There are lots more memory aids now than once there were. It's easier to remember but also easier to get confused. One of my memory aids for the house in the San Gabriel Valley I've posted about several times is Google Street View. It's become something of a historical record because it records the appearance of the house and neighborhood over time, in this case from 2008 to 2022. A major change -- to me -- took place after 2011.
This is a screenshot of my house and the house next door (where the Vegas lived when I lived in the neighborhood) taken in October 2011:
Several things: The Vegas' house is light brown, which it was when I lived in the neighborhood. The house where I lived is painted yellow -- which it wasn't when I lived there. But it was yellow the last time I saw it in person in 1969. When I lived there, the house was painted white with dark green (Hunter Green) trim.
There's a heavily cracked blacktop asphalt driveway, the only one still remaining in the neighborhood. That was put down some weeks or months after we moved in in 1954. All the driveways in the neighborhood were blacktop initially. Before the driveway was installed, it was just graded dirt which turned muddy when it rained. My mother was livid about it. But the house itself wasn't finished when we moved in. There were still parts needed stucco and plaster, some plumbing fixtures weren't installed in the shower, trim still needed to be applied on the interior and exterior, and the house hadn't been painted.
Part of the problem was that our house was the last one on the street to be built and finished. This was the Post War housing boom, and houses were being built all over the Los Angeles Basin at a furious clip. This neighborhood was being developed so fast that Life Magazine did a feature on one family that moved from Connecticut to California and faced the dilemma of the New and Incomplete Reality of Los Angeles -- and this particular neighborhood -- at the time.
What had been essentially wild country -- hills and pasture, hills and oak forest, etc -- was turned into housing overnight. Initially, there were no curbs, gutters, sewers, or other amenities that would come later. Finishing the neighborhood, to the extent it ever would be finished took years.
The curbing you see in the picture didn't arrive until long after we moved out in 1959. I'm not sure curbs were there in 1969. And I've noticed on Street View that the sections built on street extensions later (in the '60s and '70s) have street lights while the sections built in the '50s do not.
In the picture you see a rusty rural mailbox. That was put in by my mother after a dispute she had with the post office. It was probably 1956 or so. Initially, she'd mounted a fishing creel on the wall beside the front door to collect the mail. One day she got a notice stating that her mail receptacle was not regulation and must be replaced or US Mail would no longer be delivered to that address. If I recall correctly (ha!) there was no indication of what would be acceptable. So I suspect she marched down to the post office (I don't remember where it was) and demanded to see the regulations, and she found that a rural mailbox would be... fine.
She went to the hardware store and bought one with a metal stand. She painted the box with flowers and vines and such, mounted it on the stand and put the whole apparatus in the ground (may have had help from a neighbor) beside the driveway. With a note that said, "Put Mail Here."
Later she found out that a rural mailbox in a suburban neighborhood like ours wasn't regulation either, and she got a British iron letterbox at an antique store and mounted it where the fishing creel had been, and that was where the mail was deposited until we moved. I think she took that British letterbox with her when we moved, but I'm not entirely sure. I seem to remember it turning up in several later houses but it may have been another one.
There's a large tree next to the mailbox in the picture up top. That's an oak (madrone?) that I planted between 1956 and 1958. It was a seedling that sprouted up in the hills beyond the end of the street. I dug it up and carried it down the hill in a can of some sort and planted it in the front yard when I got home. It grew. It's somewhat unusual because oaks don't like being disturbed especially as seedlings. But this one did fine. It was maybe two-three feet tall when we left. Sadly, the oak tree and the mailbox are now gone (a/o 05/22). But they had quite a long run.
Here and there at the front of the house are rose bushes that my mother planted. She had a whole rose garden beside the house, and she planted different varieties in front. Not all of them were still there in 2011, but many were. Most are still there now.
Records say the house was last sold in 1981, and I suppose the current residents have lived there since then, though the house may be a rental. If so, it's pretty shabby, as the paint is obviously peeling and I'm sure there's plenty of wear and tear.
I think this is one of only two houses of this floor plan on this street. There are several others on the next street to the south. It's a curious floor plan in some ways. I realized at some point not too long ago that it is a traditional California Bungalow floorplan probably dating from the '20s or '30s that had been "reversed" -- that is flipped front to back -- and that was actually a selling point back in 1954.
Instead of the living and dining rooms being in the front of the house facing the street, they were in the back. This meant that the big living room window faced the orchard and mountain view to the north, and it was pretty spectacular when we moved in. Unbroken orange groves to the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, then the great bulk of the mountains with perpetually snow-capped Mt. Baldy rearing to the sky.
It was breathtaking. And soon enough, it was no more. The orange groves were ripped out and burned, new houses and an elementary school were built where they had been. The view of the mountains remained but most days you couldn't see the mountains (which rose only about 10 miles away) because of the smog.
Oh, the smog.The San Gabriel Valley seemed to collect all the smog generated in the Los Angeles Basin, especially on days when the winds blew in from the ocean about 35 miles west. Which was most days, except when the Santa Anas blew from the east and fire season began. The only time we got relief was when it rained, clearing the air briefly before the smog or the dust or the smoke from the fires blew in and settled again.
It seemed there was quite a contest between the smog and my lungs. I was out of commission many times because of asthma. I would have attacks kind of randomly, and in those days, there was no treatment, no rescue inhalers, nothing. You just had to live with it. Or not. Some people had asthma much worse than I did, and sometimes attacks were lethal.
It could be tough.
Sometimes I'll see tv shows or movies filmed in Los Angeles during the '50s and '60s and I'll flashback to how smoggy the air was. It's obvious in the films, but I wonder how many people realize what that perpetual murk in the sky was. Sometimes it was so thick, you could barely make out features only a couple of miles or less away.
When I've been back to LA -- which hasn't been often -- since I lived there, even though the air quality is much better overall most of the time, my eyes still smart, and I have occasionally started coughing as if I were about to have an asthma attack.
Body memory? Probably.
But back to the house and its "reversed" bungalow floor plan.
It wasn't a large house by any means, only just over 1000 square feet, not including the 2 car garage.
There were nominally three bedrooms, but we chose to call it two bedrooms and den. One bath, but it was quite large with a separate tub and shower. The sink was in a tile topped cabinet. I think the tile was two-toned pink, but it might have been blue. We've live in so many houses with tiled bathrooms, and sometimes they were pink, sometimes blue, sometimes beige or brown or green. I don't remember for certain which this was, but pink seems right.
The kitchen was galley-style on the side of the house opposite the bedrooms and bath. It was very minimal. There was a single bowl (or was it double?) porcelain sink in a tile-topped cabinet with drawers and shelves under the window that faced west. The tile was, I believe, white with dark green trim (ah-ha! Is this the inspiration for painting the house white with dark green trim?) There were two upper cabinets on either side of the window.
There were hookups for a washing machine but no room for a dryer beyond the sink cabinet. We had a Kenmore automatic washer, and it drained into the sink I think. Pretty primitive. But at least it was an automatic washing machine, something still not common in those days.
On the other side of the kitchen from the sink there was an enclosed cabinet for the water heater, the refrigerator next to it, and a gas stove next to the fridge. There was then a door to the entrance hall and beyond that was barely enough room for a table and chairs. Or perhaps the table and chairs were next to the stove and the door to the entrance hall was at the end of that wall. That was the section where the washer was on the opposite side.
The flooring was linoleum -- the real thing -- which I think was mostly green.
As I recall, there was only one light fixture with a single bulb -- but there could have been two. What I remember was that the room was dreary day or night. Bleak. Spartan. Not like the welcoming, open plan kitchens with stainless appliances, massive islands and granite and pendant lights you see on all the renovation shows! I think the kitchen had to be painted (cream color) after we moved in, too. I can recall the smell of the oil-based enamel (no latex paint in those days). There was a door to the side yard next to the sink cabinet on the opposite end from the washer-space. My mother set up a clothes line in the side yard and hung the wash to dry, as we had no dryer and there wasn't room for one in any case.
Because of the reversed floor plan, the front door was actually at what would have been the back of the house -- the back door to what would have been a screen porch where no doubt the wringer washing machine would have been, and probably the refrigerator/ice box too.
But the back porch was the front porch, and the front door opened into a hallway with the door to the kitchen on one side and a door to the den on the other. After passing by those doors, you entered a living room that was about 12' or 13' by 18'. There was a windowed door to the back yard at the far end of the room. This would have been the front door in the non-reversed floor plan. To the left was a dining alcove, probably 9x9 or so. It's hard to call it a dining room as it was open to the living room and it was rather small. Big enough for a table and four chairs but that was about it. There were windows on two sides. The window facing west was high up, as if one might put a buffet under it, but my memory is that the alcove/room was too small for that. We had a table pushed up against the wall under that window.
The other window faced the back yard.
In a non-reversed floor plan, there would have been a porch across the back -- which would have been the front! -- but our house had only a concrete step at the back door from the living room.
The two bedrooms were at either end of a hallway that was reached from one end of the living room. The bedrooms were fairly large as I recall (but remember I was a kid!). The one where my mother slept perhaps 12x15, and the one where I slept perhaps 12x12.
They had closets which were the kind you see in a lot of '50s houses in Southern California -- sliding door clothes hanging sections in the middle with drawers below and door-front cabinets above. I think these were adapted from Japanese designs probably in the '30s.
In the hallway there was a linen closet on one side of the bathroom door and a coat closet on the other.
There was a floor heater beside the door to the hallway. I don't recall whether there was a door to close off the bedroom wing or not.
Except in the bathroom and kitchen, the floors in the house were oak hardwood. The kitchen floor was linoleum; the bathroom was laid with tile.
The walls were lath and plaster, not plaster board.
I can easily do a walk-thru of this house in my mind. There were others I remember pretty well even when I was very young, and some I have little or no memory of living in.
For example, we lived in a rental house in Baldwin Park I have almost no memory of except that the exterior was blue and the window frames were steel. I have no memory of the interior at all. There was a house on Mill St that I recall the exterior of, but nothing of the interior. I remember a small house built in the Spanish style in the '20s or '30s we lived in when I was two. I can easily visualize the interior and exterior. But there was another house -- a duplex of similar style -- down the street where we lived for a few months after that that I barely recollect and often have confused with the small house a few doors down.
There was also a house in West Covina that we only lived in a couple of months in 1953-54 that I remember very well -- and can do a mental walk through to this day. I even recall the design on the wallpaper. I wish I remembered the address but I don't.
And so it goes.
Moving day was frequent, and when I was kid, I looked forward to it. We lived in this house - the one I started the post with - almost 5 years which was the longest we'd lived anywhere up till then. I actually didn't want to leave, even though I was excited to be moving again, and I really didn't much like the house anyway. These contradictory feelings seemed to intensify over the next few years. We lived in three different houses from 1959 to 1962, the first of which was a brand new rental out in the country east of Sacramento that I loathed in every way imaginable. It was a miserable little place, though spanking new.Then we moved to a nice older house in town, also a rental, that had its own charm but which I felt alienated from. Isn't that a strange thing. A house from which one feels alienated? As if it were a living thing?
Well, we moved to another house -- which I've written about -- the next year, one my mother bought, and it became my home place for a decade or more. Even when I wasn't living there after 1969.
More about the house in the San Gabriel Valley, though. There is a house with the same floor plan at the other end of the street currently (07/22) for sale for something like $750,000. It was purchased in pretty worn out shape for in 2017 for about $250,000; it was renovated and sold for $559,000 in 2019, and is now offered at $728,000 (down from the $748,000 original list price.) The house has an identical floor plan to the house down the street I lived in. I may have known the people who lived here when the house was new as I passed by the house on my bike on the way to and from school. But I don't remember them.
Changes during renovation were not as extensive as they might have been. The most notable change was the replacement of hardwood flooring with ceramic tile throughout the house (something commonplace in Hispanic-American homes.) Also, somehow a second bathroom was squeezed in off one of the bedrooms (in my house down the street, it would have been my bedroom.) Exactly how that was done, I'm not sure. It appears that half the bedroom closet, a hallway coat closet, and the space for the separate shower in the main bathroom were combined into a very small 3/4 ensuite bathroom. There is only a shower in the new one. It appears the tub in the main bathroom was replaced with a shower as well.
The kitchen has been renovated with new cabinets, countertops and appliances making it seem up-to-date, but the layout is essentially the same. There's a tall pantry cabinet where the washer-space was in my house. Laundry facilities may have been moved to the garage. The refrigerator space is on the opposite side of the stove, and it's not clear where the water heater is (perhaps in the garage as well).
Also not clear is where the closet is in the third bedroom, the one we used as a den. There is no door to the entrance hall from the third bedroom but there is one from the kitchen placed beyond the refrigerator space. There appears to be no room for a breakfast table and chairs at that end of the kitchen.
But when I look at the photos of the interior, it's really quite striking that there are so few changes from the look of the house when new, and such changes as there have been are largely to bring the house more up to date and make it more pleasant.
The price differential is shocking, but that's LA. As I recall (ha) the price of the house my mother bought on the GI Bill in 1954 was $6,400, no down payment. I believe the mortgage payment (25 year? 30 year?) was $56. And now these houses are selling for over $600,000 before renovations.
The neighborhood was one of the few non-segregated ones in Los Angeles County. The residents were racially, ethnically varied, and they varied by class too. Most of my neighbors were working class, salt of the earth, yada yada, but some were hoity toity perfessers at Cal Tech and so forth, accountants, health care workers, solid middle class. There were war brides from France and Japan (yes), and there were Mexicans, 'hillbillies', Okies, and Negroes as well. The neighborhood now is almost entirely Hispanic, and for the most part is considered middle class. Most houses are owner-occupied. My understanding is that for a time in the '90s and early 2000s, the area was beset with gangsters and there were numerous shootouts, murders, and much drug trade. That mostly ended by the 2010s, and these days, the neighborhood is one of the quietest and safest in the San Gabriel Valley -- where there are still plenty of drug and other problems.
As I mentioned, I haven't seen this house or neighborhood in person since 1969, and I have no wish to see it again before I die. I have very conflicted memories of living there, and those conflicts will not soon or easily be sorted out. There were aspects of living there I liked, others not so much, and revisiting it -- even vicariously like this -- is emotionally turbulent. When I did a memory tour of California last October, I consciously avoided Los Angeles and the Bay Area altogether and focused most of my attention on rural and Central Coast areas which were important to me and evoked strong and nearly all positive memories. Some places had changed so much they were hardly recognizable. Others were... almost exactly the same as I remembered them. But the fact is, once that tour was done, I had (and have) no urge to return to California. That period of my life is done as well.
So.That's my story. For now anyway.
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