Dear DnA Readers,

I hope you’re doing well. Skip this intro to get to the fun stuff (like a new museum about Venice, above), or stay with me for a reflection… on aging.

And no, I’m not talking about the present and former occupants of the White House. I’m thinking of Los Angeles. The onetime “city of tomorrow,” famed the world over for its lithe bodies, youth culture, and constant influx of 20-somethings seeking opportunity, is fast becoming a gerontocracy. As recently reported in the LA Times, the median age of Angelenos is heading up, and the young are heading for the exits, mainly due to housing costs. 

Have the Golden Oldies pushed out The Young and the Restless?* There have been all kinds of policies and strategies designed over recent decades to maintain or create affordable housing in Los Angeles, but very few are targeted directly at providing reasonably priced homes for working families today. If anything, perhaps inadvertently, the tools have achieved the opposite. For example, Proposition 13 — “the Devil,” according to a developer I spoke to for this story — has enabled empty nesters to age in large houses thanks to their depressed property tax rates, limiting the supply of houses for young families that need the space. Rent control locked in low rents for now elderly people, while young adults pay astronomical market rates for apartments that, incidentally, are rarely sized for families. Downzoning and slow growth measures arguably reduced the supply of housing for the next generation. Subsidized “affordable” housing is available to a small percentage of households that meet a low-income threshold, but rarely for the "missing middle." Many young couples seek homeownership, but the less costly option — a condo — has been stymied by defect lawsuits and other constraints. The list goes on.

This picture is a far cry from American towns, including Los Angeles, in their early days, when immigrants built themselves modest houses, which they then adapted and expanded to accommodate extended families, boarders, and small businesses. The result was ad-hoc and affordable urban housing, according to Max Podemski, author of A Paradise of Small Houses: The Evolution, Devolution, and Potential Rebirth of Urban Housing. He writes about the rowhouses, tenements, worker's cottages (below), and more, that made for perfectly good, if modestly sized, homes for millions of people young and old, until reformist and segregationist housing policies destroyed them via the spread of suburban, single-family homes and city center “urban renewal.”

This Wednesday, I will talk with Max about his book at the Village Well in Culver City, and will ask, what can LA do to bring back that model of housing? See details below.

After all, as the demographer Dowell Myers told the LA Times reporter Terry Castleman, "When other states take young people from California, “they steal the future of the economy ... It begins to degrade the quality of life for everybody else.” Including seniors. As voters reflect on the sensitivities around taking the proverbial car keys, er, nuclear codes, away from Grandpa, we would do well to ask ourselves if Angelenos care about passing on the torch.

*Thanks for this snappy line goes to hubby Robin Bennett Stein, who actually had a bit part in that soap opera, when he was young and restless!

Chicago's worker's cottages. Image courtesy Chicago Workers Cottage Initiative.

Design Things To Do

Innovation in Stained Glass
Book Club of California talk with David Judson
Wednesday, July 10th, 5:30 PM—7:00 PM
The Blinn House, 160 N Oakland Ave, Pasadena, CA 91101

If you’ve never visited the historic Blinn House in Pasadena, home of Pasadena Heritage, Wednesday is the chance to do so, and while there you can learn all about the art of stained glass at Judson Studios, the oldest family-owned stained glass company in the USA.

The Book Club of California will host a book talk at the house with David Judson, president of Judson Studios and co-author of Judson: Innovation in Stained Glass!. The house, designed in 1905 by architect George Washington Maher, is noted for such details as its “broken arch” patterns, its Wisteria Vines patterned glass, and its sumptuous handcrafted glass tile fireplace.

Reception begins at 5:30 PM with light refreshments!

Click here to register.

Broken arches are a repeated theme in the historic Blinn House. Image courtesy Pasadena Heritage.

What Happened to the "Paradise of Small Houses?”
A Conversation with Max Podemski
Wednesday, July 10th, 7:00 PM–8:00 PM
Village Well Books & Coffee, 9900 Culver Blvd. #1B, Culver City, CA 90232

Nearly every American city is struggling to provide what’s called "missing middle" housing — affordable, comfortable housing for working people that used to be a staple of cities, such as the rowhouses of Philadelphia or dingbats in Los Angeles (below). Max Podemski, an urban planner, has explored the history — and future — of this kind of urban housing in his new book, A Paradise of Small Houses: The Evolution, Devolution, and Potential Rebirth of Urban Housing.

This Wednesday, I’ll sit down with Max for a conversation about his book, and find out his diagnosis for how the Los Angeles region can solve its workforce housing crisis.

The event is hosted by Westside Urban Forum. Click here for details.

Joan Quinn is On the Edge  
Laguna Art Museum
Through September 2nd, 2024
Art Workshop: Joan Quinn Portrait Exploration
Saturday, July 13th, 1:00 PM

It is intriguing to see the same person painted by different artists, as happened to Joan Agajanian Quinn, onetime West Coast editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, and longtime champion of the LA art scene.

Now nearing her tenth decade, Quinn has opened her private collection of artworks by friends including Lita Albuquerque, Andy Warhol, and Ed Ruscha. See them at On the Edge: Los Angeles Art from the Joan and Jack Quinn Family Collection, at Laguna Art Museum, along with 42 portraits of Quinn as well as her late husband Jack and her twin daughters (below). On July 13th, you can add to that number by joining artist Yolanda Gonzalez for a pencil and watercolor portrait painting class at the museum, with Joan Quinn as the model! 

Click here to purchase tickets for the class. Learn more about the exhibition, here.

Detail from The Quinns, 1995; Richard Bernstein; Silkscreen, pencil, pastel and acrylic on canvas, 60x30 in. Photo by Frances Anderton.

Artists Take on LA: Ed Ruscha, Judy Baca, and Vincent Valdez
Tuesday, July 16th, 7:00 PM–8:30 PM
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, 6067 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA, 90036

Los Angeles, in all its hubris, sunshine, and noir, is a source of endless fascination for artists and writers. Three who have drawn inspiration from the cityscape, as well as helped shape people's perception of it, will come together next Tuesday: Ed Ruscha, Judy Baca, and Vincent Valdez.

Ed Ruscha is currently the subject of ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, a large retrospective at the museum; Judy Baca and artists from the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) have been painting a continuation of her vast mural, Great Wall of Los Angeles, in a gallery space at LACMA; and Vincent Valdez depicted the story of the forced removal of the Mexican American community in Chavez Ravine in his oil painting on the Good Humor ice cream truck.

Michael Govan will lead a discussion with the three following a screening of Ruscha’s short film Elysian Park and the Stone Quarry Hill.

Click here for tickets.

Note: Judy Baca will conclude her in-gallery painting on Sunday, July 21st.

Judy Baca painting The Great Wall of Los Angeles, summer of 1983, photo courtesy of the SPARC Archives (SPARCinLA.org)/LACMA.org.

The Making of a Design District
Discussion hosted by Studio One Eleven/The Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at CSULB
Thursday, July 18th, 5:30 PM–7:30 PM
Studio One Eleven, Downtown Long Beach, 245 E. Third Street, Long Beach, CA 90802

Do you live or work in a neighborhood with a growing number of design-related businesses and wonder if it could become a “district?” — like La Cienega Design Quarter, Helms Bakery District, or Design Core Detroit? 

One community that’s pondering this is a group of designers and architects in Long Beach. On Thursday, July 18th, the DTLB architecture firm Studio One Eleven and The Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at CSULB will host a conversation about “what constitutes a design district, the motivations behind their establishment, and their journeys to success.”

Sinead Finnerty-Pyne, Director of Marketing at Studio One Eleven, will lead the conversation with Kiana Wenzell, Co-Executive Director at Design Core Detroit, and Angela Anthony, Brand Ambassador at Helms Bakery District in Culver City.    

To attend this free event, RSVP here.

Studio One Eleven, Long Beach.

This Is Some Place
Local Photographers Speaker Series #1: Josh “Bagel” Klassman & Marilyn Ramirez
Venice Heritage Museum
228 Main Street, #5, Venice 90291
Speaker Series #1: Sunday, July 21st, 4:00 pm; Exhibition is open through Fall 2024

Ever since Abbot Kinney came up with an outsize scheme of creating La Serenissima on the Pacific shores, Venice, California, has captured and stoked the imagination.

Now an institution has appeared to enshrine this place of dreams; Venice Heritage Museum opened earlier this year on Main Street in Venice, with an inaugural show, This is some place., an exhibition of photographs, video, and printed ephemera “that spans from Opening Day in 1905 through to the origins of Venice’s counterculture and onward to questions of the community’s future.” These are questions worth asking since Venice’s counterculture character has been subsumed in tech companies, AirBnBs, and multi-million dollar homes alongside encampments of the unhoused.

The show features artistic and photographic contributions from Charles Brittin, Rod Bradley, Henry Diltz, Shanna Jones, Josh “Bagel” Klassman, Janet Kusnick, Earl Newman, Stuart Perkoff, Marilyn Ramirez, David Scott, eco-futuristic architect Glen Small, Frank Talbott, Emily Winters, and, shown top of this newsletter, The Colorful History of Venice, a drawing by Emily Winters & S.E. Mendelson for the 1978 California Coloring Book, enlarged to wall size and drawn on by visitors.

On Sunday, July 21st, the museum's curator, Anthony Carfello, will launch a Local Photographers Speaker Series, starting with Josh “Bagel” Klassman, who captured Venice’s skate culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s; and Marilyn Ramirez, interpreter of Venice today.

Click here for details.

What I'm Digging

Hot Jesus! 

How can one resist? Of course I clicked on this story about the “ripped beyond belief” depictions of Jesus now racing around the internet. “The son of God, as rendered by modern artificial intelligence, is chiseled and has startlingly good hair,” writes author Caroline Mimbs Nyce, explaining that there is a general “drift towards hotness” in generative-AI, but that it is excessive in Jesus imagery. What's new? When I mentioned this trend to a friend (raised Catholic) she pointed out that Jesus was hot long before AI, which may have helped attract adherents over the centuries. Just think about the ripped abs and muscled arms in Michelangelo’s Risen Christ or Jesus’s wavy locks in Raphael’s Last Supper or the telegenic Jim Caviezel in Mel Gibson's 2004 The Passion of the Christ. So much for saintly inner beauty!

This AI depiction on Facebook of a "ripped" Jesus in the boxing ring got more than 600,000 likes.