Some soul on Twitter posted this with the caption “Somewhere in Los Angeles”:

To which I felt compelled to reply:

That would be Venice, corner of Pacific and…Brooks?

Then I felt compelled to do a quote retweet:

My old neighborhood, Venice CA, corner of Pacific and Brooks. I passed this intersection almost every day for decades and this box with its rotating wonderful messages for maybe 10 years. I miss it. I miss that place.

And added:

This is what that lovely old brick building looks like now, I’m afraid. They did a high end refurbishment and tore out that lovely old wooden door, destroyed the character of the place. It used to be an artist’s studio and sometimes I would see a gray cat sitting in one of the windows taking in the world. The box with the message on it is gone now, too. Of course, it’s always possible I’m remembering the wrong intersection. There’s a similar building on the corner of N. Venice Blvd. and Pacific. It’s been a few years.

But it was bugging me because in the original post there was a tall brick building looming behind the smaller building. As you can see from photo 2 there is no such building behind this one. I got a little obsessed with it and started searching.

 

 Yep, Pacific and N. Venice. I used to live two blocks from here, right across the street from Billy Al Bengston’s studio but that was a hoary great age ago.>/i>

I think this is the box from the photo but I may be an unreliable narrator.

I “drove” down Pacific via Google maps. In my defense, the building on Brooks and Pacific used to look virtually identical. There was an old wooden door, a cat who sat in the high windows, it was a studio, and it broke my heart when they “upgraded” it.

Further obsessive compulsive behavior led me to find out that the Canal Club, which was housed in the N. Venice Blvd. behind the wooden door, is now permanently closed. A victim of COVID, perhaps. The Ace Gallery used to be a few doors down from there on Venice, but it’s also now permanently closed (although I believe it moved to Downtown before finally closing).

The palimpsest of all these old neighborhoods is strong in me, though perhaps not as strong as I thought. I lived nowhere else but Venice until I was in my thirties when it got “discovered” by developers and I could no longer affords the rents. I miss it a great deal sometimes, although I know it’s been “upgraded” away from the place I knew and loved. The old down-at-the-heels, funky, bohemian Venice was infinitely preferable to its current incarnation as Silicon Beach. Alas. The place I almost remember is long gone.

This is another day of remembrance, but I won’t go there.

Requiescat in pace.