Terminal Bar & Cafe Long Ago Terminated

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When I got to Los Angeles in ’78 there was still some of it left, like this bar located in a warehouse building across from the old fruit and vegetable wholesale mart in downtown Los Angeles. Too much of this entire area has been razed along with the memories of anyone who once had a drink in the Terminal. I have yet to find one posting of the Terminal Bar let alone the Terminal Cafe that adjoined the joint. Being the fool that I was, all I have is this snap shot. At the time, I wasn’t ready to have a drink in every joint I photographed and Oh Boy what a fool this guy was. I can say that because I was that fool.

Enjoy this photo, because that’s all that’s left of the Terminal Bar. Find more photos of long gone bars in Los Angeles here.

The Big P On Pico At Fairfax

Pickwood Theater-1992

Who amongst ye in Los Angeles can recall the Picfair movie theater, a small single screen on Pico at Fairfax? Built in 1940 and destroyed in 1992 following a torching during the riots. By then it had been closed since 1979 and had morphed into Albee’s Discount Appliance. The joint has a curious history including owned for a time by James Nicholson before he started American International Pics in the late 1950s. This picture is of the front of the marquee, uncovered by fires from the rebellion. We’re looking up, seeing were hundreds of bulbs once blinked in patterns.

I recall walking beneath the P, through the ghosts of a ticket booth & concession stand, down into the pit where chairs once sat audiences upright for the movies. I walked around the empty shell of the theater, sky above, simple stenciled designs on what was left of the plaster walls.

For more info, check out the great memories of the place left in the comment section of the Cinema Treasures site.

Gorky’s Was There First – With Borscht & Brew

Several decades before the reinvention of downtown Los Angeles into a loftified art walk circus, the place was dead at night. Dead and scary with zombie crack addicts and also sad and lonely with one of America’s most populated tent city homeless encampments. Today every classic joint has been purchased and reinvented by well-oiled club magnates and skid row is planted with 8am-midnight parking meters. But back then, few ventured downtown at night. There was Al’s Bar, a spotty arts district and Gorky’s. Gorky’s, a 24 hour restaurant serving hardy eastern European soul food and their own brew. Craft beer in the heart of downtown LA decades before the term craft beer was even thought of my a few yuppie entrepreneurs. But downtown Los Angeles got a lot worse before it got better and Gorky’s didn’t make the cut. All the facts are contained in a long ago published article in the LA Times that’s still available if you follow this link.

gorky

Sometimes I wonder if Gorky’s even existed. But then I found this shot hidden away in an old box of negatives. Someone wearing a Gorky’s tee shirt. That sight inspired a mind’s eye vision of visiting Gorky’s late one night for the stew. It was freezing outside, my breath a frozen cloud in front of my face. Long Live Gorky’s! Long Live deserted downtown LA, where the produce market bar rocked and rolled every morning until 9am. Now that was some good time.

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We Never Close…

shipspaintedWM

…that is until we close for good. Ships Coffee Shop. Los Angeles. Toasters on every table. Open 24 hours. Several locations. Arrows of neon pointing toward space. A place in the dreamscape of every kid who grew up in these parts of Los Angeles. Nope, they never closed, until they closed for good back in 1995. Whittled down to the last shop on La Cienega Blvd, then erased from the landscape. Family opened and family gone. The Culver City location, which was as close to Hollywood as one could get before actually hitting Hollywood Blvd., eventually became a Starbucks. There’s irony there but we’d rather not bother with the obvious. Google “Ships Coffee Shop” and you’ll come up with biographies and cool vintage shots. This shot’s from the last few years they existed. For some reason the sign was repainted just before the coffee shop closed for good. “Go figure,” as my Dad would say. Which means there’s no logic in the ever changing landscape of our Stripeycity.

Betty, our last waitress at Ships Culver City

To see a photo of Ships’ neon in full splendor against a smoggy LA sunset, visit the stripeycity shop.

stripeycity says hello & goodbye

We now only have memories of San Francisco’s Original Joe’s dim bar & massive plates of spaghetti, drowning in red sauce or clams. Damn the fire bugs that destroyed it and mourn the loss of the joint’s brick facade and its dark, musty bar, site of a thousand cocktails and glasses of red wine long before the age of the mixologist.