Don't be distracted while on the 210, but work is starting in earnest on that Gold Line extension basket bridge, reports Arcadia'sBest.com. Engineers will likely be milling about Arcadia's Santa Anita and Baldwin Avenues preparing for construction of the "iconic freeway structure," as it's being called. The bridge will cost around $18.5 million dollars and is the first part of the extension--ranked the 5th largest construction project in the county by the Los Angeles Business Journal--being built. "The bridge will be in the exact same spot the previous bridge was before trains stopped running there in the 1990s and it was removed because it did not meet earthquake safety requirements," according to the story. Arcadia'sBest.com also reports the Foothill Extension second phase, to Montclair, is almost done with its environmental reviews, while a proposed extension to Ontario airport will begin an alternative analysis study later this year.
· Bridge Work Begins Over 210 [ArcadiasBest.com]
· AECOM to Design Basket Bridge [Curbed LA]

Road rage incident in another country via Treehugger
Once again, Allstate has ranked Glendale as one of the top three riskiest cities in the country for drivers in terms of traffic collisions, reports the Glendale-News Press, an award which the city won last year. Allstate covers about 11% of all insured drivers in the U.S., so this is a fair snapshot, according to the insurance company. But the Glendale Police Dept calls the news an "incomplete" look at accidents in the city, a point of view which might carry some weight if it weren't for that other News-Press story currently on the web site. With the headline, "Police seek help in identifying road rage attacker," the story asks for the public's help in finding a "motorist who climbed a couple's car during a red light and hit them several times through an open sunroof," an attack that follows another road rage incident in which a "Glendale man was stabbed in the stomach by another motorist who cut him off on the Golden State (5) Freeway near Western Avenue." Good times.
· Nationwide survey of safe driving cities ranks Glendale near bottom [GNP]
· Police seek help in identifying road rage attacker [GNP]
· Glendale Is A Particularly Risky Place to Drive [GNP]

“…I’ll pack up my truck and make my get-away.”

Pedaling on a Sunday morning through that woozy boundary line of The Patch and Carondelet neighborhoods, when the sight above made me hit the brakes. It was the embodiment of an old river city, the poetry of mud and W.C. Handy blues.  The metal chair is now all 5 layers of colors, all decades at once; the past is the present and if you think it won’t see much future, they been sayin’ that since I Like Ike.

The CSB has reams of complaints on this ram-shack-le, plenty claim “Derelicts on Private Property.” In the Great Depression he’d have been out-of-working class – how dare the neighbors cast judgment! …Oh, they were vehicular in nature! Not gonna make a Sanford & Son crack, even though Redd Foxx is a St. Louis native.  Just a couple of Canon shots, hopin’ there’s no slingshot through the metal blinds aiming at my head, and slowly pedal away.

This Venice beach house, renovated by late architect Stephen Kanner, according to the listing, looks somewhat, but not exactly, similar, to that one bedroom Kanner cottage in Venice that was for rent last October. That was a one bedroom with polished concrete floors; this one is a two bedroom, one bathroom with "newly refinished hardwood floors," a restored O'Keefe and Merritt gas range, and a private backyard. Rent is $2,995.
· $2995 / 2br - Canal-adjacent Beach House (Venice) [Craigslist]

Click the image above to view the full photogallery.

According to its listing, this rustic pad in the hilly woods of Woodland Hills was once home to Don van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, the avant garde singer-songwriter and artist whom Lester Bangs called "far more significant and far-reaching than the Beatles." One of about a dozen cabins left from the original tract of 120 built by Woodland Hills founder Victor Girard, the eighty-five-year-old structure has two bedrooms, one-and-a-half baths, a brick fireplace, French doors, and central air and heat. It's listed at $325,000.
· 4295 Ensenada Dr, Woodland Hills, CA 91364 [Redfin]

Banksy (allegedly) in The Sun: "I guess I fancied going somewhere a little bit warmer. So we ended up in Los Angeles and, yer know, it's this really glamorous town that also has this dirty side to it. But... above anything else it's the easiest place in the world to rent an elephant." (Painting that elephant, on the other hand, is frowned upon here in LA.) [The Sun, via FishbowlLA]

The Santa Susana Field Laboratory, home to a Cold War nuclear test site, should be all cleaned up, just 58 years after a partial nuclear meltdown. On Friday the Department of Energy, NASA, and the state signed agreements to, as the AP puts it, "remove all contamination and return the atomic energy and rocket engine test site to its natural state" by 2017. The DOE owns the meltdown-area buildings, NASA owns the rocket test sites, and Boeing, which says it's still reviewing the agreements, owns most of the land. The 1959 partial nuclear meltdown has the fine distinction of being America's first, and the LA Times cites a 2006 study that found "the accident could have resulted in 260 to 1,800 cases of cancer within 62 miles of the site over a 'period of many decades.'" (Boeing disputes the findings of that study.)

But that's not all! The AP reports that after 1959, under the operation of Rocketdyne, "there were other problematic practices and incidents, including two more reactor accidents, use of burn pits with radioactive contaminants, and a rocket-fuel explosion that killed two scientists who were illegally disposing of hazardous waste."

As part of the cleanup, "significant amounts of soil contaminated with carcinogenic dioxins, heavy metals and radioactive materials" will be removed from the site and taken to licensed waste dumps, including one in Utah, according to the LAT. The agreements have to go through a public review before being finalized. Meanwhile, cute donkeys are hard at work assessing the damage.
· Deal to clean up LA-area nuclear accident site [AP]
· Nuclear cleanup at Santa Susana facility would finish by 2017 under settlement [LAT]

Hung Far Low's September 2 re-installation (photo courtesy Dennis Theriault/Portland Mercury) 

When is a decayed building sign from a long-gone Chinese restaurant more than that? Put another way, what inspires people to spend $77,000 in a terrible recession to re-erect an obsolete chop suey sign?

If you're one of the owners of Ping restaurant or a leader with the Portland Development Commission, the decision was much less counter-intuitive that in might seem.

"It’s something more than simply a funny iconic part of tourism," says John Jay, a co-owner of Ping (located at the base of the building previously housing Hung Far Low) and the Executive Creative Director at Weiden + Kennedy ad agency.  "Sometimes we need these icons, these visual symbols to say there is something happening here. That symbol for us is a very much a glue or a magnet that’s attracting future generations and the past."

The Hung Far Low Building was completed in 1917. It was first a millinery factory and shop. While the Chinese were forbidden by law from owning property, it was secretly purchased by one of Chinatown's most influential residents, Wong On. He created the Hung Far Low Restaurant in 1928 and operated on the second floor until its move to SE 82nd Avenue in 2005. The sign was removed during the 2008-09 renovation of the Hung Far Low building, which now houses Ping. Portland citizens rallied to restore the 2000-pound landmark, raising more than $8,600. PDC closed the remaining gap with approximately $45,000 in grant funding.

For years people have enjoyed how the name seems to euphemistically allude to sizable male endowment. It was (and is) a pop cultural icon of Portland, both for the joke and for its role as the primary visual symbol of the city's Old Town/Chinatown neighborhood - even more so than the Chinatown gate on Burnside.

Hung Far Low's September 2 re-installation (photo courtesy Dennis Theriault/Portland Mercury) 

As it happens, Hung Far Low translates as "almond blossom fragrance" in the Chinese dialect of Taisan, which once ruled the streets of Chinatowns in midcentury America but has now been supplanted by Mandarin (and English). 

Yet, the sign's return comes  at a time when many Chinatown restaurants and businesses have moved to 82nd Avenue. Is this an effort to bring back the past or to mythologize it?

"Obviously we would invite any of the families or business to return, but that’s not the sole purpose," says Jay, who partnered in Ping with Kurt Huffman, Andy Ricker and wife Janet Jay. "Our goal is a new vision that is not simply restoring a neighborhood. The world right now is being inspired right now in many ways from contemporary culture coming from Asia. We hope it’s not just a return of Chinatown but an evolution of a neighborhood that speaks to greater Asia."

I've interviewed John Jay numerous times before, including for this 2007 profile for Oregon Business magazine. Although he is often on the road at W+K's offices in Tokyo, Shanghai and New Dehli, Jay is passionate about Portland as a creative capital and the source of youthful outsider energy that the rest of the world is already well enamored with. He's got his hands in numerous different projects, such as Ping, as an adviser to Pacific Northwest College of Art, his curating an art show last year in conjunction with the Portland Art Museum's "China Design Now", and his efforts to bring Asian market Uwajimaya to Old Town/Chinatown. Jay also comes from humble origins in Columbus, Ohio at a time when Chinese culture and cuisine was a point of entry to millions of Americans to Asia. It was very important in restoring the Hung Far Low sign, for example, that the original phrase "chop suey" be restored, because that dish was a staple of 1950s and '60s Chinese-American cuisine.

Ping partners Kurt Huffman, Andy Ricker, John Jay and Janet Jay (photo courtesy Lee Emmert/The Oregonian)

"I grew up in a Chinese laundry with immigrant parents," Jay adds. "There is a certain energy and magnetism that sign causes us to have warm feelings about. I think today Chinatowns all over America are very diverse. They have Thai and Vietnamese restaurants. The sign is a bridge. I always say...i just spoke to graduating seniors of Chinese descent from Portland high schools. It sounds a bit cliché, but I told them to remember the shoulders you’re standing on."

When I heard that PDC committed $45,000 to the sign's restoration, part of me felt skeptical. In this kind of terrible economy, couldn't that money have gone to something more (if you'll pardon the pun) constructive? At the same time, when one sees the sign back in its place, which it has been since its return on September 2 with an outdoor celebration (including Hung Far Low owner Bruce Wong and his family), it's hard to feel anything but glad to see it's back. I think it's true that sometimes a sign is more than a sign, just like aging architecture is worth something more than the sum of its square footage and land value. Surely some will shake their heads at spending $77,000 to restore the sign from a restaurant that is no longer there and say it's another case of Quirky Portland. But if celebrating local symbols that combine pop cultural and world cultural history is wrong, let's not race to be right.