Quote:
Originally Posted by Earl Boebert
http://tmblr.co/ZvK8Dx9Yzvpb
"...colder than a ticket taker's smile at the Ivar Theater..." (Tom Waits)
ca. 1980's, when I spent a lot of time exploring LA after business trips to the Honeywell facility in West Covina. In those days the company would let you fly night first class because it was the same fare as day coach, so after the last meeting I'd meander my way to LAX and the Western red-eye to Minneapolis. It left at 1 AM, and the last flight to Vegas left at midnight from the same terminal. Watching that plane board was better than a trip to the zoo. And no, that's not me in the picture :-)
Cheers,
Earl |
OMG, the Ivar. It was notorious when I lived in Hollywood between the late 70's up till about 1983. Guy got shot dead one night under the canvas marquee and no one called it in until dawn.
There was a gay bar in the back behind the stage, "The Gaslight", reached from the driveway to the right of the theater entrance (the drive was later closed in just leaving a long, narrow hallway). Before that, it was a club, "Bido Lido's", and later "The Sewers of Paris". By the 1990's it was a rock venue (I was a patron by then), "The Opium Den".
The always-legit theater itself was opened in '51, but the great two-level club space was much older. What went on over the years in tiny Cosmo Street, the alley which one could access from the back of the club, was the very definition of noir.