That Vintage Girl

If you walk along any famous boulevard in Los Angeles, you will find many hidden treasures and relics from old Los Angeles.  I get a feeling of elated joy and nostalgia when I see that these remnants from the past are still with us. The old Studio City Theater on 12136 Ventura Boulevard in Studio City is one of these historic treasures.  It was a popular neighborhood movie house from 1938 to 1991.  After the theater closed it became a bookstore, first operating as BookStar and now as Barnes and Noble.  But most special about this theater is that most of the original Art Deco inspired structures have survived like the original ticket booth, the theater marque, the entry with the window cards to display movie posters, and the beautiful terrazzo floor.  Inside, you can still see the projection port windows that projected thousands of film reels onto the silver screen. And the new Art Deco inspired signage inside the bookstore blends perfectly with the original styl...

This Museum Day post is about my visit to the Southern California Railway Museum in Perris, California. Tucked away in a remote part of the Inland Empire, the museum has one of the largest collections of interurban electric street cars that were used on the Pacific Electric Railway in Los Angeles during the early 1900s. The museum collects and restores these beautiful vintage rail cars to preserve and share their historical significance in the development of transportation and communities in America.  It was not too long ago in American history when the primary mode of intercity transportation was just walking.  So people shopped and worked close to their homes.  But this stationary lifestyle began to change in the late 1800s with the development of electric powered trains referred to as trolley or street cars.  As more and more trolley lines were built,  they evolved into expanded interurban railway systems that ran within and between cities. Developers began...

This month's Books & Coffee post is about The Associates: Four Capitalists Who Created California. It is a historic novel about the building of the Iron Horse in the late 1800s.  The book unfolds the true story of one man's dream and vision to build an intercontinental railroad across America, that fell into the hands of four shopkeepers who came to California during the Gold Rush and became some of the most powerful, influential, and wealthy men in California.  The man with the vision was civil engineer Theodore Judah and the men with the power were Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, and Charles Crocker.  It's an intriguing story about the building of the intercontinental railway that was intertwined with political strategy, the industrial revolution, and how it lead to the development of Southern California.   I have paired the book with coffee poured into a cup and saucer that are reproductions of the beautiful Mimbreño China that was ...