Roadside history

Like a chump I can't help reading every historic marker and roadside plaque that comes my way. I appreciate reading about historically important places and events, but sometimes it's funny to see a commemorative plaque set up a considerable distance from the actual site. I know of a marker on Monterey Road in South San Jose pointing out the New Almaden Quicksilver Mine...12 miles to the east!

This one in Compton isn't quite so far off...sure it's on a semi-major street, but with no street parking allowed and only private parking lots nearby, it's not very accessible....

25 years later - Aeromexico Flight 498

A few days ago was the 25th anniversary of the air disaster in Cerritos where an Aeromexico passenger jet and a small plane collided mid-air. The City of Cerritos hosted a memorial gathering at a sculpture dedicated to the victims of the accident.

Two of the passengers, Raul Leanos and Elva Leanos, from the Aeromexico flight were from San Jose, and I remember them both. I'm baffled (but not surprised) that the San Jose Mercury News ran an Associated Press article about the memorial that didn't mention Elva and Raul. This was huge news in 1986...what a lazy newspaper to go with a short AP article rather than provide local insight and reflection about the tragedy.

Seven Apple Trees Gang

My earliest graffiti memory dates back to 2nd grade at Hellyer Elementary in San Jose. The Seven Trees neighborhood was in walking distance from school, and to that point my dealings with Seven Trees involved checking out Shel Silverstein and Doctor Dolittle books from the Seven Trees Library.

I used to take the yellow school bus to Hellyer, and Dewey the bus driver would drop us off in the morning with about ten minutes to spare. One morning when Dewey let out the busload of rowdy students, I saw that a crowd of kids had already gathered on the sports field.

That's when I saw it...10-foot VST letters had been hacked out from the grass. My little mind couldn't make sense of the vandalism, and I asked this kid George (the same kid who thought his mother's name was "mom") the meaning of VST. He explained that it stood for Varrio Seven Trees, a gang from Seven Trees. Gang? At that point my point of reference for gangs was the Apple Dumpling Gang, a Disney movie with Don Knotts and Tim Conway.

Opening tomorrow is MOCA's Art in the Streets exhibition...Friday I took a look at the outdoor setup setting up...

This is a test

I'm old enough to remember the Cold War. Although I'm too young to have lived through drop-and-cover nuclear attack drills at school...we only practiced for earthquakes...I do remember the occasional test blare of civil defense sirens.

Those things could wail. If anyone reading this is familiar with San Jose, I went to Sylvandale Jr. High, and the nearest siren tower was near the corner of Capitol and Senter...about a half-mile away. No ducking or covering followed...only teachers pointing out the obvious. "There they go again!"

I'm certain most cities have yanked out their sirens, but they're still hanging on in Los Angeles. In fact, one still lingers in front of City Hall. Why haven't they been removed? Indifference? Cheaper to just keep them rusting? Saving them for the next menace?

Gould Cinemas - Part 4

A couple weekends ago I took a little trip to my hometown...San Jose. I hadn't been there in four years, and even then I was just passing through on a Bay Area college campus tour I gave my younger cousins. My parents retired a while back and moved off to Clovis, so the SJ chapter in my life had come to a close...at least I thought.

Of course I had to feed my Gould obsession by taking a look at the remains. Kinda painful to the eye, but here are some shots looking in from the cobwebbed window. Yes, that's a jar of giant pickles you see...

Gould Cinemas - Part 3

The Gould Cinemas had a short life. 1979 to 1996...that's a 17-year deterioration from a hopeful neighborhood movie theater to a public nuisance. Planning Department records confirm that the City of San Jose staff knew the theater would be doomed to failure even before it was built.

Above you'll see a site plan of the Capitol Expressway/McLaughlin Avenue/Tuers Road area before it was developed as the Gould Center. The land was owned by the Gould family, and it was worked for agricultural uses of some type (like most of Santa Clara County in the waybacks), as you can see by the barn, well, and water tower.

As single family residential neighborhoods sprouted around the Gould property, in 1976 the City approved Elizabeth and Ed Gould's request to re-zone their land for a commercial development to serve the new homeowners.

When it came time for the City to review plans for the Gould Center, the Planning staff had huge concerns about the proposed theater location. Not enough parking, too close to the adjacent houses, too isolated, no connection to the rest of the retail businesses...but the developers didn't budge.

Here's a note on the plan indicating Planning's preference for the theater to be at the corner of Tuers and McLaughlin...where the Denny's ended up...


The Planning Department denied the proposal in November 1977, but a month later the Goulds appealed the decision to the City Council. Their strategy worked for them...the Council and Mayor Janet Gray Hayes gave their blessing.

Construction lasted a little over a year, and the Gould Cinemas opened for business in December '79, buried behind the other retail suites and far from Capitol Expressway street visibility. It wasn't long before the theater lost its sheen and settled into a last resort existence as a second-run theater catering to the younger set, spendthrifts, and psychos. Yeah, I saw movies there all the time.

Gould Cinemas - Part 2

Have you ever felt sick over just the memory of a nasty smell? I'm feeling it right now as I recall the disgusting funk that permeated the Gould Cinemas, the most whacked out movie theater in the history of San Jose. Ugh.

I don't think the air conditioning system was ever serviced in all the years the Gould was in existence. The stink would envelope you as soon as you stepped into the one of the three screening rooms. You'd hope it would fade into your subconscious, but trying to ignore it was absolutely futile.

Here's the crazy part...as reported by the San Jose Mercury News, on March 21, 1993 a "mysterious gas" emitted during a screening of Leprechaun sent nine Gould patrons to the hospital. Firefighters responded to reports of mass coughing and figured that kids dropped smoke bombs or stink bombs. One customer likened the smell to roach spray. Harry Davis, the owner of the Gould, was philosophical when asked about the pranksters..."You know what they're going to do."

Gould Cinemas - Part 1

And here we have a 1997 snapshot of the Gould Cinemas in San Jose. You can just barely see the ghost of the sign letters along the wood siding. At the time the space was being used by the local Democratic Party as a campaign headquarters, and I can only assume it's now vacant.

Hard to believe that from 1979 to 1996 operated a movie theater with disco lights, restrooms painted completely black, throngs of teenagers with no regard for the posted schedule, and the world's hugest pickles bobbing in a jar.

The Gould was a 3-screen movie theater tucked away at the ass-end of the Gould Shopping Center. Probably the worst location for any business, let alone a movie threeplex. I'm sure the residential neighbors weren't happy with loudmouth moviegoers loitering and honking and spilling toxic popcorn in the parking lot.

Despite the filth, the ridiculously sticky floors, and the deadly stink, it was fun for us kids. I remember watching these movies...

The Principal, Brighton Beach Memoirs, The Believers, Angel Heart, Ghoulies, The Golden Child, Raw Deal, My Science Project, Splash, Ice Pirates, Red Dawn, Dreamscape, Terminator, Johnny Dangerously, Space Hunter, Yor, Metalstorm, Brainstorm, Nate and Hayes, Krull

The last movie I saw at the Gould was Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. About halfway through the show I turned to see that my friend Dave was as far forward he could possibly be on his seat without falling off, and I realized that he had the right idea.

Almaden Quicksilver

I took this picture of the Almaden 5 (formerly Almaden Twin) marquee during a visit back to San Jose in 2001. I can only decipher the first two lines of text...Cinema and All Stores Open During Construction. Never been back.

Although in junior high I usually watched movies at the nearby Gould Cinemas, the Almaden Twin was only a couple buses (72 & 26) away. There was also the draw of the skateboard shop, Go-Skate, where my friend Larry would filch stickers while his brother Robert rounded up coins for Thrifty Ice Cream. I remember watching Rad at the Twin, and I can still hear Robert laughing his head off when Chevy Chase ripped one in Spies Like Us.

Great times...skating, taking the bus, watching movies, laughing at fart jokes. I am amazed to hear from adults who proudly say they grew up without ever taking the bus.

Trees may be extinct like the elephants

I only remember two homes from my childhood in San Jose...faint memories of living in the Evergreen neighborhood, and then years and years of memories in the "Ramblewood" part of town. My parents moved the family into the sparkling new Morrison Homes tract in 1975, and there they stayed until they retired several years back. (The building permit shows a $28,000 valuation, which is about $113,000 in adjusted 2010 dollars and about a quarter of today's house value...I'm sure the nearby San Jose Dump didn't inflate the price at all.)

When I was about six years old my dad came home with a couple redwood tree saplings, and he planted them in the back yard. By the time I was in high school those trees were well over 60 feet high, and I often wonder how they're doing these days.

So now I'm in Downtown Los Angeles, and in a dense, urban setting, every tree counts. I appreciate it when the City of Los Angeles plants more trees in public areas (like in the sidewalk tree well in front of the Los Angeles Theatre Center...photo below), and I appreciate folks who plant trees on private property. It pains me to see mature trees cut like the tree hacked up on Monday.

Sylvanjail bears

I attended San Jose's Sylvandale Junior High in the '80s, when the school district installed a ten-foot high chain link fence topped with barbed wire around the perimeter. Sylvanjail was born.

Even then I didn't like feeling like a prisoner, and I'm still not a fan of gates, walls, window bars, private streets, vacated alleys, and security check points.

I prefer hearing about walls being dismantled, fences reduced in height, bridges constructed, bus stops added, rail lines planned, and hiking and biking trails extended and connected.

The photo shows the Hayward Hotel at Spring and 6th in Downtown Los Angeles. A gate on the Spring Street side has been removed...that's what I'm talking about.

Eastridge Boys

When I moved last month I found a stash of old marketing brochures I had saved when I was a young whippersnapper in San Jose. It's a half-decent set of amusement park maps, park highlights, and chamber of commerce rehash. Amazing the things that avoid the landfills...

These are photos taken from a Eastridge Mall pamphlet from the early '80s. That place has seen its ups and downs as shopping tastes have changed through the years, but in those days Eastridge was a sparkling, regional retail destination.

And it was a playground to kids like me. The intoxicating scent of popcorn filled Sears, and in this pre-VHS era we could watch cartoons for a quarter in a filthy plastic booth. I remember getting in trouble with my cousin Marcos, who had brilliant ideas like sliding down the dividers between escalators and wading in the fountains to filch the coins. You've heard of mall rats...we were more like mall rugrats.

Looking at these pictures, I love the geometric patterns, the elongated bubble canopy over the information booth, and the sculpture (since relocated to downtown San Jose), which I liken to a metallic peacock.

Raul Leanos, I Hardly Knew You

Today marks the anniversary of the 1986 mid-air collision of Aeromexico Flight 498 and a private plane above Cerritos. Aboard the jetliner were Raul Leanos, a kid from my junior high in San Jose, and his mother, Elva Leanos, who worked in the school cafeteria. They were on their way back from a summer trip to Mexico before the new school year.

In those days the school would post up lists of homeroom teachers and their students outside the main office. I remember walking to school to check on the assigned teacher for my upcoming 8th grade year, and a crowd of television news reporters blocked my way. Another kid explained that someone had died in a plane crash, and a cameraman taped footage of the homeroom list, surely zooming in on Raul's name for dramatic emphasis.

A few years ago the City of Cerritos dedicated the Cerritos Air Disaster Memorial by Kathleen Carcicof as part of a quiet sculpture garden tucked away near the library. It's a nice place to sit, contemplate, and think about the good folks we've lost.

Was dog a donut?

I pretty much grew up in the same San Jose neighborhood. I barely remember my parents' earlier place in Evergreen (which my Dad decided to move away from "once the neighbors painted a giant sun over the garage" in the mid-'70s), so as you can imagine I had mixed feelings about staying put. Stability on one hand, boredom on the other. Even at a young age I knew other SJ areas were way more interesting. Downtown. Willow Glen. Alviso. Alum Rock.

One of my favorites along Alum Rock Avenue was the giant orange that housed Mark's Hot Dogs. No kidding...this is a walk-in orangey orange built in 1947, and the City of San Jose declared it a historic landmark in 1992. Can't say my family actually ate there much, but I definitely liked to look.

Now that this type of wackitecture has popped back in my head, over the last week I've taken a drive by most of the giant donuts in the Los Angeles area. I'm amazed by how these monsters have held up over the years, and most seem to be slinging donuts like the recession never happened. I'll have to make another round of visits, and next time I'll put on my taste test face.

Ramblin'wood

I grew up in a nondescript San Jose neighborhood with housing tracts constructed in the mid-'70s to the early '80s. Not quite East San Jose, not quite South San Jose, and no catch-all name for the neighborhood, unless you count the Ramblewood tag that never really took. Something tells me South Central San Jose won't stick either.

I remember being upset that I lived in a nameless place, and to this day I have difficulty explaining the location. It doesn't seem right to describe a neighborhood in terms of freeways and freeway exits or the nearest shopping mall. Maybe I'll start saying I grew up near the Lord of the Rings streets. Maybe I grew up in Middle-earth.

Los Angeles neighborhood identity is a tricky business. A sliver of the Van Nuys neighborhood wants to leave and join up with the adjacent, tonier Sherman Oaks neighborhood. Valley Glen and Lake Balboa also split from Van Nuys in recent years. Poor Van Nuys. I don't know what's worse...to be a neighborhood with zero identity or a neighborhood with a negative identity.

Checked out

If all goes well this year we'll fulfill our little dream of moving from Santa Ana to downtown Los Angeles. I'm a huge fan of libraries, and EzraPounded and I agree there's no better library in California than the Los Angeles Central Library. I know I'll spend hours reading in the stacks, lounging by the outdoor fountains, and checking out (get it? get it?) their exhibits, like the Richard Neutra sketches and drawings coming in May. It's great to hear stories like the one about Ray Bradbury writing Fahrenheit 451 on a rented typewriter at the Central Library.

Just as Fahrenheit 451's Faber went up against the book-burning firemen, a bicycle shop on First Street in San Jose called Faber's Cyclery is up against developers with their eyes on knocking the historic shop down. The business owner, Alex LaRiviere, has a dream of his own...a bicycle and beer museum with graffiti walls.

LaRiviere's sky-high pile of rusty bikes used to fascinate me. One summer home from college a couple friends from SoCal flew in for a visit. Instead of taking a straight shot on the 101 Freeway to my parents' house, I remember driving Alisa and Sunny through SJ's less-than-sparkling First Street and Monterey Road. Even with out-of-towners I couldn't resist a drive past the tangled bikes and other oddities along the aging corridor. I'm pretty sure they haven't been back to San Jose...

A clown fish in a sea of animals

I've never been very good at video games, and I have zero patience for fighting games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat.

Maybe my dispassion goes back to the days as a kid in San Jose...my parents liked to eat at this hole-in-the-wall taqueria called El Paseo, located at Tully and King. (Actually, my dad only referred to the place as the Greasy Spoon.) I'd hit him up for a quarter, played a quick round of Pac-Man, and that was it. No second quarter, no follow-up game. The owners later rigged up the Pac-Man arcade machine to play at an impossible triple-speed. That put the nail in the coffin for my gaming career.

I am good at one arcade game...Galaga. However, I didn't take it up until I had free hours between college classes, and I had nothing better to do (study?) on campus after the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings ended.

On Saturday I noticed that the Space Invader tiles are missing from the Giant Robot store on Sawtelle. The store worker said it's been a couple years. Geez. This guy has a great photo collection of Space Invaders in Los Angeles.

Rise river rise

After almost five years of living a stone's throw from the Santa Ana River, EzraPounded and I have only recently started taking advantage of the paved bike route that runs along it. Just about every weekend we'll either cycle south to Huntington Beach or north to Yorba Linda.

Nice times...reminds me of my days in San Jose, where I grew up riding the bike trails along Coyote Creek (home of a secret colony of albinos...but that's a story for another day). In those years the path rolled through open expanses of orchards and farmland, but by the early '90s the area was dotted with tech campuses. I'm glad to see that the Coyote Valley (the most southern portion of San Jose) is still mostly open space...

Buck the clucks

I had heard that public schools maintain student cumulative files for years, so the summer after graduating from high school in San Jose, I decided to check the damage. I have no idea why the administration reacted so defensively, but man, I practically had to make a Freedom of Information Act request to look at my own records. They finally relented, and some chump pencil pusher sat at the same desk watching my every move as I pored over the file. Oh yeah, for kicks I brought along a couple friends, Dave and Ted, and had their files pulled, too.

What was the big secret? I have no idea...there was hardly anything in there but a couple report cards and a goofball photo. The whole mystique of looking up top secret files was shattered.

This Friday my inner snoop compelled me to check the City Hall records of my little piece of the earth in Santa Ana. Again I found myself sitting across from a bureaucrat eyeing my every move while I paged through documents...public tentative tract map and conditional use permit documents in this case.

Guess who came along? Dave! Hehehe...he stared down the city worker and checked the plummeting Dow numbers.

Vodie to the max

I'm sure I'm not the only one who tosses the yellow pages phone book straight to the recycle bin when a new edition appears on the front doorstep. Strange how the more obsolete the hard copy phone books have become, it seems we're bombarded with more and more versions - the "original", the Spanish language edition, the chamber of commerce book, etc. etc.

This might sound nuts, but when I was a wee lad I couldn't wait for the replacement phone books to arrive. I was fascinated by the write-ups on the local San Jose attractions, and wondered which photo would land the coveted cover spot. I'd read up on how to telephone strange sounding countries, and flipped to the z-section of the yellow pages to check out the listings under "zoo."

When I was really young and still illiterate, I'd page through the yellows browsing for ads that caught my eye, like that creepy Buster Brown and his dog, and my favorite, the auto bears. I'm pretty sure the first time I ever picked up the phone and dialed out was to the auto service shops that advertised with that damn cuddly bear. "Do you sell toys?" I asked the workers who must've thought they were getting cranked.

Here in Sana Ana we have the surviving Vodie's bear sign specimen on 17th Street, just east of Bristol. The site was developed in 1956, which fits for this type of happy bear sign. The property was on the market earlier this year, so our bear has dodged another bullet for the moment.