Roadside Rambutan

My Favorite Street(s) to Drive continued....

San Vicente Boulevard through Brentwood into Santa Monica towards Ocean Ave.



Nope!




Swell median, swell trees, but at about 21st St. the road tilts toward the earth's end and the descent--with houses succeeding one another like booths at an endless salespersons convention, past the gardens of fantastical Mexican haciendas, masses of mesembryanthemums and coral trees, and runners in hydrangea-blue strapless jogging outfits, obscured by intervening gulfs of shadow--threatens to launch my beater pick-up, Knievel-like, into the Pacific, presumably to the delight of the Montana Avenue elite and ex girl-friends.

You think they could install a run-away truck lane?

Elsewhere....

Central Avenue, between Washington Blvd and 7th
St.



First you got Tacos Gavilan. That's just fun reuse (pssst mulitas are on the menu).








Then the "nautical deco" of the Coca Cola bottling plant, designed in 1937 by Robert V. Derrah. The streamline steamliner!

(Derrah is also credited with the Crossroads of the World shopping village on Sunset Boulevard wherein a ship topped by a lighted, turning ball, serves as the centerpiece.)


Across the street is the eclectic African-American firefighers museum.






Further north is the great wall of produce, the gigantic Seventh Street Market.








Aaahhh that's more like it, no Regency-style bee hives, no trips to Aamco, mangoes.