Page Museum — La Brea Tar Pits

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Page Museum / La Brea Tar Pits
Wilshire Boulevard Miracle Mile
August 15, 2015

Page_exterior

We took Margaret to see the Ice Age fossil collection at the Page Museum. We have been there several times before but our most recent visit was two years ago. The La Brea “tar pits” (technically asphalt seep pools) are home to an unparalleled set of fossil remains from the Pleistocene period. In 1913, the first systematic excavations began when the Hancock family gave the newly established Los Angeles County Museum the sole right to excavate fossils from the tar pits for two years. Inside the museum are displayed many full skeleton fossils of extinct mammals such as mastodons, mammoths, sloths, horses, camels, dire wolves, and of course saber toothed cats, which Margaret liked best.

Page_interior

We opted to see one of the two shows on offer, “Ice Age Encounter,” a family friendly 15 minute docent presentation with media clips and a life size saber toothed cat puppet. There is also a 30 minute “Titans of the Ice Age” 3D film shown in another theater inside the museum. Both shows are ticketed separately from the basic museum admission.

Page_theater

We decided to skip the outside tour of the current excavations because of the record heat. That tour is included with the museum admission. The Page Museum is located in Hancock Park, next to LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), and it is generally a very nice park to stroll through. There are several active asphalt seeps within the park grounds, including a pit where excavation is still going on. Additionally, the museum is very busy with Project 23, an exploration of 23 separate large excavated boxes of material dug up recently when LACMA expanded its parking garage.

There is an area inside the museum where visitors can look through glass windows to see scientists, both paid and volunteers, sorting through fossils of various sizes, cleaning and categorizing them. It is fun to watch that activity and realize that this institution is not just a warehouse for fossils dug up years ago; it is also an ongoing research institution.

The basic admission price for adults is $12; with one show added, the price is $16; a “passport” including both shows is $19. Student, youth, and senior prices are $9 basic, $13 with one show, and $16 for the passport. For children ages 5-12 those prices are $5, $8, and $11. Wheelchair accessibility is good. The staff are cheerful and helpful.

We usually like to park in the lot behind the Page Museum when we visit it or LACMA. The charge is a $10 flat rate; that lot is located at the corner of Curson Ave. and 6th St., directly behind the museum. Enter from the western side of Curson Ave. However, it tends to fill by late morning, and we were running a little late today. We found it full, so parked across the street in the commercial parking garage behind Johnnie’s New York Pizzeria, our favorite area restaurant. We like to eat at Johnnie’s whenever we go to one of the Wilshire Boulevard museums – there are about half a dozen located within a block or two on “Museum Row” – and we made it our lunch stop today. Margaret was in touch with her inner hobbit and wanted mushrooms, so she ordered the mushroom calzone. Meredith ate cannelloni, and Bob had a chicken Panini. Both food and service were very good.

We met up with Meredith’s sister Kathleen at Starbucks back in the San Fernando Valley near Margaret’s home for cold drinks at the end of the day. The heat was even more extreme in the Valley then it had been at Hancock Park. We dashed from air-conditioned car to air-conditioned restaurant.

Margaret did a little better with the car / wheelchair transfers today. The exertion tires her, but her balance and ability to stand seemed a little better than on our last several visits. She did not talk much today, although she asked after her grandchildren, and she seemed engaged and happy at the museum.

Hammer Museum

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Hammer Museum
Westwood
August 1, 2015

Enough digression for now! Time for a blog post which is both about a museum AND located in Southern California. On this visit we took Margaret to the Hammer Museum. We have taken her there several times before, although not since we started keeping this blog. The Hammer has several things to recommend it: admission is free, the permanent collection includes some very nice pieces, and it is relatively close to Margaret’s home in the Valley, although traffic is usually bad on the West Side. We are not big fans of contemporary art, which is the Hammer’s focus, so we only visit there when there are exhibitions of particular interest to us.

Today we saw all three of the featured special exhibitions. The Afghan Carpet Project is displayed in a small gallery on the ground floor and consists of six handmade carpets, all designed by contemporary Los Angeles artists, then handmade by weavers in Afghanistan. That exhibit runs through September 27, 2015, and when it has closed the carpets will be sold and the proceeds given to the nonprofit organization Arzu Studio Hope, working in Afghanistan.

Hammer cat

We enjoyed the photography exhibition Perfect Likeness: Photography and Composition, which runs through September 13, 2015. Meredith had seen a review of the exhibition in the Los Angeles Times, Making Photos, Not Taking Them. As the title of the exhibition suggests, the photographs featured are very beautiful and carefully composed, truly works of art in photographic media. Meredith was particularly taken by a large photo of a river landscape. Margaret was struck by a still life featuring a cat statuette and a vase of flowers. Bob liked a camera shop photo staged recently but based on an old snapshot of a camera store in the 1930s. The third special exhibition, Scorched Earth, features paintings and mixed media pieces by Mark Bradford. It runs through September 27, 2015.

We finished our visit with a swing through the permanent collection, which features traditional art, mainly paintings, from the Renaissance through the Impressionist era. Several signature pieces are currently not on exhibit, and a guard said they were on loan to other museums. The galleries have been rearranged so no obvious holes in the collection exist. There were plenty of nice pieces left for us to enjoy, including a large Eakins painting and a small Monet.

Hammer cafe

Partway through our visit we stopped to have lunch in the museum café. The menu was more extensive than we had recalled, and we all enjoyed our meals. Margaret had a BLT, Bob a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, and Meredith salmon benedict. The café is located in the museum courtyard, and the setting is quite pleasant, shaded by Chinese elms. The menu prices were a little high, but not unusually so for a museum restaurant or for Westwood.

As noted above, museum admission is free. (Their slogan is “free for good.”) On Saturday and Sunday parking costs a flat $3 charge for all day; during the week parking costs $3 for 3 hours with validation by the museum. Wheelchair accessibility is generally good. The elevator is quick and serves all floors. However, doors into galleries are heavy and do not have automatic opening mechanisms. Staff and other patrons assisted us with those doors today.

Margaret finds the car to wheelchair transfers harder than before. She tires easily. We are hoping that physical therapy will help her build strength so she can stand longer and take more steps, and we are trying to encourage her.

Inside Out

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Pacific Winnetka Theater
Chatsworth
July 18, 2015

Meredith went up to Los Angeles without Bob, who was back in Massachusetts. She met up with our youngest daughter and her sister Kathleen, and they all took Margaret out to see the movie Inside Out. It proved to be, as we hoped, one of those animated movies with plenty of clever jokes for adults to enjoy, as well as a story line that younger viewers could follow. The group lingered in the coffee shop by the theater afterwards, and Meredith showed photos from our recent trip to Spain. She had also brought Comic-Con goodies, including an artist-signed print of the Inside Out emotion characters and the latest cartoon book by Lonnie Millsap for Margaret, and some Star Wars items for Kathleen.

Camino del Norte

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June 9-18, 2015
Galicia, Spain

Pardon our hiatus from this blog. We spent most of June, three weeks in all, in Spain. For the first 10 days we walked the Camino of Santiago de Compostela, staying in hostels. There are several different routes that make up the Camino, all of which end in the city of Santiago in northwestern Spain, at the cathedral which houses the tomb of the Apostle James. We chose to walk the final 200 kilometers of the Camino del Norte, starting in Ribadeo on the northern coast of Spain. After that we did some sightseeing, first in Santiago, then in Lugo, Leon, and Oviedo. Like many other English speaking pilgrims, we were inspired by The Way, the 2010 movie starring Martin Sheen and directed by Emilio Estevez. Our pilgrimage was a wonderful and life changing experience. Perhaps the best part was meeting and walking with other pilgrims, including people from Spain, Italy, Germany, the U.S., Australia, and South Africa, and we want to give a special shout out to Dave and Kathy from England.

On our last night in Santiago, the priest preaching the homily at Mass in the cathedral told the congregation that the Camino does not end in Santiago, it ends at the end of our lives, and we are all pilgrims. As we return to our regular lives we try to hold on to that message.

IMG_1056

As I pause on the Camino to Santiago
Bless to me, O God, the earth beneath my feet.
Bless to me, O God, the path on which I go.
Bless to me, O God, the people whom I meet,
Today, tonight, and tomorrow.
Amen.

(Iona Community, adapted.)
Posted in the Miraz hostel of the Confraternity of Saint James

Hanging out in the Valley

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Reseda, Lake Balboa & Van Nuys
Sunday May 24, 2015

Our most recent visit to see Margaret did not involve any museums. Her long hair was in need of a trim, and she had agreed on our previous visit that she would like a haircut, after previously resisting suggestions that she have it trimmed, so we made that our main activity.

We first stopped for lunch. We had Mongolian barbecue, which Margaret had expressed a desire for recently, at King’s on Vanowen in Reseda. Margaret had pork; we each had beef, and we were all pleased with our meals.

When Meredith had searched for hair salons on Yelp earlier in the week, she found few that were open on Sundays. (We chose Sunday for the visit because with the three day weekend it made for the easiest travel day.) We did find a salon in the Korean area of Van Nuys that is open on Sundays, the Art of Hair, on Sherman Way at White Oak. The staff there were very pleasant and skilled, and Margaret was pleased with her haircut.

Haircut

The three of us spent a half hour or so at the Lake Balboa park, playing a cooperative game of Scrabble. Margaret had fun forming words, although she came up with a couple of alternate spellings! We rounded out the day meeting up with Meredith’s sister for coffee. Margaret shared fun memories of her brother.

Blog-iversary

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Today marks one year since we started this blog. Many thanks are due to our oldest daughter, who showed Meredith the fundamentals of setting up a blog and walked her through the initial set up, step by step. You can see her website, featuring art and humor, here: Angry Wall. Thanks are due also to Greg Jordan, designer of the ZLAC Rowing Club website, who had earlier taught Meredith the fundamentals of WordPress.

Turning back to My SoCal Museums, here are some numbers:

Number of posts: 30 (not counting this one).

Most featured museum, with 3 posts: the Getty Center. Tied for second with 2 posts each: Autry National Center, Skirball Cultural Center, and LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art).

Total number of visits to the website: 1,097 (some of these are repeat visitors).

Most views on a single day: 20.

Very modest beginnings, we know, but we have fun putting this blog together and hope people enjoy reading it. We welcome your input.

Coming up later this summer and in the early fall, we plan to see the mummy exhibit at the Natural History Museum (opens September 2015), the Vermeer painting on loan to the Timken Museum (through September 11, 2015), and the Dead Sea Scrolls at the California Science Center (through September 7, 2015).

Autry — Civil War

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Autry National Center
Griffith Park
May 9, 2015

Autry horse

We took Margaret to see a new exhibition at the Autry Museum of the American West: Empire and Liberty, the Civil War and the West. It runs through January 3, 2016. It is not narrowly focused on the war alone. Rather it gives a broad context both before and after the war, about westward expansion and racial tensions. The exhibition includes over 200 artifacts and tells the story not only of African-Americans in the west, but also that of Chinese immigrants, and of Native Americans relocated to the Indian Territories.

Autry video

Margaret enjoyed the small video displays scattered throughout the exhibit, which narrated various individual stories. She also was very impressed with the wedding dress on display, made in the mid 19th century by a woman who immigrated from Scotland to Utah. Meredith found it particularly chilling to read old bills of sale for slaves, listing them matter-of-factly by name, age, and gender. Near those bills of sale was displayed a labor contract between a California merchant and a Chinese laborer, binding the Chinese immigrant to work for the merchant for three years, at a rate of $12 per month. The laborer had to first pay back the cost of his passage ($30) before earning any cash for himself. Bob speculated that even after that point the poor man might have been obligated to buy food and goods from the “company store.” Margaret told us that labor contract reminded her of her great-grandfather’s apprenticeship contract as a carpenter, a document Margaret’s parents had when she was a girl.

After leaving the Empire and Liberty exhibition, we strolled through the Imagination gallery, which has many artifacts from western movies and other western shows, and we lingered over the singing cowboy section. Gene Autry is prominently featured, of course. When we had coffee after our museum visit, Margaret reminisced about seeing Gene Autry perform with a rodeo, which came to the Boston Garden when she was a girl.

We also strolled through the Western art gallery. It includes artifacts as well as paintings and sculptures, and we enjoyed seeing again a piece that we have seen there before, a beautifully restored classic Indian motorcycle.

We did not tour the permanent collection of Western artifacts downstairs on this visit. We had encountered a lot of traffic coming up from San Diego and arrived a little later than we had planned. We had lingered in the three galleries on the top floor so found them sufficient for this visit.

We had lunch in the museum café, which offers sandwiches, salads, and burgers and a few other items. Service was excellent. Customers order at the counter, and then food is brought to the table. Margaret was pleased that their standard cola is Pepsi; she much prefers it to Coke, but most restaurants do not stock it. The food was excellent, and we all enjoyed our sandwiches. Over lunch Margaret shared with us a postcard she had received recently from our youngest daughter, and she reminisced about the first postcard she had ever sent, over 70 years ago, to her parents when she was away at scout camp at about age six. It was a penny postcard, and she worried that she had not addressed it properly or put the right postage on it, but she had done all that correctly, of course, and the card did reach its destination. Margaret spoke softly but was very alert, and she did not struggle with any aphasia. It was a very pleasant outing for all of us.

Adult admission is $10. Wheelchair access is excellent, and parking is free. The museum is closed on most Mondays and some holidays.

Northridge Baseball

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CSU Northridge Matadors
Northridge
April 25, 2015

Our most recent visit to see Margaret did not involve a museum outing. Instead, we took her to a baseball game, and watched the CSU Northridge Matadors play at home against UC Riverside. The trip turned into a nice family outing. We met up with Meredith’s sister Kathleen, our two younger daughters, and our son-in-law at Maria’s Italian Kitchen. We love both the food and the service at Maria’s, and this visit did not disappoint. Margaret savored her calzone. Then the group, minus Kathleen, went on to the baseball game.

Northridge_MatadorStadium

Margaret has always been a baseball fan. At the first major league baseball game she ever attended, around age 10, she saw Satchel Paige strike out Ted Williams at Fenway Park. Margaret and her late husband Eli were Dodgers season ticket holders for a number of years. She taught Meredith how to keep score. We all enjoyed today’s game, although it was cool and there was a slight drizzle. Unfortunately, the home team — our son-in-law’s alma mater — lost, but they did have an exciting rally in the bottom of the ninth inning and finished 5 to 3.

Reyes Adobe

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Reyes Adobe
Agoura Hills
April 11, 2015

We decided after our recent art excursions with Margaret that it was time to take her to another historical site for variety. Using the Passport 2 History, we picked out the Reyes Adobe. As with many historical homes, it is only open on a very limited schedule, in this case the second and fourth Saturday of each month in the afternoon. This visit fell on a second Saturday, so the outing worked well with our schedule.

Reyes_gate

The Reyes family is one of California’s oldest. Juan Francisco Reyes was a soldier on the 1769 expedition led by Portola which also included Father Junipero Serra. A descendent of his, José Jacinto Reyes, married Maria Antonia Machado. Maria bought the land from her uncle, and one of her sons built this adobe home in 1850. It stayed in the family for many years, then was purchased in 1935 by Dr. Malcolm McKenzie. The McKenzie family made various repairs and restorations.
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The next owner made some modifications in the mid 20th century which were unfortunate from an historical perspective, and which have since been removed for the most part. She ultimately sold the land to developers, and the adobe remained vacant for several decades. It was nearly torn down but eventually rescued by the local historical society. After a long fundraising campaign, the adobe was restored and opened as an historical site in 2004.

There are some artifacts on display in an outbuilding which the McKenzie family built as a barn. We started there, chatted with the docents, and looked at photos, maps, and artifacts. We also watched a video about the history of the building and its site.

We proceeded with Hank, one of the docents, over to the adobe. (No one is allowed in the building without a docent.) He was very knowledgeable and told us a great deal about the Reyes family, adobe construction, and the history of the area – you name it, he knew about it!

Reyes_doorway

The building is not wheelchair accessible, because it has a very high (original) threshold. With our assistance, Margaret stepped up on the threshold and down into the first room, then we moved the wheelchair in for her to sit down. The first room was used primarily as a children’s bedroom and occasionally as a bedroom for visitors. It is outfitted with mid-19th century furnishings, including some artifacts which had belonged to the family. There is a high threshold between the children’s room and the main room or sala also, and we did not want to tire Margaret unduly, so Meredith and Margaret stayed in the bedroom and looked through the doorway into the main room, while Hank and Bob went into the sala and Hank explained some of the items in that room.

Admission is $3 for adults, $2 for seniors, and $1 for children. The building is situated in a nice park setting, and there is sufficient parking, which is free. In addition to the twice monthly openings, there is a three day festival there in the fall.

There is no café or restaurant on site; the park is located in a residential neighborhood. The adobe does not open until 1:00 so we had our lunch first. We had scouted out local restaurants on line ahead of time, and settled on the Rabbit Hole Café on Thousand Oaks Blvd, a vegetarian eatery. The interior is decorated with Alice in Wonderland prints. There are a number of vegan items on the menu, but the fare is not restricted to vegan items. The restaurant also offers many gluten free options. Margaret had a roasted vegetable shepherd’s pie; Meredith enjoyed a frittata; and Bob had a “chick’n” and brie sandwich. The staff was very pleasant and helpful, and we were quite happy with the food.

Over lunch, we brought Margaret up-to-date on our recent doings. She shared with us correspondence she had received recently from her brother, her cousin, and Bob’s aunt. We told her about the Padres games we had been to this past week, and then talk turned to baseball generally, one of Margaret’s favorite things.

After we had finished at the Adobe, we ran a quick errand, then met up with Meredith’s sister Kathleen for coffee. We had not seen Margaret since her birthday late last month, so we gave her some presents which she unwrapped there.