20th century

Ned Paynter’s Rare Views of Los Angeles Landmarks

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One of our favorite genres of photography is architecture shot on slide film by vacationing or itinerant college professors. The images they capture as lecture illustrations aren’t necessarily fine art, but they always present different angles on familiar landmarks. It’s a pleasure to discover and explore a new-to-us collection.

Recently uploaded by the Friends of San Diego Architecture is a large sampling of the 9,791 slides assembled by the late historian Dr. Ned Paynter between 1975 and 2006. He traveled in Europe and throughout America, dug the Art Nouveau, Mission Revival, casino kitsch and Postmodernism, and made a few trips up to Los Angeles to document a pre-gentrification Downtown and some intriguing oddities.

We’re pleased to share a taste of Ned Paynter’s local discoveries, and encourage you to explore the offerings on the Friends of San Diego Architecture site. If you fall in love with something, you can even buy a print. And if you’d like to get to know the opinionated and interesting man who captured these vistas, he blogged until the end of his life.

Aztec Hotel, Magnolia Ave., Foothill, Monrovia. Robert Stacy-Judd, 1925. (Photo 1987).

Bradbury Building, 304 S. Broadway. George H. Wyman, 1893. (Photo 1978).

Duarte School, 1431 Buena Vista St., Duarte. F.S. Allen, 1908 (photo 1991).

Eastern Columbia Building, 849 S. Broadway. Claud Beelman, 1929. (Photo 1989).

“Metropolis” Dress Shop, Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. (Photo 1982).

Pacific Auto Works, Long Beach, Schilling & Schilling, 1928. (Photo 1982, since demolished).

Tail O’ the Pup, Milton Black, 1946. NW Corner Beverly & La Cienega. (Photo 1982.)

Wardrobe Cleaners, 126 Catalina, Redondo Beach, 1950. (Photo 1985).

Mayan Theater, 1040 S. Hill Street, Morgan, Walls & Clements, 1926-27. (Photo 1986).

King Eddy Bar poem (1997)

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Do you love and miss the old King Eddy bar as it was before the Downtown L.A. gentrification brush blotted out its soul? Come slip into that dark, cool place in this poem by Bernard Tucker, graciously shared by his sons.

King Eddy Bar

The door yawns

lets in the morning –

a handful of regulars

for breakfast of coffee, beer, boiled eggs.

The fusty 40 x 50 foot saloon

reeks of stale tobacco and cheap booze.

Walls of layered grime

yearn for a coat of paint.

A Jack Palance-of-a-guy

lords over the rectangular bar.

Whiskey runs a poor second to draught,

Christmas lights chase each other

around the top shelf,

feign merriment.

 

By noon two dozen stools and chairs hold

the local fraternity

descended from their cheap nests.

TV is on.

Juke box plays ‘Nights in White Satin’,

a thin bent body yells

“Who put that crap on?”

Late afternoon, the dark hole roils,

the past wrapped around beer glasses

the present seen clearly in refills

and the only sun, a hard boiled egg.

 

I crack the door,

the polite bartender points to the far corner:

my patient dangles his only leg

from a stool,

sugar diabetes and nicotine

claimed the other.

Quick to butt his cigarette

“only have two a day, doc.”

His wheelchair waits by

lifesize sepia Babe Ruth poster

“goes back to the twenties

only thing worth a damn in this joint!”

Not a bad hero for these players,

age wearing heavy on their shoulders,

every day must step up to the plate

handle whatever comes,

and the pitching can be mean.

 

– Bernard Tucker

   March 1997

   Los Angeles

 

Bernard Tucker was a cardiovascular surgeon at Good Samaritan Hospital in Downtown Los Angeles for 30 years before retirement in 1999. Originally from a small silver mining town in Northern Ontario, Canada, Bernard first came to Southern California in 1961 for a medical internship at Memorial Hospital in Long Beach. A lifelong interest in literature spurred him to start writing poetry in the early 1990s and attending workshops organized by Hy Baker and the Pasadena Poets. His poems covered topics ranging from his youth in Canada to nature as well as the more human side of practicing medicine. The people and environs of Los Angeles were of course a major inspiration, and poems covered local matters such as the city’s homeless population, 1992 riots, urban wildlife, and the Los Angeles River. Bernard passed away in 2019.

Attention, Joan Crawford Lovers: The Mildred Pierce House is For Lease!

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We got a tip today from a Glendale resident and Joan Crawford fan who wishes to remain anonymous, and who we’ll call Veda.

Veda wanted to be sure we knew that 1143 North Jackson Street, which served as the exterior of Mildred and Bert Pierce’s unhappy marital home in the 1945 film of James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce, and which is a featured location on our Birth of Noir tour, is available for lease.

Surely someone within the sound of our digital voice loves Joan Crawford and is looking for a pleasant suburban home in which to bake pies, spoil their children, call a wandering spouse’s bluff and maybe make their first fortune? Just don’t schedule a house tour expecting to find a cozy upstairs for the kids’ rooms: it’s a famous blooper that the single story exterior location gives way to a two-story studio set.

Veda notes that the Rossmoyne Historic District is a terrific neighborhood, and you’ll be walking distance from Trader Joe’s, Walgreens, Ralphs, Vons, and We’re Pouring, the local taphouse and gastropub.

Should you move in, we hope you’ll step outside and join our Birth of Noir tour group when we’re again able to give tours. We’ll tell the story of the prior owner, a lovely French lady, and how she saved the now magnificent front yard palm tree, because it was in the movie, and what kind of a monster would buy the house and not save Mildred’s dying palm tree if she could? The world is held together by such small acts of grace, and we are so grateful.

Richard Schave’s Public Comment to Los Angeles Planning Commission on Times Mirror Square

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For context on the below public comment that Richard Schave made on 5/14/20, please see our newsletter post, Listen Live As The L.A. Times Project Appeal Hearing Illuminates City Government’s Corrupt Soul.

So, what happened today at the Planning Commission hearing for Times Mirror Square? Fireworks. And not celebratory fireworks, but the kind of explosion that happens when an errant spark falls on the barge and blows the whole enterprise straight to hell.

You can read our blow-by-blow commentary on Facebook, but in short, the Commissioners told Onni Group:

• That their projects suck;

• That the site deserves an architecturally distinguished building;

• That they were disgusted by the lack of affordable housing;

• That offering to donate $1 Million to Pershing Square was stupid;

• That it was their own fault the project wasn’t moving forward;

• That they had no intention of violating the Brown Act for them;

• That they didn’t care if the funding dried up and the project died.

Then they rejected the appeal and continued consideration of the EIR until July 9, when they expect Onni Group to return with a great design and affordable housing component.

It was glorious! We predict Times Mirror Square will soon be on the market again. And William Pereira’s 1973 addition might yet get the thoughtful vertical expansion it deserves.

Updated May 18: the wild Times Mirror Square Los Angeles City Planning Commission audio is now online! Listen to the hearing here. Read Commercial Observer coverage of the hearing here.

Public Comment: My name is Richard Schave. I am principal author of the Historic Cultural Monument nomination for Times Mirror Square.

A City Planning staffer threatened me over this work. I have shared this information with the FBI.

I am asking the Commission to accept the appeal and deny the EIR.

I hope you have all read the plea released by the US DOJ yesterday, describing how a private citizen worked with Jose Huizar, serving as the Guiliani to Huizar’s Trump, creating an alternative city planning feedback loop, predicated on bribery, extortion, shell corporations, nepotism, and money laundering.

A principal point of public interface for this criminal enterprise is this Commission.

When I went to Huizar’s City Hall office before the PLUM hearing to speak with staff, I found the FBI had sealed the office. When I asked for a meeting with Huizar’s replacement Marqueece Harris-Dawson before PLUM, his staff told me there was no need to meet, since they intended to follow Huizar’s direction on Times Mirror Square.

PLUM rewrote the landmarking designation for the benefit of developer Onni Group. Yesterday’s RICO filings mention Onni’s $50,000 donation to Jose Huizar’s wife’s PAC.

The City of Los Angeles deserves better. Do the right thing, accept the appeal, deny the EIR.

April Fool: Times Mirror Square EIR Challenge Rejected, or “Nothing to see here, G-Man”

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Last October, a passionate band of concerned Angelenos went to Los Angeles City Hall to testify one last time in support of the preservation of William Pereira’s Times Mirror corporate headquarters.

This recognized architectural and cultural landmark had been deliberately cut out of the approved Historic Cultural Monument designation by the Los Angeles City Council, a political body with numerous members under FBI investigation for public corruption in service of real estate interests.

But almost a year after investigators raided Councilmember Jose Huizar’s City Hall office and home, he was still sitting on the council, and questionable projects in his Downtown district continued to get the green light.

Still, it’s important to show up and speak truth to power, even when it seems like the fix is in.

Included in our group that fall day were preservationists, historians, architects, affordable housing advocates, longtime L.A. Times and Times Mirror executives, neighbors, tenants and descendants of the newspaper’s founders.

Although we went into the hearing room expecting to bear witness to the city’s approval of demolition of the great newspaper and media HQ that Otis Chandler built, that didn’t happen. It seemed that the City Planning Department had received a long letter that gave them pause, so they paused approval of the project… “for one week.”

To see what we said in October, learn more about this wild preservation campaign through Fall 2019, and read the letter that gave the city pause, click here.

That letter, from Lozeau Drury, the attorneys for public interest nonprofit SAFER, proved to be the prelude to a legal challenge to Onni Group’s project EIR, citing numerous instances where serious problems had been glossed over or ignored by City Planning in order to approve the enormous development.

One particularly interesting point: although Councilman Jose Huizar continues to promote a streetcar loop through his nonprofit initiative L.A. Streetcar, the EIR provided no analysis of how such a conveyance would impact traffic around the site. Is there going to be a Broadway Streetcar, or isn’t there? In politically supported Downtown L.A. development, it seems you can have it both ways.

One week turned to a month, then to several. Six months later, we’re still holding out hope that the landmark Los Angeles Times complex can be saved.

But on April Fool’s Day, City Planning came out of its slumber and issued a new document, which declared that nothing in SAFER’s challenge letter justified halting the project. Although this new document references a complete rebuttal of SAFER’s claims (“March 2020 Responses”), this rebuttal was not shared by the city, so we’re unable to weigh its merits. [Update: the rebuttal was provided after we requested it, and you can find it here, with the section on Jose Huizar’s Schrodinger’s Streetcar highlighted.]

We hope and expect that SAFER will appeal City Planning’s determination by the April 10 deadline, and that Times Mirror Square may yet be saved.

After all, in recent weeks, the Los Angeles public corruption investigation has once again kicked into high gear. A lobbyist pleaded guilty to bribing a politician, who could only be Councilmember Jose Huizar, with half a million dollars in a liquor box—for just one land use vote. (In response, we have called for his resignation.) A virtual City Council meeting was overshadowed with the news that former Councilmember Mitch Englander had made a deal with the Feds in exchange for leniency on his felony charges.

Court watchers expect more charges, arrests and indictments of sitting politicians, developers, lobbyists and city staffers to happen any day.

So, why did City Planning reject SAFER’s challenge? Perhaps the office felt it had no choice. To acknowledge SAFER’s bold claim that the EIR should never have been approved in the first place would be to admit that politicians like Jose Huizar are able to pull strings at the highest level of land use, for the benefit of their developer and lobbyist friends.

If that’s the case, it will all come out in the coming indictments. And Los Angeles will be left to pick up the pieces of our broken, beautiful city. We hope that, unlike Parker Center, Times Mirror Square will still be standing when we do.

The National Emergency Library is here for Los Angeles

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Libraries, how we love them—especially when they’ve got plenty of room and don’t cull the weird stuff that nobody has checked out since 1923!

Back in the good old days, earlier this month, we were still spending our Tuesdays at the Huntington Library, where we’d split the day between peering through a magnifying lens at unpublished negatives of Grand Central Market, reading snarky editorials on the foibles of the Golden Age Hollywood set in Rob Wagner’s Script magazine, and wandering the holy gardens.

These visits have kept us sane while battling to preserve Los Angeles landmarks from the relentless forces of what we’ve long suspected, and what is finally being proven, to be rampant public corruption.

But the Huntington, like so many wonderful places in Los Angeles, is now closed for the duration, and it’s right that it’s closed. We’ve all got to hunker down like bears in our dens and wait out the viral peril⁠—but there’s no rule that says we have to be bored or zoned out while we wait.

The good folks at the Internet Archive have taken the nation’s temperature and written a marvelous and healing prescription: their enormous collection of scanned books, which in normal times is available for free check out, but with use limits, is now 100% free and always available. You can browse a selection of 1,428,426 volumes, and we bet at least 3,745 of them would be exactly what you’re looking for right now!

To get you started, we’ve curated a short list of L.A.-centric titles that will enhance your understanding of this improbable and baffling city, and get you familiar with this terrific digital resource.

But we must remind you that these books, however fascinating, are all written about a place very different from the Los Angeles of 2020. When we get through this public health crisis—and we will get though it—our shared history will be one of a metropolis that faced the greatest threat imaginable at the same time that the DOJ was taking down a big chunk of its corrupt city government.

If you put a twist this screwy into a script, they’d throw you out of the writer’s room. Yet it’s happening, right now, to us. And when the risk of disease has passed and the cancerous rot of corruption has been cut out of the halls of power, we’re going to need a new story to tell about what it means to be an Angeleno in 2020 and beyond.

Luckily, we’ve got nothing but time on our hands to study the past and imagine L.A.’s bright future and what each one of us can bring to the table.

So be well, have faith, be careful out there, and enjoy! And do share your recommendations for great reads that you find in the National Emergency Library in the comments below.

ESOTOURIC’S SELECTED TREASURES FROM THE NATIONAL EMERGENCY LIBRARY

Update 3/28/20: as this information has circulated, writers have complained that the Internet Archive’s loan policy change violates their copyright. Please use the links below responsibly, enjoy older, weirder, out of print offerings, and buy books by working writers.

• Piccolo’s Prank (1965) by Leo Politi: a rambunctious monkey runs amok on old Bunker Hill, and if you love this one, there are many Politi treats in the library

• Exploring California Byways in and Around Los Angeles; trips for a day or a weekend (1967) by Russ Leadabrand: a slow-paced guidebook to out-of-the-way places still worth seeking out, once the quarantine is lifted

• Historic California in Bookplates (1936, reprint edition) by Clare Ryan Talbot: reproducing the miniature works of art that identified treasured volumes as the property of notable Californian individuals and institutions

• La Reina : Los Angeles in three centuries (1929) published by Security Trust & Savings Bank: a collection of historic photographs used by the pioneer bank as part of its branding efforts

• The Los Angeles Guide Book (1972) by Annette Welles: because sometimes it’s fun to imagine we’re time traveling tourists, it’s a great reference if you happen to be writing a period mystery in quarantine, and who doesn’t want to know that Norms diners used to suck?

• L.A. Bizarro! The Insider’s Guide to the Obscure, the Absurd and the Perverse in Los Angeles by Anthony R. Lovett and Matt Maranian (1997): an over-designed pre-internet marvel celebrating the weirdos, visionaries and benign hustlers who have been largely displaced under our pro-development City Council, but who we sincerely hope can bloom again in the new L.A. to come

• Los Angeles A to Z: An Encyclopedia of the City and County by Leonard and Dale Pitt (1997): an essential companion for any dedicated Angeleno, packed with fun facts you never knew about familiar places

• Los Angeles, City of Dreams by Harry Carr (1935): the first great insider’s take on modern L.A., by a crack reporter who spent four decades chronicling her transformation from sleepy backwater to modern metropolis

• Bread & Hyacinths: The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles by Paul Greenstein, Nigey Lennon and Lionel Rolfe (1992): the astonishing story of how the bombing of the L.A. Times building inspired the creation of a new kind of city in the desert, a site we will be visiting with Paul Greenstein on our likely rescheduled Desert Visionaries tour

• The Dream Come True: Great Houses of Los Angeles by Brendan Gill and Derry Moore (1980): a loving survey of domestic architecture historic, contemporary and celebrity, richly illustrated with original photographs, and including some rare lost gems

• A Slight Epidemic: The Government Cover-up of Black Plague in Los Angeles: What Happened and Why it Matters by Frank Feldinger (2008): recommended for obvious reasons, in the hope that we not repeat the mistakes of 1924

South L.A. LACMA Satellite Site in Violation of Sweetheart City of Los Angeles Lease?

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As the Los Angeles County Supervisors rushed to approve LACMA’s hot-off-the-presses EIR for Peter Zumthor’s new museum building last April, ignoring the 83% of public emails begging them to vote no, they made frequent mention of museum director Michael Govan’s claim that LACMA intended to open satellite facilities in far-flung corners of the County.

Bringing art to under served communities is a terrific thing, and we’d like to applaud LACMA’s commitment to building diverse audiences, especially young ones.

But when we recently went out to look at the most widely reported of the proposed LACMA satellite sites, the former transit garage Building 71 on the edge of South Los Angeles Wetlands Park, we saw no signs of any LACMA presence.

Almost two years after the deal was announced, we found the barn-like 84,000 square foot 1911 concrete structure sealed up tight, with Playboys gang tags on the entry bays and metal cages clamped to the windows.

 

When LACMA proudly announced its 35-year no-rent lease of the historic tilt-slab structure in January 2018, it was with the promise to retrofit and activate Building 71 as an art center to serve the 9500 children who attend school in the vicinity.

But we learned from our conversations with museum administrators that LACMA soon balked at the seismic, structural, mechanical, electrical, plumbing and hazardous materials abatement costs associated with bringing Building 71 into compliance as a public space suitable for hosting events and exhibiting art. And indeed, there is no evidence that any work has been done to improve or activate the South Los Angeles Wetlands Park site.

However, the lease agreement did not only call for LACMA to retrofit and activate the derelict Building 71. The lease states:

Additionally, within one year of the execution date of the Lease, LACMA shall provide certain public programming at several recreation centers within the surrounding communities. Within eighteen (18) months of the execution of the Lease, LACMA will begin public programming on the premises area.

If LACMA was providing public programming at any of the South Los Angeles recreation centers, or on the grounds of the Wetlands Parks, we would have expected to have seen a press release. Nothing has been heard about any of the exciting initiatives promised in the January 2018 lease agreement:

• Free Social Justice-themed School Tour and Art-making Program

• Teen Tour Guide Program

• Intergenerational Weekday and Weekend Programs

• Teaching Assistant Training Program

One year has passed with no public programming at rec centers. 18 months has passed with no public programming at the Wetlands Park. We are now more than two years out, and LACMA appears to be in violation of its no-rent 35-year lease from the City of Los Angeles.

The lease served its purpose, though, by providing cover for Michael Govan’s inspiring claim that approving the ill-conceived, over-priced Zumthor building was serving the public good and bringing great art and cultural programming to South Los Angeles.

Recent reporting by Carolina Miranda in the Los Angeles Times suggests LACMA may be shirking its responsibilities at the South Los Angeles Wetlands Park because it simply doesn’t have the money.

We believe that City Council should hold LACMA accountable, and remind the museum that it made a commitment to bring the arts to South Los Angeles. LACMA and City Hall owe the community straight answers about what’s happening with Building 71. It’s not enough to clap each other on the back and smile for the press release photos: you have to write the checks and do the work and actually improve Los Angeles.

Or perhaps, since LACMA isn’t using Building 71, and if the museum is indeed in violation of its lease agreement, this useful and centrally located City-owned site could be freed up for other civic uses. Its 84,000 square feet could even be used to house some of the more than 60,000 Angelenos who are sleeping on the streets.

If you share our concerns about the misuse of this site and about LACMA’s unsustainable redevelopment scheme, please sign our petition and consider supporting the Save LACMA non-profit, which is currently fundraising for a ballot measure to stop the museum from destroying itself.

Vermonica Lives!

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Two years ago I received the news that Vermonica had been dismantled and moved. . A lot has transpired and one silver lining is realizing the impact and support for this work. . So many threads to this story- which I hope will be illuminated, disclosed and discussed. . Because of the continued sleuthing and inquiry by Richard Schave and Kim Cooper of Esotouric, a trove of emails were found that were damning to Bureau of Street Lightning and the city and therefore forced the city to do the right thing. . I have a contract to rebuild the piece on Santa Monica Boulevard near the Bureau with a hopeful opening in early May- the 27th birthday of Vermonica. . Hope to see you there. . More soon, feel free to share this news, I am hopeful. . Sheila . . . #sheilaklein #vermonica

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We’re delighted to finally be able to share the thrilling news that Sheila Klein’s Vermonica, the original vintage Los Angeles street light sculpture and cultural landmark (accept no imitations!) will once again be installed in the heart of East Hollywood under the direction of the artist. Her New Years Day Instagram post (above) let the cat out of the bag.

The unbelievable story of Vermonica’s mysterious removal and half-baked duplication has been featured on this blog previously. Catch up by reading Part One and Part Two.

Getting to a place where the city agreed to right this wrong took a lot of hard work by a dedicated crew who refused to accept the loss of the landmark as a done deal. When progress stalled, Adrian Riskin of government transparency blog MichaelKohlhaas.org uncovered a shocking tranche of emails that revealed precisely how a city department had violated Sheila Klein’s artist’s rights. To the city’s credit, they came back to the table to hammer out a deal that satisfies the artist and gives the artwork back to the East Hollywood community.

For us, the lesson of this 2+ year restoration and accountability campaign is clear: Never give up on the things you believe in, and let the light of Vermonica be your guiding star as you set out every day to be a good Angeleno and to make this city a better place for your neighbors and those who will come after.

So save the approximate date of early May 2020*, for a big party at Vermonica’s new, nearby location. We cannot wait to dance in the streets by the light of our beloved urban candelabra with Sheila Klein, music, tacos and YOU!

*update: Like so many things, Vermonica’s return has been delayed by the pandemic. We’ll keep you posted about progress on this restoration.

Esotouric’s Holiday Gift to You: Architect Richard Neutra’s Recipe for Tongue-Goulash

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Los Angeles is a magnificent melting pot, a city constantly reinventing itself as adventurous eaters explore and adapt the comfort foods of cultures not their own.

Today, we have Yelp and Instagram to help us find the freshest taste sensation. But in old Los Angeles, cultural foodways were shared in small-run amateur recipe books, published to promote historic preservation, celebrate civic engagement, or raise funds for a favorite charity.

Recently, at a library book sale ($2!), we picked up a copy of the 1942 Victory Edition of Burnt Toast, a regional recipe book published by the Women’s Auxiliary of the California Babies and Children’s Hospital (now called Eisner).

The conceit of “burnt toast” was that young wives were clueless in the kitchen, but could develop their skills by carefully copying the signature dishes of established community members. And these were not just women of a certain age, but men, too, because Southern California has always been a progressive place.

Every regional charitable recipe book is interesting, but those from Los Angeles can hold some cool surprises in the form of recipes from well-known cultural figures. And we’re pleased to share with you the coolest surprise in Burnt Toast: architect Richard Neutra’s recipe for old world Tongue-Goulash. (We like to think that the hyphen represents the tongue sticking out.)

Not a fan of meaty goulash? Perhaps you’ll enjoy Mrs. Dione Neutra’s Graham Cracker ice box cake. So simple, even a newlywed can do it, and taste tested by the sophisticated Neutra household!

Here’s wishing you and yours a season of delicious treats shared with those you like best, from your pals at Esotouric and Burnt Toast! Please let us know if you make either of these dishes, and how you like them.

3-D Tour of the Original Bob Baker Marionette Theater

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Welcome to the eleventh in a series of 3-D explorable tours of off-the-beaten-path Southern California spaces, created by Craig Sauer of Reality Capture Experts using cutting-edge Matterport technology.

Our love for the Bob Baker Marionette Theater is no secret. It is a zone of pure creativity and whimsy that could only have flowered in Los Angeles. Bob was a dear friend, and in 2013, we were privileged to help see that his visual archives were safely preserved by the Los Angeles Public Library, at a time when the theater’s future was uncertain.

Uncertainty is a funny thing, though. Yes, the original Bob Baker Marionette Theater is a “protected” city landmark which a developer nevertheless intends to demolish for a generic housing development. But the young puppeteers who took up the management strings after Bob’s death in 2014 have proved to be terrific stewards. They’ve nourished a nonprofit arm, built thriving community partnerships, and just last week opened up their lovely new, much larger puppet theater on a busy stretch of York in Highland Park.

The sweet, silly and inspiring shows that Bob Baker created for the mid-century kids of Los Angeles will continue to blow the minds of new generations.

Still, it’s hard to see such a Los Angeles treasure displaced, and we wanted to mark the transition. So we reached out to Craig and asked if he’d be interested in bringing his Matterport camera over and documenting the theater, backstage, workshops and Bob Baker’s personal research library loft (up the stairs, stage left), where Bob selected the music for shows and gained visual inspiration for puppet costumes, backdrops and props.

The results are a time capsule, three-dimensional love letter to Bob Baker’s genius as it manifested in the final days, before the world he made was boxed up for the move to Highland Park.

On a day when The New York Times honors our hometown marionettes with a lengthy feature, we’re sending out this bittersweet remembrance of the funky, original Bob Baker Marionette Theater in its historic home of 56 years. We hope you enjoy the opportunity to creep around this magical place which no longer is a public space, but which welcomes you virtually inside any time you feel its call.

And we heard the funniest thing on opening day in Highland Park: that developer who bought the building and planned to tear it down hasn’t been heard from lately. Rumor has it, nothing’s happening at 1345 West First Street any time soon.

But the marionettes have already moved on, and invite you to come see a show in Highland Park. Bring on the dancing cats and raise the traditional post-performance cup of ice cream to the next 56 years of joy!