Los Angeles Lakers Fans- One Generation After Another

ALTHOUGH I WOULD not consider myself an avid Los Angeles Lakers fan -- and admit to having been to only one game -- I could not help but become inundated with their successes this past week in the news of their recent win. It seems as though I couldn’t get away from the hype of the popular team -- sportscasters on the news feeding the details of who shot the most points and who saved the game and even a stranger asking me, while sitting by my apartment complex pool this past weekend, if I knew the score. Shortly after, I realized that this obvious Lakers fan had asked me because his young son had probably dragged him up from the couch while watching the game to soak up some sun at the pool on a beautiful April afternoon. What struck me most was that despite this little boy’s strong urge to be playing outside rather than on the couch, he was just as interested to know if the Lakers were winning and when he found out that they did he couldn’t have been happier.

It became clear that Los Angeles Lakers fans pass on their pride and respect from generation to generation which helps maintain such a strong loyalty for so many years. It would almost seem taboo for someone in a family of Lakers fans to stray away from the pack and adopt another favored team. Despite its location and whether the home of the Lakers resides at The Forum in Inglewood or the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, the Lakers will always have fans --both young and old. The team represents so much more than just the game. The Los Angeles Lakers represent a community, a city and generations that will last as long as Angelenos and fans allow it. The team would be nothing without its fans and the fans would be nothing without their team.
-- Jayme Dolan

photo credit: "#1 Laker Fan" by jvnuag, flickr creative commons

Vanished Los Angeles: The Ambassador Hotel

TAKE A LOOK: Hidden L.A. is beginning a series of clips of the once grand, star-studded Ambassador Hotel. Legend has it that Zelda Fitzgerald (F. Scott's wife) lit her lingerie on fire in one of the bungalow bathtubs; history has recorded it, that it was the site of one of America's shocking tragedies -- the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. After that moment, the hotel, once one of the jewels of Wilshire Boulevard, went into steep decline. By the 1980s it was run-down-at the heels and musty but still evoked an air of elegance -- great bones, you know. For most of its final years, before it was closed to the public in 1989, razed in 2006, (after a protracted battle) the site was often rented out for filming (Hoffa, Forrest Gump, Pretty Woman, L.A. Stories). But truly, if you were quiet enough, you could hear the ghosts dancing in the old grand ballrooms or sitting in the rose garden adjacent to the Palm Bar where natty Korean businessmen and East Hollywood types, with their chipped black-lacquered nails and bed-hair, shared barstools. L.A. at it most old-world-swank and stately. It's one of my most special pieces of L.A. history, lost.

Gone.

-- L.G.

top photo caption: entrance to the Ambassador Hotel

top photo credit: www.hollywoodheritage.org

photo credit: Diane Friedman, from the website, Location Managers Guild of America

bottom photo caption: One last look at the Ambassador, shot from the fire escape of the Gaylord Apartments, February 15, 2007

Iconic L.A.: Save the Peak

EARLY LAST week, word leaked out that a nonprofit group planned to drape the Hollywood sign with a banner urging the citizens to "Save the Peak." The cover went up late this week this week in hopes of drumming up support for purchasing nearby Cahuenga Peak from private developers for $11.7 million. The sign has brought attention: both concern and confusion.
But that was precisely the point. The group, Public Trust for Lands, says that they have raised about half of the asking price for the parcel. The land was purchased by a Chicago investment group from the estate of Howard Hughes in 2002 for close to 1.7. million.(Hughes had planned to build a love nest on the 138-acre property for actress Ginger Rogers, according to an L.A. Times report this weekend. NPR Weekend Edition Saturday ran a segment by L.A.-based journalist Karen Grigsby-Bates about the drawing power and iconic nature of the sign, our "signature" says host Scott Simon. The deadline to raise the funds is right around the corner, April 14. The Chicago-investors' plan was to sell the land for $40 million for home sites, and that's when L.A.'s biggest booster -- the ubiquitous Hollywood-area City Councilman Tom LaBonge -- stepped in to ask for the San Francisco-based land trust to help preserve the mountaintop. And I can attest, I've seen and spoken to LaBonge at dawn hiking those trails in Griffth Park and up around that sign when there is no camera or journalist (on the clock) around. As we say in the business this story is "developing." Stay tuned.

-- L.G.


(photo caption: Workers hang lettered banners over the Hollywood sign that will eventually spell out "Save the Peak." The environmental group the Trust for Public Land is sponsoring the project, which is an effort to raise money to purchase the land near the sign and keep it from being developed.

photo credit: Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times/February 11, 2010))