2011- Day Two

It really is scary the way time excellerates as one gets older. I’m at that age where they really start to fly by. Hollywood was in the middle of a multi-billion dollar overhaul when the economy tanked. When I moved to Hollywood, over ten years ago that was. It looked quite different than the picture we now see. High end boutiques and trendy restaurants are elbow to elbow with the old stripper wear boutiques, head shops and tattoo parlors.

There’s a W Hotel and Apartments at Hollywood and Vine that nobody can afford. At Sunset and Vine there is a mixed use (apartments, restaurants and shops) structure that takes up an entire long block from Sunset to Selma on the west side of Vine. It’s called Sunset+Vine. How imaginative! These units looks very cheap but cost a fortune. Then at my end of Hollywood, in the heart of tourist land, Hollywood & Highland, the high-end residential stampede is finally grinding to a halt. The Jefferson Project and the McCadden Project are done.

©Russell Smith, Sunset+Vine

Above bears witness to the immense changes that Hollywood has undergone. Across from Sunset+Vine, a Trader Joe’s has just opened up.

An Interesting Holdout, Molly’s

On the NW corner of Selma and Vine

The Jefferson Project in Pictures

As you can see, the Yucca Corridor has been through a lot of changes, or should I say convulsions over the last few years? The last picture may be from the McCadden Project. It’s all ugly and overpriced. Nobody wants to rent it and it’s creepy to watch these multimillion dollar projects sit fallow. Poor city planning results in this kind of crap. And it makes me, for one, very angry. Where is the housing for the poor and middle class? We exist too. I guess this is the part where I wish everybody a Happy New Year. I wish it for the poor and the displaced. The horrible divide in wealth in this country will eventually lead to upheaval if it is not corrected.

Concrete Hole Dwellers

Will the indignity never end?

I like to call the hole in the ground next door, the concrete garden. It’s a play on the novel by Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden. It was later made into a movie. He never wrote anything very good after that first tour de force, but his books do sell, and win awards as well. The women in the video got rather violent after I turned off the camera. They began to break bottles against western wall of their hole. It is the wall that abuts our building, so it got loud in here where the non-homeless dwell. The contractors in the upper left hand of the screen did little to fix the gate. See for yourself. That picture was taken five minutes before it was just posted.

Doesn't look promising

Was that the best these guys could do? And they wanted to put a building up on that spot? My God! That thing would have tumbled, all five floors, right all over the Pointe (my building). These half-assed developers won’t rest until they buy up my building and the one next to it and the one across the street from us. We’re the last pieces of rental property that are governed by rent control regulations on this stretch of the Yucca Street cooridor.

The number of rent controlled units decrease every year, yet the L.A. Times published an op/ed piece last May that called for the end of rent control. Trust me Paul Habibi and Eric Sussman (who authored said op/ed) there are no high-priced lawyers living in my building. It’s composition is mainly immigrant families and young people starting up with their lives as grown ups. It also seems to provide student housing for the Musicians Institute. The developers are tearing down all the rent controlled units anyway, so your arguments are unwelcome. Why don’t you weigh in on another issue, such as Ayn Rand and how great she is? Paul Habibi is a real estate entrepreneur, according to Wikipedia. (It’s too easy) Eric Sussman lectures at UCLA. When he isn’t playing teacher, he’s “president of Amber Capital, Inc., a 15-person real estate investment company, which has acquired, rehabilitated, developed, and managed over 1,575,000 square feet of commercial real estate since its founding in 1993.” Just another fucking developer! L.A. Times is not unbiased. It is a tool of the real estate investors, in the grand tradition of old man Mulholland, who has a beautiful two-lane highway named after him. It’s hard not to think that everything is a fix. But that’s how they do things in Los Angeles.
The Jefferson Project is all finished and they’ve hung out their For Rent sign. At three thousand a pop, I wonder how fast they are renting apartments? Now they have twenty seven units set aside for people with low income. This is out of two hundred and seventy units- a measly ten percent. I wonder what the income requirements are for these units? Who decides who gets them? There are a lot of working poor families in this neighborhood. Will the recipients be from this neighborhood? I bet it’s a lottery system, and the only people who got invited to play were friends of the family, if you will- nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

So let us agree that the development company that owns this lot on the corner of Yucca Street and Las Palmas Avenue is irresponsible in the way it is conducting the disposition of said lot. They are not making it a secure site. Anyone can camp out there, and now they do. The people who camp on their lot are not nice people. They are mean, ugly and probably drug addicted people. Would you want them setting up shop in the concrete hole next door to your home?

Jeff Pro Nearly Done

See the Cherry Picker?

Getting that ad space ready - note that it will be an electric sign! blinky blinky

Once the new neighbors start meeting the old neighbors, sparks are gonna fly. This place will become mugger central because of its central location (several on ramps to the 101 within 2 minute’s drive). Also, these new units are all high-end. White Trash like me could never gain entré! The Jefferson Project is asking for $3,000 per month in rent. RENT! I don’t know how much the McCadden units are going for but it must be in the same neighborhood (forgive the pun) of the Hollywood and the Jefferson Project. By the way, the arrogant Hollywood is still trying to get 2.5 million dollars for their penthouse units. Look to The Hollyblog to give you full coverage of the emerging class warfare!

More neighborhood pics!

You better pray!

Did you ever know that you're my hero?

Detail of side of firetruck

Gentrification Sucks!

Another reason to hate the Jefferson Project

Jefferson Project - Built by Scabs & Rats

Joe Hill, martyr

What’s the big deal? So they aren’t paying decent wages, maybe even paying illegal immigrants under the table to haul stuff away. Why is everybody getting their panties in a bunch? If it weren’t for unions, there would be no middle class in this country. Sweatshops would abound. Workers would be forced to labor for twelve or more hours at a time. There would be no OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration). Hell, there would be no Department of Labor, whose Secretary serves on the President’s Cabinet. The last effect Secretary of Labor that this country had was under Bill Clinton. His name? Robert Reich. He served under Bill Clinton and was one of his chief economic advisors. The reasons why Obama didn’t tap him for his administration is beyond my comprehension. Maybe he asked and Reich turned him down? He’d make a better Secretary of the Treasury than Geithner, who has proven himself to be a complete corporate shill. But maybe he is doing a good job by Obama, taking the heat for his misguided pro-corporate policies. So how did I get all the way from the Jefferson to here? Well, there used to be strong labor laws in this country, but under Uncle Ronnie, they were dismantled by Congress (with the help of the pro-right wing Supreme Court). Now, all we have left of the vestiges of a strong union mentality in this country is Labor Day. I wonder how many middle class Americans realize that they have a day off to barbecue thanks to the blood, sweat and tears of labor agitators from the Great Depression era. I wonder how many people know who Joe Hill was. (Joan Baez does a great version of the song, “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night.”)

If it weren’t for labor unions, there would be no middle-class today –Russell Smith

Guess how much a unit is going for at the Jefferson? Three thousand dollars a month, that’s how much! With that kind of money backing up this never-ending project, one would think that they would hire members of Carpenters Local 209 to help build this…thing. But no! Every penny counts in this rat-eat-rat world of ours. Back in the old days, the Union would have had a nice gang of thugs to beat the living shit out of these scabs who are stealing jobs from dues paying members of Carpenters Local 209. It is sick-making when one realizes that construction workers, REAL construction workers, are some of the hardest hit people here in L.A. in this Republican-created Depression.

Call 972-556-1700 to complain!

One last insult to the workers of Hollywood. I saw Spiderman getting a ticket for being Spiderman. The world really is turning into an Orwellian nightmare. Watch!

Who told?

Did you see the March 8 New Yorker?

Hurt Locker marches to victory

Clearly there was a leak. Don’t tell me the illustrator, Mark Ulriksen is psychic, because there’s no such thing. Culturally America is bi-coastal, with a vast wasteland in the middle. Stage actors from New York are no longer considered a sell-out when they do a Hollywood blockbuster, Cathy Bates cleared that all up after Misery and Fried Green Tomatoes.  So the cross-continental pollination continues, and a decade later, The New Yorker splashes a less-than-subtle spoiler on the front page. And then we here in Hollywood are supposed to act like we care when John Updike buys the farm? When great writers, like Pinter for example, used to go to Hollywood, it was with a fedora hat pulled over their forehead, sunglasses and a trench coat. They were ashamed to be associated with Hollywood and were considered sell-outs. Well, this is the last straw. When our subscription runs out, I’m going to see if we can get the Hollywood Reporter, or Variety. If we must stick to Condé-Nast, then I want Vanity Fair. If the New Yorker wishes to remain relevant, then why are they still publishing that gadawful poetry? I open to The Thundershower by Derek Mahon. It has nine stanzas. Oh, look! It’s trying to rhyme. Why should I give a damn about this thundershower? After 54 lines of ponderous mush, there should at least be an earthquake. Usually I read the cartoons while I’m on the throne. Talk of the Town? Who gives a damn? Ain’t my town! Okay, I’m going to stop deconstructing the New Yorker now, but it really pisses me off that someone at Borse-Porterhouse leaked the results to someone who gives good head, so good that it got him/her a position or friend at the New Yorker. Well, they say Nancy Reagan gave head like she was sucking for oxygen. Guess that’s what makes the world go round.

How long, oh Lord, how long?

I want my sidewalk back!

The bizzarely named Jefferson Project continues to ruin the lives of local residents. The eastern sidewalk from on Highland from Hollywood to Yucca is closed. When I first asked the site manager, Buba, how long this inconvenience would last, he assured me that it would only last “three weeks.” Three months later, I’m being told that it might be a couple more months. With  unemployment for construction workers in Los Angeles running at a mind-boggling twenty percent, these kind of boondoggles will keep the most incompetant, lazy and drug addled among you, busy as bees pollinating opium plants. Nice work, Bubba.

Most annoying commercial ever

With a spokesmodel named Flo, who looks and acts like she’s taking Provigil by the bottle, Progressive Insurance has won the hearts, if not the pocketbooks, of America. While I was cutting through the Hollywood and Highland complex to get to the CVS at Sycamore and Hollywood, I was assaulted by a Progressive-Insurance-a-thon. Here they are filming one of those commercials again. Where’s that tampon I can use to gauge out my eyes? Take a look and see if you can find Flo!

Can’t win

This is the corner of Yucca and Mccadden. See the pretty Wedding Cake Building? Such a lovely sight! But to the developers, nothing is sacred.

What a world!

Ten months later and what have you got?

I have also recorded how the developers transformed this corner via photography. Maybe next post I’ll just let you watch the change a month or so at a time. Well, now you know my two pet Hollywood peeves : over-development and homelessness. When people say I have no compassion for video tapping these people, I say they have no compassion for looking at what we collectively have done by not advocating for public services. I’d take a big cut out of my paycheck to improve the roads, the schools, psychiatric services, homeless shelters and to hire more police and firemen.

Another service that I like to provide is reviews, mostly movie reviews, but also live stage, which means anything from improve comedy to a hard core band at a dive bar here in Hollywood, where the stars are created. I just saw a documentary calledAmerican Teen . I give it a B+. The premise of this documentary is to follow around a group of seniors in high school and record their trials and tribulations as they transition from childhood to official adulthood. By the end of the movie I really loved some of the kids and absolutely hated others. You can guess who’s who for yourself. There are sections of animation that at first seemed facile, but then I got it. Children live in a cartoon world of fantasy, while the grim reality of life crushes us poor adults day in and day out. With some of these kids, you could see the pain so clearly on their faces as the ponder and worry over their futures. Yes, it’s a solid B+. What could the movie makers have done to make it an A? There are scenes that seem very stagey and come across more like a teen soap opera based in Warsaw, Indiana. Despite that, I heartily recommend this movie for rental.