Ghosts of Los Angeles I

History’s randomness is what haunts; the way two unrelated stories immersed in shadow and question marks collide in some tangible way, totally unexpectedly, thrusting pathos upon the ordinary and the mundane, somehow leaving you with no answers even after the curtains of shadows are opened, often only momentarily, affording a glance of something you thought you’d never see.

More and more I feel like Los Angeles is America’s great undiscovered city. The conventional wisdom is that there’s no there there (Gertrude Stein’s famous quote, often erroneously attributed to Los Angeles, when in fact she was referring to her hometown of Oakland), a state of mind prevalent among even those who grew up there. Yet, the city’s shadowy history is enough to suck in thousands who have a hard time explaining – even coming to grips with – its relentless pull. Bunker Hill. Skid Row. The Black Dahlia. Ed Wood, Jr. The Manson murders. George Reeves. Film Noir. Robert Kennedy. Richard Ramirez. Even East Hollywood and Charles Bukowski.

At 5533 Hollywood Boulevard stands the Gershwin Hotel, formerly the St. Francis Hotel, built in 1926 near Western Ave. It’s the kind of pre-Depression throwback that adds so much character to a city –bricks, outdoor fire escapes, arched doorways, old windows. A prime candidate – if there ever was one in this city that cares so little for its history that you get the feeling it actually hates it – for the wrecking ball. I’ve snapped many a photo of it myself for no other reason than it’s a great old building, and I worry on every trip to L.A. that it may not be there the next time I come back.

The hotel, however, boasts a couple of celebrity guests. Although this hasn’t been verified, a woman working at the Gershwin in 2003 told author Matt Dukes Jordan that Bukowski stayed there a couple of times while he still lived in East Hollywood.

What has been verified is the presence of James Earl Ray, who arrived in Los Angeles in his white Mustang on November 19^th, 1967, with a spare tire full of Mexican cannabis and dreams of producing pornography. In less than five months, the spectre-like Ray would assassinate Martin Luther King, Jr. from the bathroom window of a Memphis flophouse, but in late ’67, the 40 year-old southern racist was a character straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel: an awkward, angry, hypochondriac speed-freak who had spent as much time in jail as in the real world, comfortable only with prostitutes and down-and-outs, drinking and shooting pool in seedy dive bars. During his stay in the City of Angels, Ray got into a bar room brawl on Hollywood Boulevard, graduated from bartending school, took dance lessons in Long Beach, and had his nose altered by a plastic surgeon. For half his stay he lived in room 403 of the St. Francis Hotel. He checked out on March 18^th, 1968, and drove into history.

Strangely, Ray is exactly the kind of man Bukowski crossed paths with every week. It’s enticing to think that perhaps the two men bumped into each other during those four months in late ‘67/early ’68. Bukowski was living in his bungalow at 5124 DeLongpre at the time, and occasionally visited Le Sex Shoppe at 5507 Hollywood Blvd – just a few doors down from the St. Francis. At any rate, it’s the kind of fascinating historical footnote that most people visiting Los Angeles are utterly oblivious to, preferring instead to spend their time and money at Hollywood and Highland, an area where all history and heritage has recently been obliterated in the name of mega entertainment complexes and chain stores. I suppose you can’t force people to see the stuff that's genuinely interesting. And probably the story of the St. Francis Hotel wouldn’t interest them anyway. It’s a bum rap Los Angeles is stuck with – an ignorant, shallow population of locals and tourists, caught up in the tragic notion that L.A. is all about the Chinese Theater, and the Walk of Fame. And little else.