Ask the Dust/3, a Realization

“That’s when I walked down the street toward Angel's Flight, wondering what would I do that day. But there was nothing to do, and so I decided to walk around town." — John Fante

Wall of art inside The Last Bookstore PHOTO:KCS

Searching for a theme in the art that covers one complete wall inside The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles,  I came up blank.

"Isn't it great?" said Barbara.

"I don't get it?"

"It's the way in which the art is arranged to fill the entire wall."

"Oh... yeah."

I was looking at the trees not seeing the forest.

There's a great deal to see at The Last Bookstore which has been featured in magazines, television, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and anywhere better mouse traps are found. It's like walking into the Centre Pompidou in Paris or strolling through the dusty aisles of eye-candy at Burning Man. You're liable to see anything. Presentation is key.

Silly me. I was hunting for a particular book.

PHOTO:KCS

Walking from Angel's Flight to The Last Bookstore felt safe. Traffic was muffled by the old buildings of Los Angeles that speak of a different period with gargoyles and columns, what might be called substance. These old girls have withstood earthquakes, sig alerts, heat waves, high winds, low lives and acid smog. We passed through a cloud of sour air near a small plaza, perhaps a reminder of where we were or who we are. We were inside the axis of our nation's second largest city amid a core of quietude, similar to the eye of a hurricane, insulated from the greater tumult that surrounded us.

The Last Bookstore sits on the corner of Spring and Fifth streets occupying a 100-year-old building that was once a bank. It's the brainchild of Josh Spencer who started selling used books in a downtown loft in 2005. The store encompasses 22,000 sq. ft. that includes two floors and the bank's original vault. Here you will find, according to its website, "a record store, a comic book store, five art studios, an epic yarn shop, a famous book tunnel, a mammoth head and unexpected nooks of funkiness."

To enter you must pass through a security check that reminded me of an experience at LAX. I get it. Many visitors enter in a constant flow. At least we didn't need a QR code.

The overall funkiness is, Spencer admits, designed to capture the Instagram crowd who are wont to shoot "reels" of the quirky nooks and set ups. This provides instant free advertising, which seems to be working. Several movies have taken advantage of the location including Gone Girl (2014) and the Netflix series, Crime Scene: The Vanishing of the Cecil Hotel (2021).

I wish we would have had more time to explore. The afternoon was moving toward sundown and I didn't want to drive the freeways back to Manhattan Beach in the dark. I found the fiction department and began madly searching authors under the letter "F." Surely The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles would have at least one copy of Ask the Dust by John Fante. Surely they would have sought and shelved this classic novel of old Los Angeles; the "greatest novel ever written about Los Angeles."

I couldn't find a single book by Fante or his son, Dan Fante. Although I would caution anyone against reading the son's morbidly revolting novel, Point Doom (2013), set in Malibu. Take my word. Unless you have a taste for the macabre. He must have had a grudge against one of the town's filmmakers, or wrote the book as a pejorative metaphor of the industry itself and the way it treats people. Or perhaps the way we treat each other.

Fante the Father was a prodigious writer and earned his bread and butter penning screenplays. In 2010, a small cadre of literary activists were successful in getting the city of Los Angeles to designate the downtown corner of Fifth and Grand streets as "John Fante Square." The LA Times described him as "a chronicler of downtown, its unloved and overlooked residents, its dirty sidewalks and cheap bars."

The only physical reminder that he existed is a solitary, barely noticed sign on a street post.

Photo by unknown photographer of sign on corner of Fifth and Grand streets identifying John Fante Square. Probably taken from inside a moving car with the window closed blurring the letters.

We exited The Last Bookstore, walked back to Angel's Flight and rode uphill to the plaza station and found our car in the covered lot. Our parking tab was I'm sure more than six months rent for a room on Bunker Hill in 1940. It had been a swell afternoon in old downtown LA starting with a beef dip sandwich at Philippe's.

Old map of Los Angeles area with downtown colored in.

Epilogue:

This trip to Los Angeles took place a week or more before the horrific wildfires that blazed through Pacific Palisades and Altadena and other pockets of LA spurred by Santa Ana winds of up to 100-mph. I wrote my first installment of this story before the fires. 

We left town on PCH through Malibu past the familiar beach houses between the road and the ocean; many now reduced to ash. Our daughter Vanessa and her family live on the inland side of nearby Topanga Canyon. She said the winds were terrifying, the devastation “incomprehensible.” 

Thankfully, they are safe but ready to evacuate in case.

Nearly 200 novels have been written about the natural risks of living in Los Angeles and end-of-world scenarios there, according to the LA Times. Now there will be more. Wildfires and earthquakes are expected. The fires when I was growing up sparked in September. They were mostly confined to the dry-scrub undeveloped hills. Today the fires are year-round and reach buildings where people live. 

Good luck, Los Angeles. Good luck to all.

"All that was good in me thrilled in my heart at that moment, all that I hoped for in the profound, obscure meaning of my existence. Here was the endlessly mute placidity of nature, indifferent to the great city; here was the desert beneath these streets, around these streets, waiting for the city to die, to cover it with timeless sand once more."  from Ask the Dust by John Fante

 

Ask the Dust/2, a Reckoning

I took the steps down Angel's Flight to Hill Street: a hundred forty steps, with tight fists, frightened of no man, but scared of the Third Street Tunnel, scared to walk through it -- claustrophobia. -- Arturo Bandini, from Ask the Dust by John Fante, ©1939.

Angel's Flight, December 23,  2024. PHOTO:KCS

At about 2 o'clock in the afternoon we joined a serpentine line to place our sandwich order at Philippe's The Original. The joint was rocking. Or at least buzzing with hungry folks. The sawdust-strewn floor soothed me. I was definitely feeling the vibe that my memory had kept alive for more than seven decades.

The moment of reckoning had arrived.

The sandwiches are made on the spot, with choices of beef, pork, lamb, ham or turkey, all dipped by request, or dry pastrami. We ordered two house specials: beef dips, plus sides of potato salad and coleslaw.  To drink, I asked for a draw of IPA and Barbara went for the lemonade which appeared thirst-quenching in a tall glass.

The corner restaurant comprises several rooms with tables large enough for a family of six. The walls are adorned with memorabilia including clips from newspapers and magazines about the fabled sandwich shop that first opened in 1908. The hometown Dodgers, are well represented with photos and souvenirs for sale. The baseball team remains the pride of LA, especially since winning the World Series in October.

Deli counter at Philippe the Original. PHOTO:KCS

I asked to have my sandwich double-dipped. "That's top and bottom," said the server behind the deli case. She was referring to the sliced roll. She placed our order on a tray and we found a vacant table and set ourselves up. I prepared myself with a sip of IPA.

I carefully lifted the sandwich with both hands, drew it toward my mouth and took a small bite, then a larger one. The flavor had barely reached my taste buds when my wife looked at me and said: "Well, how is it?" I felt as though I was on trial.

The entire room expanded. My peripheral vision brought everything into panoramic focus -- past, present and future.

"It's good," I said, sensing a chill and flush fill my face. "It's good," I repeated.

"Is it as good as you remembered?"

"It's different, but I like it." I couldn't imagine my 5-year-old self. I did feel satisfied. 

The episode catapulted me to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, a refuge protagonist Hans Castorp never wanted to leave. Alas, we are bequeathed the present moment and all that we we bring to it.

I don't believe it was the same sandwich. I was certainly a different person. The meat was tender and savory. The bun simply a bun. I had since tasted the divinity of San Francisco sour dough. 

The casual atmosphere of families and friends enjoying their meals reassured me, a multi-ethnic and multi-aged mix. I watched a young Black man bussing tables wearing a Dodger cap and blue Philippe's shirt and wondered about his life in LA and the stories he must tell his friends. Glasses of lemonade stood on many tables, indicating its popularity at 99-cents each. The best deal in the house. A Beef Dip costs $13.95.

It became clear that the French Dip would remain a reminder of my youth but not likely repast for my future. I eat very little beef these days. I recalled better French Dips during my teenage years in Pomona at Tony's, at the coffee shop at Garey Bowl and from behind counter at Roy’s Liquor on Fifth Avenue across the street from the Hull House, a favorite high-school hangout. But those sandwiches would never overshadow my first succulent experience at Philippe's, the sense of discovery, the sawdust-covered floor and my Dad’s comforting grin.

Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, 1952. Photo by Walker Evans, celebrated Depression-era photographer. Note the high resolution of real film and the smoggy sky. Los Angeles air quality has improved immensely since lead was removed from gasoline.

After exiting Philippe's, we walked about a block down busy Alameda Street, across from the classic Downtown Post Office building, before realizing that finding Angel's Flight on foot would be difficult and hazardous. The varied streets criss-cross in helter-skelter fashion. So back to the car.

Named after a battle of the Revolutionary War, Bunker Hill is where the wealthy folks of early Los Angeles resided in grand Victorian-style homes overlooking the city with views of the greater basin and mountains beyond, a prime location for anyone who conducted business in town, as did Prudent Beaudry. A French-Canadian immigrant and LA's 13th Mayor, Beaudry was instrumental in developing what had been a large, vacant dirt mound above downtown.

Beaudry took it upon himself to have his home constructed on top of the mound and water pumped uphill to accommodate his new abode. To do so, he started his own water company, a vision that would become a major and controversial conundrum for Angelenos as the population of Los Angeles exploded over time without a local water source. According to record, Beaudry's water service kept the L.A. River flowing into zanjas -- ditches -- to service the original settlements of Pueblo de Los Angeles established by Spanish charter in 1781.

Celebrated as the "world's shortest railway," Angel's Flight opened in 1901, eliminating the need to climb the 140 stairs from downtown to the top of Bunker Hill. Although the Hill has been flattened and modernized today, the original rail cars, featuring stained wood and polished brass polls, take riders back in time for the cost of one dollar, round-trip.

Inside the railway cars is as cozy as a warm blanket on a cold night. Whoa! that's steep!

As Los Angeles changed, so did Bunker Hill. The hilltop enclave of the town's movers and shakers was derailed by what may be Los Angeles's most renowned contribution to our nation: The first freeway.

Originally christened Arroyo Seco Parkway and opened in 1938, the fast-road into town soon became known as the Pasadena Freeway, linking that leafy community with downtown Los Angeles. This fast track was designed to bring shoppers from Pasadena into LA. But it had the opposite effect. Wealthy Angelenos like Beaudry vacated Bunker Hill for the genteel town bunkered below the picturesque San Gabriel Mountains. 

The flight of the well-to-do left vacant quarters on the hill. The community became a magnet for artists, writers and those seeking an affordable, bohemian atmosphere. Victorian homes were converted into apartment houses called "flop houses." Here is where John Fante found his muse and wrote several books about his neighborhood, including his novel Ask the Dust. The book was made into a movie in 2006, written and directed by Robert Towne, a pal of actor Jack Nicholson, who played private investigator Jake Gittes in the film Chinatown.  Despite high expectations, Ask the Dust flopped as a film. The story of a young writer and his Mexican girlfriend didn't feature enough action.

Towne had been enamored of Fante, calling Ask the Dust the "greatest novel ever written about Los Angeles."

The Hill became a location for noir films. The environs inspired Charles Bukowski, LA's street poet laureate whose drinking life was memorialized in the 1987 film, Barfly set in LA. The poet was played by actor/boxer Mickey Rourke. Faye Dunaway was cast as a female barfly. Bukowski wrote the screenplay which included fist fighting and philosophy. Rotten tomatoes gave Barfly 4-stars. 

Bukowski referred to Fante as his "god."

The transitional period of Bunker Hill contributed to LA noir that portrays the underbelly of the beast, which has been recreated for voyeurs of the genre up through the Netflix era.

The new Bunker Hill is shiny, modern and sterile with its plaza and high rises. You would be hard pressed to find a cigarette butt or empty bottle here.

A clue, or simple ducat?

The top station of Angel's Flight is located at California Plaza, 350 South Grand Ave. There's a convenient covered parking lot across the street at a rate of about $17 per 15-minutes. The railway connects the old with the new.

We arrived to find tourists queued in front of the tiny station window. We heard British accents. We saw young  Asian visitors. I was surprised to discover that the quaint funicular was on the international map. Yet it made sense. Los Angeles is not to be underestimated. Here was an LA antique, "the world's shortest railway." Author Michael Connelly, LA's master of procedural crime fiction, entitled one of his Harry Bosch mysteries, Angel's Flight (©1998), the site of a murder inside one of the cars.

Our day trip for a sandwich had turned into a literary expedition. Barbara was thrilled to finally ride the funicular that had somehow escaped her youthful days around Los Angeles.

Tickets are $1 for a round-trip. The rail car arrives at its lower station on Hill Street across from Grand Central Market, an enclosed marketplace full of eateries, shops and souvenirs. The marketplace runs a full block to Broadway.

“That was fun,”said my wife as we exited the funicular. “And short.” She would normally have walked the stairs but Angel's Flight was a lifetime experience. How many funiculars does one ride in a lifetime?

This was my second trip. I rode Angel's Flight in 1965 before the modernization of Bunker Hill and like most teenagers didn't give it much thought. Ho-hum.

We had not heard of The Last Bookstore. The chatty gal in the ticket booth mentioned it to riders on our way down. "It's really cool," said a returning rider. Barb received a text from a friend saying, "go to the bookstore." I knew then we would not be leaving downtown LA without checking out the curious book emporium. 

The plot had thickened. 

Final installment in my next blog, Ask The Dust/3, a Realization. Where the author gets his due. Sort of.

Historical sources for this post are from various websites, blogs and Wikipedia. The narrative is intended to entertain and inform, a true story supported by the most available facts. I was surprised and delighted to find the Walker Evans photograph of Bunker Hill.

Ask the Dust/1, a Romance

Look at that mountain

Look at those trees

Look at that bum over there, man

He's down on his knees

Look at these women

There ain't nothing like 'em nowhere -- Randy Newman, "I Love LA"

Established in 1908, Philippe's The Original is the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Los Angeles. PHOTO:KCS

In 1952, when I was 5-years-old, I fell in love.

We had arrived in California the previous year, having left Seattle where my sister, Mimi, and I were born. We first lived in Alhambra, then Monterey Park. Both towns were a short drive from downtown Los Angeles, whose retailers and restaurants served the surrounding communities.

My father had found employment at the downtown U.S. Post Office so we spent time together in that neighborhood, which is now considered historic. Times have changed. As Bob Dylan says, "A lot of water under the bridge, a lot of other stuff, too." Like gleaming high rises and freeways that will swallow you whole.

Still my memories remain the same, sweet and bitter, a romance that started when my Dad introduced me to a sandwich, which represented a place, time and eventually a history that has lingered in the right side of my brain, where I'm told feelings are stored, for more than 70 years!

Los Angeles, the city of Angels, the home of many towns, the place that defies place and defines a concept. Maybe it's simply the home of the Dodgers, those bums from Brooklyn, or the Lakers, although there are no lakes. A sports town with a famed Coliseum and one of the original NFL teams: the Rams, honored yet more often scorned as the Lambs by their own fans. 

Call it a beacon, a light that attracts dreamers wanting to be stars. The epicenter of the movies, the House of Hollywood: The Studios. Home of The Beach Boys and Good Vibrations, celebrated by musicians who flocked to Los Angeles in the 70s to record hits like California Dreamin', Hotel California and L.A. Woman.

It's a receiving station for foreign immigrants, many from south of the border, and domestic refugees from colder climes like my family, looking for a new start under the sun.

But it's really a desert, isn't it? When the Colorado River dries up, what do you got? In the meantime spread and build, spread and build, ad infinitum. 

There's a flip side to the fantastical L.A. coin, darkly described by mid-century L.A. noir writers like Raymond Chandler, John Cain and James Elroy, author of The Black Dahlia, based on a grisly real-life murder right here in LA River City. 

Author John Fante, according to some L.A.'s greatest literary icon, put it this way in his 1939 novel, Ask the Dust:

"Los Angeles, give me some of you. Los Angeles, come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town."

Boiled down, LA is a contradiction. She's a beautiful woman stripped naked by forces of greed, lust and gratuitous celebrity.

She's Gloria Swanson on the staircase in the movie Sunset Boulevard. She's Kim Kardasian on the runway. She's Faye Dunaway, impregnated by her own father, John Huston, in the movie Chinatown. She's the ill-fated wife of O.J., Nicole Brown Simpson. She is movie starlet-turned-political renegade Jane Fonda.

She's a victim and survivor. That's why I love her. Which is why, on a recent trip to Southern California, I had to visit the site of the most sensuously savory LA experience of my long-ago youth on the corner of N. Alameda and Ord streets, around the corner from Chinatown, a couple of blocks from Union Station. There, sits a sandwich joint called Philippe's The Original.

Is it not the lips and tongue that tastes love first? Add the work-shop romance of a sawdust-covered floor. 

"It's called a French Dip," said my Dad, naming a signature sandwich that helped build a town.

Opened in 1908 by a Frenchman named Philippe Mathieu, Philippe's holds the distinction of being the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Los Angeles, and the place where the French Dip sandwich was invented. This latter claim remains arguable, due to a number of different and doubtless apocryphal stories.

In 1951 Mathieu told the LA Times that he dipped a sandwich roll into his beefy broth at the request of a customer. The sandwich eater's reaction was so positive that customers began asking to have their rolls likewise dipped in the juice. Another story explains how Mathieu, not one to waste food, dipped a stale bun into the broth, and hungry customers begged for more. Stale bread being the mother of invention.

From my first taste at Philippe's, I became a French Dip aficionado, a lover of juicy beef, that continued through my college years. Although I never returned to Philippe's, the place remained a delicious, distant memory, a first romance that never faded away. And strange though it is, over those years my personal consumption of beef had diminished to practically nil.

Yet the question remained: would she taste the same today? Would I experience a latent orgasmic sensation? What would it be like to find out? Desire plagued me when I saw on Facebook that Philippe's The Original was still operating in the same location at 1001 N. Alameda St. And the reviews sang like temptations to the soul.

"Amazing!" "Melt in your mouth!" "Indulge in the juicy, savory goodness!" I ignored any negative comments.

Woodcut print entitled Bunker Hill by CP Fels.

Christmas week, Barbara and I drove to Southern California to see our grandson Finn dance in Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker presented by Pacific Festival Ballet at the Fred Kavu Theatre in Thousand Oaks. The performance was mesmerizing. We stationed ourselves in Barbara's hometown of Manhattan Beach, to visit family and long-time friends, while visions of Philippe's French Dip danced in my head.

Checking my iPhone, we were based a mere 23 miles from the legendary sandwich shop. "We must go there," I said to my wife, who has very little interest in French Dips. 

Amid our full schedule of walking, browsing and hanging out, I was able to convince her to join me on my date with destiny in the heart of old Los Angeles. She had expressed interest in seeing Angel's Flight, the historic funicular railway on Bunker Hill, based on a woodcut print by Cathy Fels (CP Fels) hanging on our dining room wall at home. 

The print, entitled Bunker Hill, shows a stately Victorian house with a faintly recognized version of L.A.'s iconic City Hall in the background. With imagination, you can see Angel's Flight.

"I've never been to Angels Flight," lamented my spouse. “I want to ride it.”

On the map, Bunker Hill is about one mile from Philippe's in the same historic district. I expected that following a late lunch, we could walk between the two. I was mistaken.

Due to a multitude of freeways that wind like giant snakes around and through the landscape of Los Angeles, intersecting, overpassing and looping from head to tail, a distance of 23 miles could consume 24 hours, if you don't know the off-ramps, toll routes, on-ramps, road codes, fast lanes and/or you go during rush hour. When is it not rush hour? 

Love is an awful plague -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The drive to downtown Los Angeles consumed a little more than one hour. As we drew closer, we were surprised to see numerous shining corporate high rises that neither of us remembered. The 110 Freeway circled to the right. We took the Broadway offramp, featuring several converging lanes -- outbound and inbound -- full of vehicles swimming like hungry koi who, unlike us, seemed to know where to find their next meal. 

Behind the wheel, I felt as though I had died and gone to Hell. Or at least Purgatory. My penance was to change lanes without incident. A few close calls, and we found ourselves in Chinatown. I recalled the final despairing line from the movie penned by screenwriter Robert Towne: "Forget it Jake. It's Chinatown."

Within a couple of minutes and three white-knuckle trips around the block, we discovered our destination. The sign atop the corner building read, Philippe The Original -- French Dipped Sandwiches. We pulled into the free-parking lot (for customers) in back. I climbed out of our Hyundai Santa Fe, stood erect and inhaled deeply, followed by a long slow exhale. The terror on my wife's face had subsided.

From here it would be all gravy. 

Next installment: The Full Monty experience at Philippe's, riding Angel's Flight and discovering The Last Book Store.