Most Iconic Image of California

Quick! Pick an image you think best portrays "Southern California."  We're looking for a single shot that says it all.

You might have chosen the Hollywood sign.  Or maybe an inviting, curvaceous, nearly-nude young woman sitting on a pristine sandy beach while hunky guys surf near their Woody, which is parked in the distance.  Or a self-involved conspicuously aging big shot lawyer (or businessman or actor) with Donald Trump colored hair obliviously driving an expensive car, ignoring stop lights and pedestrians, and talking on a cell phone.

If you're a Republican (yes, we still have a few of those in California) maybe you think a picture of Ronald Reagan orating in front of the Stars and Stripes still says everything which needs to be said, all in a single picture.

Okay, not many Republicans read Mixed Meters, so that last one was a just a joke.  And the other images are only imaginary; they don't really exist except in the movies.  And movies, I'm sad to report, are not even close to being real.  Even Ronald Reagan knew that.

I've known for many years exactly which image I would pick to epitomize life in SoCal.  Just recently I had my first chance to actually take a decent photo of the object in question.  The locale was a new light-rail station in Azusa.

While I admit that this object may not be unique to this area, it reeks of cheap theme parks or cheesy B-movie special effects.  Both of those say 'Southern California' quite well.

This thing imitates nature.  It does that very badly.  It might be better to say that it defies nature.  It employs all the architectural panache of a sleazy strip mall, another Southern Cal speciality.

Its purpose is to whitewash essential infrastructure, hiding it from our consciousness behind a facade which is always in plain sight.

We find this thing acceptable, I guess, because it facilitates our modern lifestyle.  It's high-tech.  It brings people together.  It gives a strong signal to all the idiots with bad hair color who text while driving.

Have you guessed it yet?

Yes, it's a cell phone tower disguised as a palm tree.   Welcome to the silly side of SoCal.

I wonder what, exactly, they were thinking in Azusa when they approved this.  Maybe: "We need to put up a tall cell tower so people can Instagram and Twitter.  Let's disguise it to look like a cheap plastic palm tree and, after a while, maybe no one will notice that's it's not real."

Cell phone towers apparently go hand in hand with palm trees around here.  I've found two cell phone tower and palm tree combos close to my home in Pasadena, about 20 miles from Azusa.

The first shows a cell phone tower disguised as a . . . cell phone tower.  It's not really a disguise but it is ugly.  It's near a palm.  It's also right behind a super sleazy strip mall.

In the second one the horribly thick flag pole is the cell tower.  It's nestled amid palms in front of a church.  The little hut in the foreground holds electronic equipment.  I guess Ronald Reagan was giving a speech elsewhere when I snapped that picture.

Personally, I think neither of these offer that much improvement over the fake palm tree.  Looking at these things is the aesthetic price we all pay to keep your smart phone connected anyplace you go.

Just imagine what beautiful or curious or bizarre sculptures which could be built to beautify cell phone towers.   Modern sculpture might be too controversial.  How about a giraffe?  Maybe a 50-foot tyrannosaurus rex?  (Note the proximity of palm trees.)

We could make our cell phone towers into huge sculptures of our famous citizens and civic leaders.   Such huge human forms have a tradition already.  They're called Muffler Men.  Cities could honor their leading citizens by turning them into cell phone towers.

Maybe a sculpture of Will Rogers holding a lariat looking back at us while we text?  Gracie Allen?  Tom Bradley?  Cezar Chavez?  Sally Ride came from Southern California.  Dr. Dre?  Cal Worthington?

And, in reality, all of them would be hiding cell phone antennae for our personal convenience.

God forbid, Ronald Reagan could become a huge plastic immovable object, gracing our skyline somewhere, his guts filled with electronics, spewing an endless stream of tweets and Facebook posts, saying things that others people wrote but doing it with great feeling and empathy.  Republicans could make pilgrimages.

Now, that is a single picture which would speak volumes about Southern California.

Maybe it would even be too much information.

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They have cell phone towers disguised as palm trees in other states too, apparently.  Here's 25 pictures of cell phone towers disguised as all sorts of things.

Most palm trees are not native to California.  Neither are most of the people.  Here's a California palm history. (palmistry?)

Tile Patterns

My local Vons supermarket was remodeled just over 2 years ago. Here's a picture of a remote corner of the building as purloined from Google Maps.

Note the stone tiles decorating the building.  They are black, perhaps made out of slate, (what do I know?) with reddish patterns, perhaps some sort of iron (again, what do I know?)

The interesting thing about these tiles, of course, is their abstract patterning.  I took closeups of a handful and brightened the pictures very slightly.  All together, there must be thousands of such tiles throughout the store and adjacent shopping center.  I've noticed that nearly all of them have some design or decorative interest.

Art, as everyone knows, is where you find it, even on the walls of a grocery store.

Click any picture for a better view.

Other Mixed Meters posts about tiles.
Foto-Buster  (a kiosk decorated with hand-made tiles)
Floor Shows (a man with a camera looks at his feet)
Russian Bestiary (scroll down for a tile peacock)

Tile Tags: architectural detail. . . stone tiles. . . natural patterns

Million Dollar Sculpture

Wandering around in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday I noticed some sculptures on a building at 307 South Broadway. You can see four of them in this corner shot.


I snapped close-up pictures of each one. Click them and they get bigger. I wonder why these particular subjects were chosen, although many of them are obviously arts related. The building was built in 1918.









Each of the above sculptures have their own buffalo head.


The building is called the Million Dollar Theater. Here's a Flickr photo-set with good pictures of the building itself. There's a Million Dollar Theater Homepage with some indoor shots. More indoor pictures here. And here's a Wikpedia page which reports the name of the sculptor: Jo Mora. Besides these figurative works there's a lot of very neat decorative sculpture as well.


Million Dollar Tags: Million Dollar Theater. . . sculpture. . . Jo Mora

Pasadena Towers

Ben of the sky is big in Pasadena posted this story about being confronted by a security guard for taking pictures of one of the lesser architectural "wonders" of Pasadena from a public place.

I dug through my messy unorganized files and found these shots of that same building. I never had trouble at that location - maybe because my pocket point and shoot is so small - but I've certainly had my encounters with people elsewhere who thought I shouldn't be taking pictures. (If you click a picture, it'll enlarge.)




This is what I call a "framing shot" - while I'm taking pictures at a location I try to find a sign to help me identify it later.


Google Street view has pictures all around this building. Start here.

Here's another picture I took of a small detail on the Green Street side of Pasadena Towers.

Here's my picture of the "Photography is prohibited" sign at Pinkberry in Old Pasadena.

Pasadena Tower Tags: Pasadena Towers. . . public photography. . . security guards

Reach for the sky - Part 3

Please visit the previous entries in Mixed Meters series on steeples, spires and other architectural attempts to stand erect: Reach For The Sky - Part 1 and Reach For The Sky - Part 2.

This installment is entitled Lighthouses of the Inland Valleys. So take a guess, where do you think this first lighthouse is located? The answer, obviously, is Burbank California, miles and miles from the nearest seagoing. It's part of some sort of self-storage building. I took this picture from Fry's Electronics parking lot.

The next picture, showing a lighthouse with a fish weather vane, is on a private home in Pasadena. Maybe the original owners were homesick for the ocean.


Most interesting, however, is the lighthouse atop the Bank of the West building in the Playhouse district of Pasadena. It's eight stories high - much higher than any new building.

Here are some pictures I took from various perspectives. Any picture, clicked, will enlarge.


There appears to be an artichoke adorning the top.


Here is where someone named Mountain Lovers wrote this note:

This lighthouse is on top of the Bank of the West building in Pasadena, California. The building was the former home of the Independent Star-News, the newspaper of Pasadena. This structure was built in the early 1900's and the light was used up until the mid 60's. As a youngster, I remember seeing the light shining downtown. I grew up about 2 miles north of Downtown Pasadena. The building is on Colorado Blvd., the famed route of the Annual Tournament of Roses Parade viewed by million each New Years Day.

I'd love the chance to go up there and take some pictures looking the other direction. The view of the mountains and city is probably pretty darn good.

I've seen it lit up at night for some time. Alas, my little pocket point and shoot doesn't take pictures of bright objects very well during the nighttime. This is the best I could get.




Lighthouse Tags: lighthouse. . . Pasadena California. . . architecture

Foto Buster

In a small run down shopping center in Altadena CA (that's immediately to the north of Pasadena) there is a familiar bit of American architecture - the drive-through kiosk. This one had been a photo developing business named FotoBuster- now out of business. Another vicitim of digital photography. I've driven by this spot dozens of times.


What I never noticed about the FotoBuster kiosk until Friday was the strange and wonderful mosaic decorations of the building. Random odd shapes and bright colors are interrupted by the occasional ceramic face or turtle. Some artist must have spent a long time tiling this little building. I found one online reference to it, this post at the blog L.A. Snapshot.


If you're not interested in the kiosk or mosaics it is highly recommended that you try the frozen goodies at Bulgarini Gelato, nestled in a corner of this same shopping center. It's near the corner of Lake and Altadena avenues.


I wonder if there's a word to describe this individualist style of decoration. On Wikipedia the Watts Towers is called "vernacular architecture" - but in this case the actual building is entirely normal, only the tiles are unique. I have no clue who did this or why or what the residents of the area think of it or whether the local preservation groups think it worth preservating.


I'm pretty sure the thing that looks like a cow's head is just residue of the glue from a former sign. Below the picture of the turtle sculpture is a long composite panorama of the north curb of the kiosk. You can see the turtle at the right end. The panorama picture is 10 times wider than it is high. Click any picture for an enlargement.




Tile Tags: FotoBuster. . . kiosk. . . mosaic. . . vernacular architecture. . . Altadena. . . Bulgarini gelato