Making Sense of Parker Center

This edition of the LAVA Sunday Salon and Broadway on My Wind walking tour looks at the Police Facilities Building (Welton Becket & Associates and J. E. Stanton, 1955). Better known as Parker Center or The Glass House, this downtown landmark is facing an uncertain future as the city seeks to demolish and the Cultural Heritage Commission, Los Angeles Conservancy and preservationists urge adaptive reuse.

Join Esotouric’s Richard Schave, architect & historian Alan Hess and 2015 LAVA Visionary of the Year Nathan Marsak for a slide show presentation followed by a site visit about the building’s history within LAPD and the Little Tokyo neighborhood, its place in Welton Becket’s architectural legacy and its role in the Los Angeles school of mid-century Modernism. We’ll also look at the threat to its survival and efforts to preserve the building and its integrated sculpture, mosaics and landscaping.

ABOUT THE SALON: On the last Sunday of the month starting at 2pm, LAVA welcomes interested individuals to gather in downtown Los Angeles for the Sunday Salon, featuring a presentation by a LAVA Visionary and opportunities to meet and connect with one another. Immediately after the Salon, a walking tour expands on the Salon theme. If youâ€re interested in joining LAVA as a creative contributor or an attendee, we recommend Salon attendance as an introduction to this growing community.

The LAVA Sunday Salon is delighted to welcome back the esteemed poet and educator Suzanne Lummis as she curates a second series of Poem Noir readings.

Starting in the basement of Grand Central Market, Suzanne will describe the defining characteristics of this poetry, whose dark themes, atmosphere, and voice of cool detachment are inspired by the low budget black-and-white crime movies of the 1940s and 1950s. Then we’ll move across the street to the Bradbury Building for the Poem Noir readings, presented by a star-studded lineup of poets.

ABOUT THE SALON: On the last Sunday of the month starting at 2pm, LAVA welcomes interested individuals to gather in downtown Los Angeles for the Sunday Salon, featuring a presentation by a LAVA Visionary and opportunities to meet and connect with one another. Immediately after the Salon, a walking tour expands on the Salon theme. If youâ€re interested in joining LAVA as a creative contributor or an attendee, we recommend Salon attendance as an introduction to this growing community.

Presenters

Tony Forsmark, a Nevada, Iowa native, graduated from Iowa State University with a major in Performing Arts and is a longtime member of the master class at the Beverly Hills Playhouse. The veteran actor has appeared in multiple theatrical, commercial and television roles, including recent roles in such shows as Criminal Minds, Documentary Now, Speechless and American Crime. Forsmark is repped by Rex Talent Management (Manager) and RPM Talent (Agent).

Strawn Bovee is known for work in Theater, Film, TV, Video, Galleries, Commercials and Interactive Games. Selected works: THEATER: Richard III, Macbeth, Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, Iphigenia at Aulis, The Heiress, Sister Cities, Daddyo Dies Well, Vagina Monologues, The Balcony, Antigone, The Possibilites, The Shawl, Tartuffe. PERFORMANCE ART: Double Play, I like to Sit, Astral Tea Party, Woman at The Well, The Dance Crazy Kid. FILM & TV: Gilmore Girls, The Guardian, Judging Amy, General Hospital, The Others, Just My Luck, All the Ships at Sea, Brewsterâ€s Millions, Fourteen (in production).

Fanny Daubigny is a French-born, Los Angeles–based writer. She teaches at CSUF and is the author of numerous articles on Marcel Proust. She is currently working on a translation of Suzanne Lummis’ poems.

Suzanne Lummis, one of the region’s best-known poets, wrote a defining essay on the “poem noir,” published in New Mexico’s Malpais Review: “The Poem Noir, Too Dark to Be Depressed.” As director of The Los Angeles Poetry Festival she produced the 2011 citywide series, Night and the City: L.A. Noir in Poetry, Fiction and Film. Her poems have appeared in many publications including The New Ohio Review, The Antioch Review, Ploughshares, American Journal of Poetry, and The New Yorker. Poems with a specifically noir mood and theme were included in”Noir Riot,” an anthology of poetry and detective stories, and in the Vers Noir section of the Knoph “Everyman’s anthology,” Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem. She has a strong performance background and appeared in numerous plays around Los Angeles in the 80s and 90s. In Los Angeles Magazine, theater critic Dick Lochte, himself a writer of detective novels, called her a “new wave Gracie Allen.”

RESERVATIONS: The LAVA Sunday Salon and walking tour are free, but reservations are required. There are no “plus ones,” so tell your friends to sign up individually. Please donâ€t reserve unless you plan to attend. To reserve your spot for this free event, click on the “Buy Tickets” button above.

On the last Sunday of the month during the hours of 2-5pm, LAVA welcomes interested individuals to gather in downtown Los Angeles for the Sunday Salon, featuring a presentation by a LAVA Visionary and opportunities to meet and connect with one another. Immediately after the Salon, a walking tour expands on the Salon theme. If youâ€re interested in joining LAVA as a creative contributor or an attendee, we recommend Salon attendance as an introduction to this growing community.

The LAVA Sunday Salon and walking tour are free, but reservations are required. There are no “plus ones,” so tell your friends to sign up individually. Please donâ€t reserve unless you plan to attend.

To reserve your spot for this free event, click on the “Buy Tickets” button above.

ABOUT THE SALON & WALKING TOUR:

We have combined the Sunday Salon & Broadway on My Mind walking tour into a single event. The talk begins at 2pm and lasts about 45 minutes. Weâ€ll break for about 15 minutes for people who have no checked in to do so, then leave for the walk around 3pm. The walk will last about 90 minutes.

Nathan Marsak On “Lost Romanesque Los Angeles”

Architectural historian Nathan Marsak, the LAVA Visionary of the Year for 2015, presents on the forgotten architectural landscape of nineteenth-century Los Angeles—a lost world whose most salient impulse was toward the imposing, rough-hewn blocks of the Romanesque style. Nathanâ€s talk will be an illustrated tour of the lost buildings of the Civic Center, followed by a walking tour of that portion of downtown.

The common narrative regarding the visual development of early Los Angeles usually involves the native vernacular of the pueblo, which one may still visit in any number of extant adobes; from there, following some historic boom times, we Angelenos and visitors alike are regaled by the wondrous Beaux-Arts high-rises of downtown. If pure Victorian architecture is considered, one likely turns attention to the Eastlake and Queen Anne examples along Carroll Avenue, or to the used-car lot of gingerbread, Heritage Square.

This does a disservice, asserts Marsak, to the wonderland of Richardsonian Romanesque, Romanesque Revival, and Romanesque-hybrid office blocks and civic structures that once defined our city. A confluence of money and local pride, primarily in the late-1880s, resulted in what was arguably Americaâ€s greatest center of the style, short-lived though it may have been. The ethos of the City Beautiful movement, skyscraper construction, and other factors contributed to its demise.

It is especially striking that these structures, whose construction exuded solidity and permanence, should have been removed on so great a scale. Besides illuminating some of the most notable lost masterpieces from the Civic Center, Marsakâ€s lecture will visit those few remaining examples of the style. Attention will be given as well to the styles that fought for dominance in defining Victorian Los Angeles, e.g., French Empire.