Terroir d' hood

Terroir, typically translated from the French as, "a sense of place," is a term largely associated with viticulture and uniquely local attributes.

The attributes that generate the

 aura of a neighborhood, and perhaps best define it, should not be bedimmed by presumptive semiotics, or colonializing instincts.  

The need for a culturally validated landscape consumes many home buyers, bewitched by radical traditionalism, unreceptive to resemanticising forces.

Intangibles, an obsession of sporting reporters, are always difficult to document.  Expertise is useful.

Ch-Ch-Change

Change is the only constant in urban quarters, the most prevailing characteristic.  A challenge then, is to view place not as still, but moving.

University Park, for example, amidst efforts to reframe the Figueroa corridor and USC's

 manifest destiny, might resemble a time lapse effect.  Flashy eateries and popular chains are sprouting along Figueroa, as is a mid rise cluster of student living complexes.  Once the district was a moribund slum.  Earlier still, it was home to the city's elite. 

Fifteen years ago Palmdale was an up-and-coming bedroom community with new municipal works, and a celebrated growth pattern.  Today, the city's image has been radically reset by meteoric foreclosure rates, and mounting social problems amongst its latch-key youth.

Like the expanding universe theories, different neighborhoods

move at different rates of speed.

A few nights ago, I attended a United Neighborhood Neighborhood Council Zoning & Planning

meeting, wherein two of the agenda items concerned Jefferson Park.  The meeting was held, without significant fanfare, on a weeknight, during the final game of the World Series.  Still, over a dozen residents attended, to further the drive toward a historic designation, one of the invisible rudders that helps steer transitional neighborhoods to productive waters, by more effectively managing change.

Outside Outsider Art

Backyard murals come in an all shapes, sizes, and sophistications (including driveway trompe l'oeil).

Cultural landscapes revealed: highly romanticized renderings of the old country, chronicles of the immigrant experience, appear frequently (see Caribbean beach scene bottom).

In 2001, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art relocated three walls from a garden structure in Pacific Palisades, bearing Portrait of Mexico Today, the only intact U.S. mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros, painted in 1932.  

Old Lyme meet tool shed, might there be other significant backyard works?

About This Site

Yes this is a real estate web-site, masquerading as a blog, masquerading as a web-site.  I've deliberately eschewed the emerging web-site standard: pretty slide show, mortgage calculator, a rap sheet of recent sales.  Nor, do I offer a jazzed up bio, full of hand-picked testimonials, and the usual sing song promises: unmatched service, attentive team, a bouquet of flowers on your birthday.  (For something a bit more in this vein, see our brokerage site: www.citylivingrealty.com)

Instead, I offer unburnished opinions, a lot of 'em, probably enough to build a gallows.  Dig through the archives (500 entries divided among 20 topics) and you'll find years of street-level reporting on the urban experience, architecture, and the real estate industry (replete with criticism). 

I write from the perspective of an agent whose chief conviction, and practice, is the promotion and preservation of historic housing stock and neighborhoods, be they mansions in privileged enclaves or humble folk dwellings in the tenderloin.

Additional notes:

*Occasionally, I detail events, vendors, or services.  Never have I received payola for doing so.

*Listings are grouped under Current Listings (in the side bar), though I've often pocket listings that don't show on the site (inquiries welcome).

*The photowork is my own.

Grassin' Grass

Remember when verdant, clean-edged lawns connoted status and neighborhood standing?

Times change.  Water use restrictions and a burgeoning water consciousness are shifting the paradigm.  

The unbroken carpet effect (seen here in Leimert Park) used to signal pride of ownership; now, it translates as sluggish and lacking progresivity, a bit like Humvee drivers in a gas crunch.  

The new world order is even on display in show-boaty Hancock Park, where many a former putting green browns; and elsewhere, as some homeowners, inspired by LADWP turf removal incentives, embrace landscape alternatives.  

The semantic system is finally under attack, pitted by terms like evapotranspiration and soil percolation.  With a crisis looming, 

will morality oblige?

Sub Modern (Part Two)

More International Style homage, with curtain wall wrap-arounds. More ugliness.  Does this building harbor residences, offices, or civic endeavors?  Modernism's extreme formality eschews the value of distinguishability.

But back to the impoverishment of architecture (see Sub Modern Part One), and the alibis of the art agnostics: "It's too expensive to build the old way".

It isn't necessarily "too" expensive, but choicer materials and refined finishes cost more, regardless of style.  Once consumers, the consortiums, civic leaders, university regents, and mom 'n' pop home buyers accepted minimal forms, be they graph paper-y skyscrapers, or the mass produced post-war housing of Levittown, the die was cast.  

Assembly line home building, minimal ersatz, and the machine aesthetic would forever be promoted, the sometimes lesser 

costs hailed; the traditional picturesque dismissed, as impractical, even vulgar.

When did simplicity become a correlate of potency?

Things I Found in September 2009

The good pickins are slimmer of late, surely in part because I've less time, less will to scale the mighty dumpsters, inspect the curb side rubbish, or traffic the forlorn alleys.  

Wiffle ball bat, found in Inglewood.  Handy for impersonations of Al Kaline or Jimmy Rollins.

The margins in my dayplanner are lined with suspension addled 

scrawl, sightings--seldom requited--like, 'pocket door on 36th', or 'demolition near Hooper'.

Painting found in Jefferson Park.  Most of the discarded paintings I find are small still lifes.  In recent years a growing number of exhibits have considered the art of the "intuitive", "outsider", "found", or "anonymous," including even the ephemera unearthings of Chicago based Found Magazine.

Sometimes the ferocity of the demo demands vigilance, common as investors seek to reduce carrying costs with quick turnarounds that favor the installation of new over the rehab of old.

Pivoting, 24", three piece, turn of the century towel bar, rescued (and subsequently re-plated) from front yard debris in East Adams.  Probably the single best hardware find of my recogedor career.