In this newsletter:

• Feature: The Red Lion: where the most popular dish is the sausage platter
• A base price of $1,500 for LA’s first World Cup game
  
• The Altadena bear under the house. You’ve seen him. He’s still there.
  
• Frank Gehry’s legacy beautifully told by his friend, KCRW’s favorite architecture journalist, Frances Anderton
• West Hollywood’s annual poetry hotline is up and ready for your call

Red Lion's Evolution, From Dirndls to 'Dick Soup'
By Brandon R. Reynolds

From the jump, I identified LA not with the palm-trees-and-beaches mythos of a million years of television and movies, but with a whole other thing: old-world German kitsch. That’s because when I first got here, I lived in Silverlake, near the Red Lion Tavern, where the waitresses wear dirndls, the beer is served in glass footwear, and the sausages have long and intimidating names. Nothing says “Los Angeles” like Käsekrainer!

Not Käsekrainer, but "Dick Soup" (ok, technically split pea)

Sixty-plus years ago, the Red Lion was a place for German ex-pats to go and soak up the vibes from back home. Except the Red Lion, like so much else in LA, was a fantasy. Homecoming for an imaginary home. Like a corner of Disneyland where all the rides were “getting drunk and eating meat.”

As some of the long-time German-born waitresses told me, nobody actually wore lederhosen and so forth back home. “In Hamburg, we don't wear that,” says Elke Christopher, a 30-year veteran of the tavern. When management handed her a dirndl, “in the beginning, I said, ‘No, please, no!’ But now I don't mind anymore.”

The problem was, you know, Nazis. “With the Nazi past, my generation especially, we were raised to not really have national pride at all,” says Silvia Moore, another German-born waitress, who’s been at Red Lion since 2000.
 

Silvia Moore poses behind the bar with German kitsch. 

Despite all the Germanic oompah, ask Assistant General Manager Sarah Green about the place, and you get some very LA stories. Like the one about the time “a lady brought her pet hog, and she let it off the leash, and it got loose … and we had an employee chasing it, and it was during Christmas, and their tree was up….” Or, “you could see the 80-year-old pirate guy that plays a harmonica sitting at the bar eating brunch ….” Or, “we just took out the jacuzzi recently, it was kind of the upstairs afterparty, with bartenders and the customers and all kinds of weird shit happened … and there was a trampoline….”

Red Lion's assistant general manager, Sarah Green, at the patio bar. Not pictured: the trampoline on the roof.

European-themed bars are nothing new, of course. But what’s interesting about the Red Lion is how it’s evolved. 

Some of the veterans still wear the dirndl while hugging steins of Bitburger, while the younger waiters sling beer while wearing tees and Red Lion merch. The crowd, too, is younger and hipper, and if they’re confused by the Heino impersonator who sings German pop songs, well, it’s all part of the bizarro stew of styles and aesthetics that makes LA… LA. 

Six decades in, the Red Lion Tavern isn’t entirely a Bavarian-forest fantasy nor a hipster dive. It’s neither here nor there. It’s more like the kind of sweaty dream you have after a long night of entirely too much meat. 

In The Neighborhood

• The World Cup will kick off in just six months — with eight of the games right here in SoFi Stadium. Soccer fans are excited… but also grumbling about the prices and worried about intensified immigration enforcement that might be in store. Fifteen hundred dollars for nosebleed seats, with very few tickets at special locals-only prices? “An atrocity,” one fan told KCRW contributor Kerstin Zilm, but another declared, “Even if I’m wasting all of my savings on it, I will be there.”
• When celebrated architect Frank Gehry passed, it was international news. At KCRW, it was personal, too. Architecture journalist and longtime KCRW personality Frances Anderton credits Gehry with partially inspiring her move to LA, where she soon found herself living in an apartment building Gehry designed, now her home for more than 30 years. Anderton wove selections from years of interviews with her friend into an audio piece that describes his legacy, in a beautiful essay you can hear or read here.
• KCRW’s Madeleine Brand called up Ken J. Johnson, who’s become a bit of a local celebrity since a 550-pound black bear crawled under his Altadena home and resisted all attempts to lure or annoy him out. “Every time I hear a noise or a creak, I’m thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, is that the bear? What’s it going to destroy next?’” Johnson said.
  
• West Hollywood has its own Poet Laureate, and she’s here for you this holiday season. Callers to the poetry hotline will hear live readings from a curated list of poems, or they can request a custom poem written by professional poets. “There's something really beautiful about this short form that's like a little snack,” poet Jen Cheng told Morning Edition host Danielle Chiriguayo. “Sometimes you don't have time for a big feast, and you just need a little bit of comfort or empathy or compassion to feel like you're not alone. That's where poetry is really helpful.”
 

Local Meme of the Week

KCRW's Local Letterbox

• 5 Things to Do This Week — Wander holiday landscapes, gift shop, and enjoy some seasonal sugar and booze. 

• Art Insider with Carolina Miranda — An analysis of the Robert Therrien retrospective at the Broad Museum.
  

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