L.A. BLEU

I’ve come a little belatedly to a book by Catherine Corman titled “Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler’s Imagined City.”  I like it a lot, but then I would.  I’ve never met any writer in Los Angeles who didn’t actively love Raymond Chandler, and not many photographers either.

There’s always a “visual” element in Chandler’s work, by which I mean that you “see” the world through his, or Marlowe’s, eyes.  And there have been various books on Raymond Chandler’s LA, generally well-meaning tomes with some slightly so-so photographs of the city, but Catherine Corman is the real deal.  For one thing, she’s Roger Corman’s daughter, so her LA pedigree is unimpeachable, and she can certainly do the noir look herself when she puts her mind to it.

Daylight Noir consists of 50 or so  moody, arty, square-format, black and white photographs, mostly architectural in some sense, some of them showing very specific LA locations, some of them kind of generic.  And attached to each is a quotation from Chandler.  Again, some of which are very recognizable, some less so.

The book has an introduction by Jonathan Lethem (a seal of approval for sure)  in which he says, “If architecture is fate, then it is Marlowe’s fate to enumerate the pensive dooms of Los Angeles, the fatal, gorgeous pretenses of glamour and ease, the bogus histories reenacted in the dumb, paste-and-spangles cocktail of style.’  Yes, Jonathan, but what if architecture ISN’T fate?

But anyway, it’s surely a good sign that Catherine Corman’s book sent me back to rereading Chandler’s novels, keeping an eye out for architectural detail.  Of course in The Big Sleep we all remember the hall of the Sternwood mansion, the entrance doors big enough to let in a troop of elephants, and the stained glass showing a knight rescuing a damsel in distress (that’s got to be pretty colorful, right?). 

At the back of the house there’s a “wide sweep of emerald grass and a maroon Packard,” and when Marlowe gets into the greenhouse where he meets the General,  “The light had an unreal greenish color, like light filtered through an aquarium tanks.”  I’m seeing a fair amount of color, aren’t you?

         

And when Marlowe gets to Geiger’s house, oh boy, there’s a thick pinkish Chinese rug, a broad low divan of old rose tapestry with some lilac-colored silk underwear strewn across it, a couple of standing lamps with jade-green shades, and a yellow satin cushion.  Carmen Sternwood is there, sitting naked on a fringed orange shawl.  OK, maybe that’s décor rather than architecture, but nevertheless this is some very colorful nor.

         Now obviously I wasn’t around in Chandler’s time, but as I walk around LA these days it looks like the most intensely colored cities I’ve ever been to.  Sure the color may be only skin (or stucco) deep, and sure there may be some dark things happening behind those cheerfully colored walls, but that's the nature of the beast, right?

One of the architectural touchstones from my earliest days of walking around in LA is the Blu Monkey Lounge on Hollywood Boulevard.  When I first saw it, it looked like this:

It seemed intriguing, secretive, vaguely sinister, a dive bar where bad things might happen. A little research suggested it was in fact just a loud bar with DJs and expensive drinks, not exactly a rarity in Hollywood, and not really my kind of place.  A little while late it looked like this:

I guess it was in some transient state as all the buildings around it get gentrified,

demolished or refurbished.  Maybe it was just being repainted.  Anyway, the last time I saw it, it looked it was like this:

You’ll notice that the word “monkey” has disappeared from the name. And I guess that stucco is still a kind blue, but it doesn’t yell “blue” the way it once did.  Isn’t it aquamarine, or maybe turquoise?  The Case of the Absent Monkey?  Well, maybe there is something noir-sounding about that after all.

Catherine Corman's website is right here: http://www.catherine-corman.com

WALK, HE SAID

Understandably, there isn’t a huge amount of walking in the movie Drive, which I just watched.  Ryan Gosling (as Driver) does a certain amount of strutting, and there’s a moment when his character asks the Cary Mulligan character (Irene) “Can I walk with you?’ but all they do is stroll along a corridor in their apartment building. This is not much of a movie for fans of pedestrianism.

But what really intrigued me about the movie were opening words, Driver’s voice over, “There's a hundred-thousand streets in this city. You don't need to know the route. You give me a time and a place, I give you a five minute window. Anything happens in that five minutes and I'm yours. No matter what. Anything happens a minute either side of that and you're on your own. Do you understand?’

Leaving aside the question of whether this actually makes any sense, either inside or outside the movie, I’m still curious about the notion that “this city” (and it’s definitely Los Angeles that we’re in), has 100,000 streets.  It seems a ridiculously high and inaccurate number, but trying to find out how many streets there are in LA is surprisingly tricky.

It’s not so hard to find out how many miles of road there are: 6,500 in the city of Los Angeles, 20,000 in L.A. County: both those figures exclude freeways. Clearly there’s not much correlation between number of miles and number of streets.  The longest street in Los Angeles is Sepulveda Boulevard - 26.4 miles in the city, and the shortest street is Powers Place, 
which according to sources runs for just 13 feet, in downtown, close to Pico Boulevard, but looking at in on Google Streetview it hardly seems to exist at all.

 I found all this info online, so don’t shoot me if it’s not gospel.   And in any case it doesn’t answer the question of how many streets there are in LA.  So I went  to my Thomas Guide, Los Angeles County, and turned to the street index at the back.  Not having an intern, I haven’t got a count of every one.  But the index runs to about 100 pages and each page has about 400 street names, which makes (very roughly) 40,000 streets, which is again way, way below The Driver’s estimate, and again this is county rather than city.

6,500 miles is certainly walkable, given enough time, endurance and a willingness to go places where you’re not very welcome, and the figure is obviously of interest to a man who wrote Bleeding London, a novel and now a photo project about walking every street in London.  Current estimates for London (ie the number of entries in the standard A to Z) are for 70,000 streets which let’s face it is plenty.

“The Knowledge” as required by drivers of London black cabs involves knowing 320 routes along 25,000 streets within a six mile radius of Charing Cross, but a six mile radius from Charing Cross really doesn’t take you very far.

It must all have been easier for Patrick Hamilton’s author of “20,000 Streets Under the Sky” – a trilogy written between 1929 and 1934, when London was very considerably smaller.   It made for a great British TV mini-series. Hamilton and his characters were walkers.  The hero is infatuated with a prostitute, and what he wants above all is to go walking with her.

“He informed himself that he was not insanely anxious to get her on this walk because he was in any way in love with her. It was simply because he had to find out whether he was or not – to see where he was.”  

Lost, I think, is the simple answer.

NOW I DON'T WANT TO COME ON ALL ZEN OR ANYTHING ...

… but it seems to me that if you come to a fork in the road and one path says “Spiritual Walk This Way,”  (or even "Spirtual") you really do have to choose the other path.

WALKING BY WATER

And so I was walking again in New York City, and if I wasn’t exactly expecting to find ruin, then at least I was hoping for patina and signs of wear, for signs of a city that didn’t look like it had just been “repurposed” and reclad in the trappings of “out of the box” modern architecture.  It was uphill work, let me tell you.

But I thought I might be onto something by going for a walk on Roosevelt Island,  a two-mile long, 150 acre island in the middle of the East River, between Manhattan and Queens.  It’s been through a lot of names: Minnehanonk, Hog Island, Blackwell’s Island, and Welfare Island, before its current designation, named after Franklin (rather than Teddy) Roosevelt.

I’d never been there before, though I had looked down on it from the Queensborough Bridge that crosses high above it.  At the time I didn’t think it looked like the most enticing bit of territory, but now I’d discovered there was something there known as the Renwick Ruin (note the singular), a former smallpox hospital designed by the architect James Renwick, opened in 1856 and abandoned a century or so later.

I asked my New York alumni if any of them had ever been to Roosevelt Island, and only one had, my wife, who’d been to a visit a friend in hospital there, more of an acquaintance really, who’d been horribly injured in a car accident and left paralyzed.  The hospital specialized in treating such injuries, but it had been a long time ago, and she said she knew nothing of any ruins.

Online research brought up some contradictory information about the extent to which the ruins were or weren’t accessible to the urban explorer.  Certainly I didn’t imagine I was going to be able to cavort among the bare ruined choirs but I decided I’d do what I could, see what I could see, walk where I could.

So off I went on a hot, humid, overcast day that threatened rain, in order to see the ruins of a smallpox hospital.  In a perfect word I would have walked there, but there’s currently no sane way to do that from Manhattan.  You’d have to walk all the way into Queens across one bridge then back across another, which would be pretty knackering even on a day that wasn’t hot, humid, overcast, and threatening rain.  And in any case it’s a straight shot to get there on the F train: I was going there for a walk, not to torture myself.

Emerge from the deep subway on Roosevelt Island and you’re right at the waterfront.  The terrain is flat, there are very few vehicles, this is a great place to walk.  There are also great views of Manhattan on one side, and views of Queens on the other, the latter largely grittier than the former.   

But I always think it’s disrespectful to go a place just in order to get a good view of some other place.  I think your attention should be focused on the place you’re in, you should embrace the local topography.

And so I walked down to the ruins, probably less than a mile, and it was much as expected, there was some severe fencing around he old hospital, various metal struts in place to keep the structure standing, and no entry of course, although inevitably a few graffiti “artists” had been in there.

There were volunteers at a stand offering maps and information and “emergency ponchos” if the rain suddenly came on.  They told me that the plan was to make the ruin even more stable but not to rebuild it, then to open it to the public.  Ruins, we know, are always in a state of flux, but one artist’s rendition of how they might end up looks like this (which will be pretty bad, if you ask me):

Two things stood out about the current state of the Renwich Ruins: first, that in making the building stable they’ve also made it far more picturesque.  Nature has got in there and done its work.  That exuberance of ivy growing up over the structure, really does make it look Gothic and magnificent.

And two, round the back (as it were) the powers that be had collected, stacked and I think catalogued, all the broken bits of masonry, and these fragments they had shored (or at least stored) against their ruins, on wooden palates. 

You can see some fine rusted metal pillars there too, and in fact there were quite a few of these scattered elsewhere on the island, folly columns, folly ruins, I suppose you might say.

There is some authentic native flora planted around much of the southern end of the island, perhaps not quite as authentic or rigorously maintained as in the Time Landscape on Houston Street in Manhattan, but it does make it possible to look out through ancient, primitive foliage, and see the towers of Manhattan just a few hundred yards away across the water, but looking as though they come from another civilization, maybe another universe.

But the fact was I’d seen other signs of ruin on the island too, though at first I didn’t know what I was looking at.  To get to the Renwick Ruin I had to walk past a giant, expansive collection of buildings, that looked to me like a gently Brutalist housing development, vaguely Bauhaus, vaguely streamlined moderne, but the structures were derelict and fenced off, and there few workmen around, and signs on the external fences saying the whole lot was due for demolition.

I know now this wasn’t some housing development at all, it’s what was the Goldwater Memorial Hospital, the place my wife had gone visiting, a nursing facility for patients who’d suffered spinal or neck injuries and, at best, used wheelchairs.  Now the patients are gone, which seems a terrible shame.  If Roosevelt Island is a good place to walk - flat, great views, very little motor traffic, surely it was even better as a place for wheelchair users.

It’s being demolished to make way for an outpost of Cornell University, which will apparently, look something that like the image below. 

Am I feeling nostalgic for ruins?  Only partly.