A Proposal: The Johnies 99 Cents Only Diner

(Flickr pic by Usonian.)

Our recent post on the film “Miracle Mile” got me to thinking more about the Johnie’s site at the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax (where a chunk of the movie was set).

Johnie’s — one of the best surviving examples of Googie architecture in L.A. proper — hasn’t operated as a diner since the start of the decade. But it’s still a well-known Wilshire landmark, and remains popular for film shoots. The 99 Cents Only company owns the site (and currently uses Johnie’s parking lot for that 99 Cents Only store location next door, which is rumored to be the company’s highest grossing outlet).

So here’s an idea: Why not turn reopen Johnie’s with a theme — Make it the 99 Cents Only diner.

Keep the sign and the architecture, obviously (although the building is in dire need of repairs, having been neglected for the past 8 years). Maybe hire the 99 Cent Chef to put together the menu, or dig into the 99 Cents Only cookbook. Perhaps open the restaurant for a limited period to test the concept.

Probably not a good idea to open a restaurant right now.. but hey, given where the economy’s going, perhaps a Johnie’s 99 Cents Only eatery would be a hit.

Variety Lights Up

I took a momentary break from my all-Jay-Leno-all-the-time coverage to join in the Wednesday night festivities formally welcoming Variety to its new 5900 Wilshire home.

City Councilman Tom LaBonge said a few words — and handed a loaf of pumpkin bread from Hollywood’s Monastery of the Angels (it’s famously LaBonge’s calling card) to 5900 Wilshire developer Wayne Ratkovich.

Ratkovich spent $34 million renovating the skyscraper, which as of last night now features a fully-lit Variety logo on the top, facing north and south.

Also attending the sign lighting: L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart and Variety publisher Neil Stiles.

Variety has more here. The building, meanwhile, noted a few facts about the sign:

Size of the Variety Sign: Overall layout is 11.6 ft. x 44.2 ft. with the ‘V’ being 11.6 ft. and the remaining letters at approx 8 ft. in height.

Weighing the Variety Sign Letters: The ‘V’ is the heaviest letter at approximately 300 lbs, not including the ‘V’ swoosh that was fabricated in sections and assembled on the building. Letters were kept as light as possible using all aluminum construction and no steel framing. Also, LED lights were used to illuminate the sign, which is much lighter than neon components.

Hanging the Variety Sign: It took three crew workers two weeks to haul the fourteen sign letters for the north and south side signs to the top of the 31-story tower, install them and complete wiring and test illumination.

Lighting the Variety Sign: Signs are illuminated with red mini LEDs from SloanLED, Inc. Each set of letters utilizes approximately 1400 LEDs and 15 power 60 watt power supplies, or about 900watts (7.5 amps at 120v). In comparison, neon illumination would have required approximately eight and a half times the power or about 64-70 amps. LEDs are also more energy efficient than neon lighting.

The building had previously sported a sign for People’s Bank on the west and east sides; those letters came down a year or so ago.

The Variety Tower Sign Goes Up

They’re prepping the new sign touting Variety at 5900 Wilshire Blvd., the skyscraper across the street from LACMA. Soon to be named “The Variety Tower,” here are a few shots (taken by my colleague, Kirsten Wilder) of the letters being installed.

The tower’s naming rights were formerly held by People’s Bank, which was pasted atop the building for several years. 5900 Wilshire, where Variety moves in at the end of the month, has been undergoing a major $34 million rehab over the past few years. The relocation of Variety resulted from developer The Ratkovich Company’s interest in attracting a marquee tenant.

The red Variety lettering will appear on the building’s north and south sides.

Meanwhile, Variety legend Army Archerd — who’s been with the publication more than 55 years — recounted the newspaper’s homes through the years:

I started April 24, 1953 in Variety’s Hollywood office at 6311 Yucca Street. It was Variety’s second Hollywood site, having launched on Vine Street in 1933. In those days the office was filled with the sound of crackling typewriters, rude telephone rings with loud conversations to match. Carol Burnett’s mother Louise worked the switchboard. “I visited her to see her plug in the calls,” Carol recalls. “She told me about you. I was at UCLA majoring in theater and working as an usher at the Warner Brothers theater on Wilcox”–from which she was fired for refusing to seat a customer on the final minutes of Hitchcock’s “Stranger On A Train.”

“The manager ripped my epaulettes off my shoulder,” Carol now laughs. The theater’s since demolisher but Carol has one of its doors in her Montecito home’s media room.”

In The ’50s, Variety’s office air was filled with cigarette smoke–some of it mine–and that of vet TV/radio editor Jack Hellman’s cigar–when he wasn’t long-lunching at the nearby Brown Derby on Vine Street. There was no air conditioning in that first office, and during one blistering heat wave I daringly wore shorts (and a tie, of course) to the office. Editor Joe Schoenfeld was not amused.

Variety then moved to offices on the second floor of the Gang, Kopp, and Tyre bui0lding on 6404 Sunset where young attorney Bruce Ramer was soon to become a partner as they moved to Beverly Hills as Gang, Tyre, Ramer and Brown. We moved down the street to 1400 North Cahuenga in a building which formerly housed the Alan Gordon camera company. We were still close enough to Vine Street where many staffers enjoyed (lengthy) lunch interviews. We expanded and this time moved up to the new Wilshire Courtyard.

Daily Variety just celebrated its 75th anniversary in Hollywood; the Variety mothership is now 103 years old.

Have A Kid, Get Into LACMA For Free

One of the best deals in town — if you have a kid — is easily LACMA’s NextGen program. LACMA offers free youth membership to anyone 17 and under — and NextGen members not only get free admission to the museum’s permanent collection gallers, but so does an adult guest.

On Saturday, as Maria got her hair cut nearby, I took Evan to the museum. We parked a block south on 8th (didn’t want to deal with the parking situation) and headed to LACMA — although, at least on Saturday, we only had time to hit the Boone’s Children’s Gallery at LACMA West.

The ongoing exhibit at the Boone is “Construct,” which continues through October. The site explains:

Be your own architect! Work at drafting tables to draw floor plans, build a model using a variety of materials, and display your buildings and designs in the Construct gallery. Or work in creative teams to build cities and structures using wood blocks.

Be inspired by the plans, drawings, and models that architect Renzo Piano developed as he went through the design process for LACMA’s Transformation Project.

Below, projects from pint-sized architects have started to populate a mini-city.

Other pics:

Above, more crafts as made by kids. The gallery provides the materials.

Painting area — smocks provided.

LACMA is indeed cool. Not a bad way to spend the afternoon with the Kid Formerly Known As Blogger Toddler.

Janitors Looking For A Living Wage

The Screen Actors Guild may be hitting the picket lines this summer… but today, it was someone else doing the picketing outside SAG’s Miracle Mile headquarters.

About 20 people are picketing this afternoon outside 5757 Wilshire, home to SAG/AFTRA, to protest the treatment of janitors in L.A. county’s high-rise office buildings (including that one). Picketers are taking turns on the bullhorn, shouting “Justice for Janitors” in English and Spanish.

The picket is part of SEIU’s Justice for Janitors California Contract Campaign 2008, which it says is “the union’s largest statewide mobilization effort ever.” From the union’s handout:

Los Angeles County’s high-rise office buildings, owned by commercial real estate giants such as Douglas-Emmett, GE/Arden, Irvine Company, Kilroy Realty and others, depend on hard-working janitors to stay clean and open for business. However, janitors earn wages so low that many cannot afford adequate housing for their families. Some are forced to make impossible decisions between paying the rent or taking their child to the doctor.

At least two of the picketers Thursday were wearing Screen Actors Guild t-shirts.

Contract negotiations continue; on March 28, more than 1,500 janitors and their supporters demonstrated along Wilshire Blvd.

You probably remember the 2000 janitors’ strike in Los Angeles, generally considered one of the most successful in recent history.

KFWB Broadcast Tower? CBS Broadcast Center? Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off

They’re located 10 steps from each other, but to hear newsradio outfits KFWB and KNX give their weather reports, you’d think they were in completely different complexes.

When it comes time to give the temp, I heard one KFWB anchor say, “It’s (blank) degrees at the KFWB Broadcast Tower.” KNX, on the other hand, has its anchors say, “It’s (blank) degrees at the CBS Broadcast Center.”

Both are totally made-up names, so I guess it doesn’t matter. The truth is, both are located in the Wilshire skyscraper right next door to Variety (where E! Entertainment Television once resided, before joining Variety in the Wilshire Courtyard complex).

But I love that KFWB goes beyond exaggeration (not only are many CBS radio stations in the tower, but CBS Radio is just one of many, many tenants in the tower) while KNX is a bit more modest.

Yet Another Wilshire Building Turns to Dust

Demolition has begun (above) on the 1949 Mullen and Bluett building located on the Miracle Mile — just the latest in a string of recent Wilshire losses (not as heartbreaking, of course, as the loss of the Ambassador Hotel, or even Perino’s. But every loss stings).

We’ve written several times about the debate over whether the building should be saved, most recently last year. The Mullen and Bluett building has been empty since May 28, 2005, when the last tenant moved out. Until recently, Office Depot and Sav-on Drugs took up most of the building.

Above, the Mullen and Bluett building in its prime. The structure, originally home to the men’s clothing shop, is believed to have been designed by Stiles Clements, who was also behind the famed Wiltern Theatre, as well as several classic Los Angeles buildings that are sadly long gone: The Miracle Mile’s Coulter’s Department Store, built in 1938 and razed in 1980 (and still just a pit today); the 1929 Richfield Building downtown, razed in 1969; and the 1936 KFI studios, torn down by the LAUSD in 2003.

But as the Los Angeles Times noted in 2003, there’s some debate over whether Clements actually designed the Mullen and Bluett building. Legacy Partners, which is developing the land, aggressively pursued that theory in order to silence preservationists:

One side says the sprawling two-story building is a historic gem of a Miracle Mile department store that today is one of the last remaining examples of mid-century "California design" by acclaimed Los Angeles architect Stiles Clements.

The other asserts that the building was never a department store, that it suffers from humdrum architecture that is out of character with rest of the famed retail boulevard — and that it probably wasn't even designed by Stiles Clements at all.

It's an odd dispute, because many of Clements' certified architectural landmarks have been unceremoniously torn down in the past with people scarcely batting an eye...

Preservationist Eric Lynxwiler was doing research a few months ago for a planned book on Wilshire Boulevard for writer Kevin Roderick, author of "The San Fernando Valley: America's Suburb," when he learned that the boulevard's Mullen & Bluett building was next on the hit list.

Irvine-based Legacy Partners had filed plans with the city to demolish the building and a smaller structure next door. The development firm proposed building 197 apartment units and ground-level retail storefronts on Wilshire between Burnside Avenue and Ridgeley.

"The design of Mullen & Bluett is amazing. It's a style that is just now being appreciated. It's a 1949 structure that looks like it's from the '70s," Lynxwiler said.

With a brick facade balanced by first-floor flagstone, the store featured men's furnishings on the first floor and a women's section on the second. "This was the first architectural style after World War II, a 'late Moderne.' This is what led to the '50s and '60s modern that everybody's familiar with," he said.

Lynxwiler hurriedly organized other preservationists in a campaign to persuade Legacy Partners to preserve the Mullen & Bluett building — now occupied by an Office Depot and a Sav-On Drugs. He urged that the apartments be designed in a style that complements Clements' structure and be built behind the retail structure...

Legacy Partners responded by hiring Los Angeles Art Deco architecture expert Mitzi March Mogul to evaluate the Miracle Mile building. Her findings, filed two weeks ago, caused jaws to drop.

"Although Clements may have designed some excellent buildings, [this] building is not one of these. It's demolition will not damage Clements' oeuvre," the report concluded.

The building was never a department store, it was only a men's clothing store, Mogul reported. Its architectural style exhibits "no particular design identity" and doesn't really fit in with the overall Art Deco-look of the Miracle Mile area.

Mogul questioned whether Clements even designed the 1949 structure.

"The building does not appear representative of Clements' personal style and appears more likely the work of a younger person, schooled in a different attitude toward ornamentation. The building may not have been executed by Clements, but only approved by him."

If Clements did design it, the building may "have been just a bread and butter commission" for "an architect near the end of his career" at age 64, she said.

Here’s the design of the building that will take its place. Lynxwiler refers to buildings similar to this as “fake art deco” — a style that appears to be growing on Wilshire, particularly the Miracle Mile.