieronymus Bosch’s hell can match this inferno effect. The muted fluorescent of all the diagonals: Wilshire, Lincoln, Sunset, Santa Monica. Already, flying over San Fernando Valley, you come upon the horizontal infinite in every direction. But, once you are beyond the mountain, a city ten times larger hits you. You will never have encountered anything that stretches as far as this before. Even the sea cannot match it, since it is not divided up geometrically … Mulholland Drive by night is an extraterrestrials vantage point on earth, or conversely, an earth dweller’s vantage point on the galactic metropolis” (from America, 1989). LA is unique, yes. But in one respect, LA is still just like every other major American city — riddled with corruption. LA’s past has had its share of robber barons and cheats and thieves and politicians on the take — from the Huntingtons and Chandlers and Dohenys through William Mulholland and Mark Taper. LA’s past has been riddled with police and city council corruption — just pick up a copy of “L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City” by John Buntin for a litany of LA scandals.
But lately it seems that the sewage is bubbling more often than not to the surface. Former LA City Council member Mitch Englander was sentenced to federal prison last year for obstructing a corruption probe, former Council member José Huizar was indicted in 2020 on bribery and other federal charges for allegedly favoring developers, former Council member Mark Ridley-Thomas stepped aside after being charged with facilitating public contracts to the University of Southern California in exchange for favors (Marilyn Louise Flynn, the former dean of the USC School of Social work, was implicated in the bribery scandal; the 83-year-old was sentenced to a $100,000 fine and 10 years of house arrest. Ms. Flynn was the stepgrandmother to Tess, my daughter Lizzie’s best friend during her teenage years).
USC has been a hotbed of scandals: there was an FBI sting of a basketball coach, sexual abuse allegations by former patients of a campus gynecologist who they say sexually abused them (USC agreed to pay more than $850 million to settle), cover-ups of on-campus rapes, and a blatant influence-peddling scheme around college admissions in which some Hollywood stars and elites bribed their kids’ way into the school. USC’s rival across the city has also come in for its share of scandals, chief among them the indictment of a former UCLA campus gynecologist for sexually abusing female patients; a Los Angeles jury found Dr. James Heaps guilty in a criminal case that came after the university system made nearly $700 million in lawsuit payouts.
And Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva has come under intense scrutiny for blocking an investigation into excessive violence by deputies against inmates, and for his denial that violent Deputy Gangs permeate the Sheriff’s Department.
The latest: three LA City Council members and the head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor were caught on tape last year discussing ways to consolidate power in Los Angeles at the expense of Black leadership; during the conversation anti-Semitic, anti-Black and anti-Armenian remarks were made. When the tape was leaked last month, City Council President Nury Martinez, who disparaged a white colleague’s adopted 2-year-old Black son, stepped down, as did Ron Herrera, president of the labor organization. The two other council members, Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León, have yet to resign, despite a public outcry, and there’s no way that the men can be kicked off the city council short of a voter recall. Cedillo will term out this December, but de León has two years left on his term, which will net him about $568,000 in combined salary and pension. What a rat.
Speaking of vermin, Los Angeles has been named the third “rattiest” city in the country (it was second last year). Exterminator company Orkin released its annual list of the most mice-and-rat invested cities last Wednesday; Chicago tops the list followed by New York, LA, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco in the top five. The survey covers September 1, 2021 to August 31, 2022. According to Orkin: “Each fall, mice and other rodents invade an estimated 21 million homes in the United States. They typically enter homes between October and February looking for food, water and shelter from the cold. And unique to previous years, with the influx of outdoor dining structures brought on by the pandemic, rodents have found the perfect place to dine, live and multiply … with some displaying more aggressive behavior than in the past.” When I lived in Beverly Hills in the 1990s and 2000s, that wealthy city had a terrible rat problem. As far back as 1999, the Wall Street Journal reported that “Once concentrated in fields and crowded urban areas, the reviled rodents have started to invade some of the best addresses in America … How did rats wind up scampering into the lap of luxury? With urban rodents reproducing at epidemic rates after two consecutive mild winters, overcrowding has induced them to trek, street by street, to suburban settings … the suburbs are easy street: lavish leftovers in flimsy plastic bags, high-end pet chow, birdfeeders everywhere.” Beverly Hills still has a major rat problem and though not enough to make Orkin’s top-50 list, it still jangles the nerves of the city’s affluent residents; according to WickedLocal website, “Beverly City Councilor Stacy Ames said she has received more calls and emails related to the rodent problem than any other issue while she’s been in office.”
I hang out a lot near the Hollywood Bowl, walking a friend’s dog, and I see many interesting things. There’s a lot of cruising and speeding along Highland Avenue past the Bowl — it’s a long stretch from Franklin leading up to the Hollywood Freeway (101) and I guess some young men of a certain adolescent mentality love to rev their engines and “hot-rod it” up the street with mufflers that make earthquake-like rumbling sounds (hey, wait, didn’t I do this when I was a teenager?). There’s also a lot of motorcycle gangs that tool up the street (why don’t these bikes have mufflers these days?), followed by 18-wheelers, garbage trucks and buses. Lots of noise. There’s also a lot of homeless people walking up and down the street — only a couple of blocks away there’s a gigantic homeless encampment lining both sides of CahuengaBlvd. under the 101 overpass, as well as in a park area above the Hollywood Heritage Museum (the original Lasky-DeMille Barn that served as one of the first Hollywood studios in the 1910s), which sits in the middle of the Hollywood Bowl parking lot. Some of them come down the hills like coyotes, scavenging for food and recyclables in the neighborhood trash cans. But the weirdest thing I saw recently was an older gentleman pulling into the Hollywood Bowl parking lot one morning. His car was a late-model BMW X7 (probably a 2021 or 2022 since the California license plate began with a “9”) with a sticker price that starts at $73,000. With long gray hair flopping out from under a baseball cap, the man opened the rear car gate, pulled out a personal shopping cart and walked over to a line of trash cans. He rummaged through the trash, pulled out some bottles and cans, then began walking up into the Whitley Hills (a wealthy residential area adjacent to the Bowl), checking out the garbage cans as he went. I can only surmise one of two things: He just lost his job and needed the cash he could make from collecting recyclable bottles and cans – or – the guy has figured out how to make enough money from scavenging to buy a BMW. As I walked by his car I peeked in a side window and saw a bunch of LA city maps unfolded on the passenger seat. Nothing like planning out your scavenger hunt.
I’ve always liked the smell of fresh-cut grass — it reminds me of summer days growing up in Mar Vista, when, as a kid, mowing the front lawn was a weekly chore. But now it turns out that that smell that so many people like is really a cry for help. According to an NPR report, two University of Missouri researchers say that freshly cut grass blades are not too happy about being shorn. “For more than 30 years, husband-wife team Jack Schultz and Heide Appel of MU’s Christopher S. Bond Life Science Center have studied how plants react to stress. For example, when a plant is wounded, it can sometimes release airborne chemicals to attract birds and other insects to try to eliminate pests that are causing the damage. So when we cut the grass, Schultz says the grass is trying to find something to help.”
Back in the late 1960s, early 1970s, I rented a great apartment in Echo Park, in what is now known as Elysian Heights. In the early part of the 20th century, nearby Edendale was the home to most of the major movie studios on the West Coast, with such companies as the Keystone Studios, Fox, Pathe and others clustered along what is now Glendale Blvd. Because of its close proximity to these movie lots and, later to Hollywood, the hilly, forest-like Elysian Heights became the home to wealthy Angelenos; the area was also a bastion for artists and communists in the years leading up to World War II. After the War the neighborhood started to slide economically, and its cheap rents became a magnet for hippies and bohemians. Some of the homes at the top of Echo Park Avenue were veritable mansions: the apartment I rented was the bottom 1/3 of a gigantic three-bedroom house that had been broken up into smaller units (my next door neighbor’s house — which was shared by three bearded young men — had an expansive gardenia garden as well as an indoor swimming pool). I lived there from 1969 to 1976 and loved it; the house was perched at the very top of the hill, with a sunken dining room that had a view toward the lights of Glendale and Eagle Rock. It was secluded, with a long flight of eerie cement steps leading up to an overgrown back yard and dirt-filled pond. Off the dining room was a small utility room that — even in the heat of the summer — was always cold. The rest of the apartment was circular: you would enter from a back door, through the kitchen into the living room. A right turn took you up some stairs to two bathrooms, one with a toilet, the other with a shower. At the top of the stairs was a long hallway that butted up against the building’s basement; at the end of the hallway was a spacious bedroom. Another flight of stairs lead down to a small vanity room, then back down to the living room — a complete circle.
One night I was awakened by the screams of my lover: “Harley, there’s someone in the hallway,” she yelled. I jumped up and, as I headed for the hall, saw a yellow orb of light floating away from me. There was no one there. This happened a few more times — awakenings in the middle of the night — then they abruptly stopped. Cold room, floating lights — was this place haunted? As it turned out, the house was owned by Elizabeth Hampton, my landlady, who had lived in Echo Park with her husband, Roy, in the 1930s and 1940s. Roy was an LA City Councilman from 1939 to 1943, and was involved in some political controversies during and after his terms in office. He was a graduate of the University of Southern California and of its Law School and worked as a journalist as well as an attorney. In 1953 his body was found in a motel on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu; Sheriff’s deputies said he had taken his own life. Was that Roy floating down my hallway in 1973?