More Past Lives of Real Estate

I stumbled over this 2005 NYTimes article while searching for information on a new loft development up the street from my house.

And I couldn't help but laugh a little, because these types of articles pop up over and over, and a few years later, we had a near-collapse of the financial system, and nine years later, I was able to buy my house for significantly less than the women quoted in this article paid for it.

I hope I timed this right. If not, it's still a nice house, even if I can't live in it yet due to be on the other side of the country. 

Past Lives of Real Estate

Yesterday morning, I realized the 2005 dead link on my blog to the original ad I'd seen for the house I bought in 2015 could be recovered via The Wayback Machine.

And WHAT WHAT WHAT???? 

I'm so confused. Everything I thought I knew is wrong.

I might be overreacting just a little, but the "original" 1895 tub and sink are someone else's careful restoration, and were not there in December, 2005, when I'd first noticed this house in an Armagno Agency ad.

(Note the ambitious price in this ad reflects the heady days of the impending mortgage crisis.)

I suppose this is what I get for doing all that restoration on my last condo, the one on 8th Street which some unscrupulous agent called "original" when they resold years later. 

I am sorry for the loss of the mantel. But I feel free now to just buy a "new" old sink instead of baking on new porcelain to the one I have. 

The outside of the house had a surprise too--the protruding section on the side is burnt sienna-colored in the 2005 photo. But now, it's a beige color. I wonder if that's new stucco, or just a paint job. 

The part that really stunned me was the bathroom photo. I thought this was a mistake, the photo of a bathroom in an entirely different house, until my tenant and I did a little studying.

See the tile outline in blue in the photo below? That's where they had to put in new tile because they'd pulled out the block in the first photo. The other clue was from when I'd looked at the house next door from the backyard. "Why would anyone block up their bathroom window like that?" I'd thought. But looking at the first photo...I realized it had been done to more than one house in the row. And when I'd gotten my windows replaced, I hadn't replaced the two in the bathroom, because they were on the new side, and were expensive wooden windows.

Honestly, I should write Lalitha a letter complimenting her family's amazing work. I'd believed this clawfoot tub came with the house in 1895. 

The mantel had changed—I'm not that keen on the new mantel. It seems too large for the room, and I know the chimney is blocked. If I ever want to restore this properly, I'll have to restore the front chimney on the roof.

The kitchen--well, we know it sucked when I bought the house. My new BBF kitchen is a vast improvement. And so are the beams Lalitha (the previous owner) and her family installed. 

"What bedroom is that?" My tenant was as baffled as I was, until I realized Lalitha and company had purchased old radiators and actually replaced some of the crappy baseboards. Hallelujah. A pity she didn't get to the whole house. '

The view, however, hasn't changed. 

Digging around like this led me to some building permits. I even tried to call the oil tank place to see if they had a paper trail of removing the oil tank, but they seem to have gone out of business. Maybe I can go to City Hall and find out some info on the permit history of my house.

I really am stunned by this sequence of events. I thought I had a house with original detail. No, I have a house with some old-timey detailed restored! 

Exhibitionists

Last month, I'd rushed downtown for one of the last days of the Beatles exhibit at the Grammy Museum. I hadn't been to the Grammy Museum before, and it was pleasant, and the Beatles show was small but interesting.

Well, this time, I raced down the first weekend the new exhibit was open, because it was the Ramones show—previously at the Queens Museum, where it had been crowded.

Almost no one was at the Grammy Museum the Sunday afternoon I went, which disappointed me, but this is LA, not New York. I'm reminded of this frequently. Every time I miss home, I'm reminded of this, though I know the NYC that spawned the Ramones has vanished. Hell, the NYC that spat out adult Marie on Avenue B is gone. The original Ramones themselves are even gone. Even the bar Joey Ramone's brother tended bar at is gone, and has been for years.

I don't know how many times I saw the Ramones. I only remember the first time, at Washington DC's Wax Museum with...my sister? The other Marie? Someone in spiked heels stepped on my foot, which is how I learned to avoid mosh pits.

Even then, we were too young, too late. We had only the vaguest sense of what might be going on four hours north of us.

Batman Day

Why? What do YOU wear on Batman Day?

Can You Tell Me How To Get To...

...Jersey City?

I was home for a week in early September, usually the best time of year to be in town, but this year, it was humid, hot, and miserable, with record-breaking temperatures for this time of year.

Still, on the mornings I stayed overnight in the mother-in-law suite of my own house, I'd walk over to Grind, the delicious coffee shop on Communipaw. And pass this row of houses.

As long as I've lived in JC—on and off since February of 1988—I've coveted these beautiful brownstones near Liberty State Park. I might even have been able to afford one if I'd bought back then.

But I'd never have managed the renovations. I can barely handle my current house, half the size of one of these.

Hope

This guy's name is everywhere in this part of the world. My office is near Bob Hope Drive. My house is near Bob Hope Square. His star on Hollywood Boulevard is around the corner from my house. 

It's weird to think how funny the Road to movies were when I was a kid, and they were old news then. Today's kids and so-called Millenials haven't even heard of them. Or him, even, I bet. Heck, they even changed the name of the airport that bore his name. Which is a shame. The last thing Burbank needs is a bit of updating and modernizing.

By Day

By day, she's a mild-mannered comic book editor.

Or not so mild.

The Final Cutting Board Project

Do you remember when I went over to the late, great 3rd Ward to make a cutting board? 

I speculated I'd put off sanding and oiling for a year. Well, it was three years, and in the end, I didn't even do it. BBF carried it downstairs to his basement shop and finished it up there, fixing my inept router work while he sanded.

My cutting board showed up in the mail one day here in Hollywood. The raw wood slurped up the oil quickly, and I had to run off to Home Depot for more food-safe oil. The results are so beautiful I barely want to cut on my cutting board.

"Come home and we'll have a woodshop," BBF taunts me from Jersey City.

Not yet. Still lots of comic book work to be done in Burbank.

Skills for the Coming Apocalypse

I'm not sure what was behind my current zeal to learn new things and get out of the house. It might've been how much BBF and I had seen over the Catalina weekend. It might've been the Groupon I'd bought for the electric bicycles simply reminding me to dig around for options. Or maybe it's just the knowledge that I need to do more than go to work all the time.

I'd signed up through Groupon for a soap-making class at at place called Sankofa Soap Studio, and on a Saturday afternoon, caught the La Brea bus south to a little house, where six of us put on eye protection, masks, gloves, and began mixing things in the instructor's small living room.

Oil, distilled water, scent (I chose something called dragon's blood)...and the reason for the caution, lye. The key to the process was the little digital scale and precision. And not splashing ourselves with lye. Terrifying, but watching components turn into soap was fascinating and fun. We were all pretty thrilled with the results.

We were a little less thrilled when we realized we had to return once the soap had set in the molds. Not only do I have a desire for instant gratification, but I work late every night and getting to mid-LA on a weeknight wasn't going to be easy. Still, on leaving the class, I was pretty jazzed.

Three days later, I left work five minutes early, caught the Burbank Bus to North Hollywood metro, switched to the Red Line to the Purple Line to Wilshire/Western, and caught the Big Blue Bus R7 to Rimpau. I walked four blocks to the Longwood, and picked up my block of soap. The instructor took time out from cooking her fish dinner to help me cut the loaf with a serrated knife. I walked to the La Brea bus to Hollywood, delighted with my new soap I'm allergic to.

That's right. I react to oil-based products. So here I was, carrying 7 bars of soap I couldn't use. But making soap was fun and trying something new is always a great way to spend a day.

A Short Trip to Pseudo-Denmark

Publishing traditionally has short Fridays in the summer. Of course, we'd lost that at Marvel during the bankruptcies, and my current company isn't strictly a publishing endeavor now that we moved to Burbank, but miraculously, this tradition moved with us.

Unfortunately, working in a deadline industry means you can't really take this benefit, but I did manage to take two short Fridays over the summer of 2016.

One was for the trip down to Catalina when BBF was in town. The other was so I could head up to Solvang and Santa Barbara for a night.

Solvang is a somewhat goofy tourist trap with a Danish theme. I'd heard mixed reviews, but was still curious. At least, it reputedly had a good bookstore, so why not check it out?

I took a Lyft up to the Burbank Amtrak station, which is next to the airport. My phone decided to spazz right when I was ordering the Lyft, and I nearly missed the Amtrak, but fortunately, the train was a few minutes late.

I ordered some Amtrak microwave special for lunch, which discouraged people from sitting next to me as the train sped west to the coast. I watched out the window with curiosity--these towns were all places I could live and commute to work from. Chatsworth...Moorpark...Oxnard. 

Eventually, the train halted in Santa Barbara, where I transferred to an Amtrak-chartered bus for another hour or so up to Solvang. We passed billowing smoke from a huge fire and I thought about one of the women from work taking yesterday off to rescue animals with her truck. A donkey had died. She hadn't taken it well, but who would?

The bus pulled up in Solvang in the town center, and I rushed over to the town mission, which closed in a half-hour. I needn't have worried. One benefit of traveling alone is speed. I was through the mission in 20 minutes.

My concern with Solvang was its early closing time, so I delayed checking into the hotel until I'd walked down every block I found and gone into every open store. I stopped for a coffee at a Danish cafe.

Solvang reminded me of Swakopmund, Namibia, in that way where Swakop is more German than Germany--it's stuck in time a bit, affected by the notion of how things SHOULD look rather than evolving the way a European city would. The kitschy factor was pretty funny, with windmills (um, isn't that more Dutch) and clogs and the little mermaid. The bookstore housed a genuinely interesting Hans Christian Andersen exhibit.

I can't say I was ready to stay a week. In fact, I was pretty well done with Solvang by the time I finally collapsed into my hotel room at twilight.

Which was why Saturday morning was so amusing. I went to catch the local bus to Santa Barbara, along with four others, and it simply never showed up. We called numbers, spoke to people. No one could explain why the bus never materialized, though we did receive quite a few apologies. I had four extra hours to wander the streets of Solvang before the Amtrak bus finally showed--I bought a ticket to one stop past Santa Barbara, since riding the bus without the train transfer is forbidden.

And I wandered State Street in downtown Santa Barbara for around four hours, before collapsing onto the Amtrak in exhaustion.

One bit of good fortune though--the Amtrak was running quite late, which put me back at the Burbank airport exactly when the bus to Hollywood showed up. Otherwise, I'd have had to go to Union Station and backtrack on the Red Line.

I won't be heading back to Solvang, Santa Barbara, or any of the train stops along the way anytime soon, but I'm pretty pleased with amount of touristing I got through this summer.