Maybe I am a peeping tom

Alice and Trish and I went out tonight to celebrate Black Monday, as Trish decided to call it.  Valentine's Day sucks and it sucks more since Jim decided he wanted "time apart" over the Thanksgiving break and it really sucks since I figured out "time apart" meant "shag the redhead from his undergraduate lecture class often and loudly."

But, that stories been told many times on my personal blog.  And Twitter.  And Facebook.

So the three of us went out to dinner (packed and loud) and then out for drinks at some place on Sunset (more packed and louder).  One of those pick up bars Alice is always trying to get us to go to.  We got a table, let a few guys buys us drinks, and made stupid small talk until they left.

When the waitress came back with our second round I started staring at her.  She had bright blue hair.  Somewhere between electric blue and flourescent blue.  Her eyebrows, too.  Tattoos on the arms poking out from under her sleeves.  She kind of pulled it off, the whole punk-tramp-sexy thing.  She looked really familiar and I couldn't figure out why.

Anyway, she gave me this look and then I realized I was staring a lot so I apologized and said she looked familar.  Which sounded even worse.  She gave me this little wink and after she left Alice and Trish accused me of switching sides and we all laughed.  I looked at her a couple times across the bar and then i knew where I knew her from.

She lives in the Kavach Building!  I've seen her on the street there once or twice.  i think I even saw her in an upstairs window once (she lives right above the left shield, I'm pretty sure).  God, what if she recognized me as the weird girl outside who's always taking pictures?  She might think I'm stalking her or something.  I kind of hid my face for the rest of the night whenever she came to our table.  

I thought about taking a picture of her for here with my phone but the light sucked and I don't have a flash.  And then I felt kind of creeper-stalkery again.  Why do I need a picture of her just because she lives in a building I'm obsessed with.

God, Valentine's Day sucks.

Building Plans

This is kind of old news to me and I had it all written out on two of the other blogs.  But they're gone now and I haven't written anything here in a while, so i thought I'd put up this little tidbit again.  This was one of the first things that really got me looking at the Kavach Building.

You can go to the Department of Public Works and see the blueprints for any building in your city.  Just like you always see in the movies and on television shows when people go get the blueprints for a skyscraper or a bank they're going to break into.  I do it all the time for class stuff or general research.  They know me down there and they like me and try to help me out.  Having boobs is definitley a plus.

Plans for houses and residences don't stay around for long, but major buildings like hotels, restaurants, and other businesses are kept on file indefinitely.  If the building still exists, Public Works keeps the plans on file.  Even indefinitely only means so long for the government, though.  After 75 to 80 years, a lot of older building plans get moved to files at local museums.  I've never been clear how they decide what goes where.

About two months after I first saw the Kavach Building I was down at Public Works checking some specs on the Bradbury Building (which is my favorite building in Los Angeles that I don't keep an obsessive blog about).  I thought about looking at the Kavach plans and figured I could learn who the architect was and maybe some clues about the design.  So I asked Nick if I could see them and gave him the address. Nick is the guy I usually deal with there.  He's a few years older than me and fashionably bald.

Five minutes later Nick came back looking kind of freaked out.  He said he couldn't show me the plans.  When i asked why, he said he couldn't say but I shouldn't ask to see them again.  I remember what he said next.  "Don't worry, I covered for you.  You won't get in any trouble."  He was really close-mouthed about it and all my best begging and nagging and flirting couldn't get anything else out of him.  It seemed to freak him out a little more, honestly.

The next time I went to Public Works was seven weeks later.  Nick was gone.  The new woman told me he'd been promoted and was upstairs somewhere now.

I never saw him again.

Some photos of the building

Needed a break from this model I'm building for Arch 533 and I figured I'd put a few more up.  These are from April of last year.  I used to have tons of photos until my old hard drive crashed.  I think Jim, jerk that he is, probably downloaded something at and I got a virus.  I wouldn't even have these except they were still on my phone.

I love this shot.  The roundtop windows were one of the first things
I ever notices about this building.  They're only in the two front apartments.

The Kavach Building, seen here hiding in its natural habitat

A view of the back of building as seen from a carnitas place on Beverly

Still hoping someone might recognize this place and be able to tell me something about it.  Barring that, maybe someone out there really wants to finish building a foamcore model of a school.  At this point I'm willing to offer food, booze, or my body as an incentive.  But you only get one.

Old Los Angeles

I'd apologize for not putting anything up here, but I'm pretty sure I'm the only one reading this.  There've only been a dozen hits since New Years, and I think half of them were me looking to see if anyone'd left a message for me.

New cool thing about the mysterious Kavach Building though.  I was looking at the Library of Congress site and found this gigantic"bird's eye view" map of 1909 Los Angeles.  It's right here.  You click on the small map on the right and it shows you close up on the left. You can zoom in and see all the individual buildings.  Its like a pre-computer Google Earth.

Anyway, the Kavach Building is on the map!  You've got to follow the streets around (which can take forever because half of them aren't named and the page loads slow) but I worked my way out from downtown and found it.  The street isn't even named yet (I'm pretty sure it was just a dirt road then), but the building had already been there for fifteen years.  When they built it it must've been way, way out on the edge of the city.  Thats both weird and cool at the same time.

As always, the red square is from me