Here is something from last week that concerns an old landmark of sorts in East L.A., the Golden Gate Theater. I only remember passing by this location that was on that heavily visited cruise strip of Whittier Blvd. back in the 60s. Over the years the adjacent building were demolished and left what you see in the photo in the story link below. Well, it's still there and some changes are planned for its use.
"The Golden Gate Theatre's Second Act - Becoming a CVS Drugstore," Written by EGP News Service, Friday, 19 February 2010. http://ourla.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1549&Itemid=3236 The property is in the unincorporated part of the County of L.A. and approvals for everything planned goes through that governmental agency. It is good to see that not everything in Los Angeles is torn down to facilitate everything that is new. The downside of this is that there are lots of hoops to jump through, everything is more expensive, gettting more so as time moves on, and sometimes there is a lot of opposition to anything for better or worse, and the changes wind up taking years and years, or sometimes just getting scrapped.
I like to see that there's something left of history in Los Angeles, and that people want to preserve it. But a factor in the interest level is that there are so many newcomers to L.A. that could not care one bit less of what was there before. These "newcomers" include some young people arriving in L.A. "more recently" by reason of being born long after many of these historical sites had their best days.
You can look to downtown L.A. as one example of local history. Who remembers that that used to be the place to see a movie with all the theaters on or near Broadway? And even MORE trivia- Do you remember that you would be seeing TWO movies for your admission? If you remember those days you are part of the shrinking group of L.A. people that can only pass along stories to the younger ones - and when I say younger, that now includes the 30 and 40-somethings who were lucky to have seen the last remnants of that era.
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