Old Town State Historic Park

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Old Town State Historic Park
Old Town, San Diego
March 21, 2015

We took a long two day hike recently, from our home to downtown San Diego and back, passing through Old Town and stopping briefly for some sightseeing. Old Town is a California State Park with dozens of small museums and historic buildings. We are not going to try a full write up here, but we do want to give a shout out to a few spots within the park. Visitors to San Diego should definitely put Old Town on their “must see” lists. For more information see the state park website or the Old Town business district website.

We walked into Old Town from the north and decided to stop in at the Casa de Estudillo, an adobe near the north end, facing the green. The San Diego History Center webpage about Old Town offers this write up of the Casa de Estudillo:

Construction of the most famous Old Town adobe began in 1827 and was completed in 1829 by Captain Jose Maria de Estudillo, commander of the San Diego presidio. When he died in 1830, the house passed to his son, Jose Antonio Estudillo, who served as revenue collector, treasurer, alcalde, and judge of San Diego under Mexican rule and later treasurer and assessor of San Diego County under American rule. He married Maria Victoria Dominguez and their family lived there until 1887. The original adobe home was restored in 1910 with funds provided by the Spreckels family, under the direction of Architect Hazel Waterman; it was donated to the State by Mr. Legler Benbough; furnishings were provided with the assistance of the National Society of Colonial Dames of America. For many years, the building was mistakenly known as “Ramona’s Marriage Place” from Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel. The museum now features furnished rooms and a working kitchen and large courtyard. Hours: 10-5 daily; Admission: free.

OldTown Oven

We rested in the courtyard, and took photos by the fountain and beehive oven. The fountain is a popular photo op; after taking Bob’s photo, Meredith volunteered to take photos of other visiting groups with their cameras.

OldTown Fountain

We then walked south through the main part of Old Town, which features many restaurants and shops, both kitschy tourist stops and nice boutiques. There are a number of restaurants we like in Old Town. This time we ate at Miguel’s Cocina. We each had taco plates and enjoyed them very much.

We also walked by the Whaley House Museum The Whaley House, built in 1856 by Thomas Whaley, is the oldest brick structure in San Diego and features authentic period furnishings. It is one of the San Diego County Passport 2 History sites.

At the south end of the park, beyond Miguel’s, we walked by the Sheriff’s Museum. We admired the old cars in the courtyard and made a note to go back and visit it another day. Apparently it offers exhibits from the entire 150-year history of the Sheriff’s Department.

Star Wars in Seattle

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EMP Museum
Seattle, Washington

The Star Wars movies are one of our favorite things, so when we saw that an extensive Star Wars costume exhibit would be on display in Seattle we were eager to fit it into our visit.

The girls were happy to come with us, and we also met up with Meredith’s niece and former brother-in-law. The exhibit is in the EMP Museum, in the Seattle Center, near the Space Needle. The museum building is a funky and colorful asymmetrical building designed by architect Frank Gehry. The EMP (Experience Music Project) Museum was founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in 2000.

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We bought tickets both to the museum and separate, timed tickets to the Star Wars exhibit, for a total cost of $32 each. (Online discounts may apply.) EMP is the first stop for this Star Wars exhibit, which is part of a 12-city national tour; it runs at EMP through October 4, 2015.

The exhibit was lots of fun. There were costumes from all six movies, and extensive background information – text, video, and audio — about the design and fabrication of the costumes. There were also interesting displays grouping costumes, such as half a dozen senators’ robes. Several displays showed how costumes evolved as a character developed, for example four separate costumes worn by Senator and later emperor Palpatine, showing his evolution toward the Dark Side.

There are some great videos, with George Lucas, costume designer Trisha Biggar, and Natalie Portman, among others. Meredith particularly enjoyed an audio clip of actor Anthony Daniels who played C-3PO, describing his doubts when his agent sent him to see someone named George Lucas who was doing a “low budget science fiction movie” and was looking for someone to play a robot, because it might lead to bigger things. Daniels was captivated by a sketch of C-3PO in Lucas’ office and agreed to play the part.

The exhibit ends with – who else? – Darth Vader, and of course we all had to take our photos with him.

EMP2

After we had cruised the Star Wars exhibit and related gift shop we saw several more exhibits at the EMP: Fantasy: Worlds of Myth and Magic; Can’t Look Away: the Lure of Horror Film; and Indie Game Revolution. Both the fantasy and the horror exhibits had some great artifacts on display, including some original Wizard of Oz costume pieces and weapons from the Lord of the Rings movies in the fantasy exhibit. We enjoyed the “guest curator” videos that were playing in the horror exhibit, particularly Roger Corman’s perspective on the evolution of horror pictures. We skipped the music exhibits at EMP and also the temporary Seahawks exhibit.

The museum has multiple levels and is a bit confusing to navigate. Wheelchair patrons can use elevators, but stairs (lots of them!) are a more direct way to get around the museum. It would be possible to use a wheelchair or walker in the Star Wars costume exhibit, but the crowds made it somewhat claustrophobic even for those of us on two feet. If we were going to bring a wheelchair to this museum, we would aim for a less crowded time than midafternoon on a rainy weekend.

There is a café on the lowest level of EMP, but we ate an excellent lunch at Chutneys, an Indian restaurant in the Queen Anne neighborhood nearby, before coming to the museum. We parked in a parking garage near Seattle Center. The trek to the restaurant took us through the center then back again, all in steady rain that turned out to set a record for March 15. We were pleased to have brought our ancient London Fog trench coats, both of which date from our undergraduate days at Yale.

Bainbridge Island

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Bainbridge Island Museum of Art
Bloedel Reserve
March 14, 2015
Bainbridge Island, Washington

Yes, we do know Bainbridge Island is in Washington State, not in Southern California. We spent a getaway weekend with our oldest daughter and our daughter-in-law, who live in the Seattle area, and we thought it would be fun to add a couple of short posts about what we saw up there. Hope you don’t mind this detour off topic, but if you do, just scroll down to the next post, which covers our latest trip to the Getty Center.

Bainbridge Island is just west of Seattle. We took a short car ferry ride over to Winslow, on the south end of the island. Right near the ferry landing we stopped at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. The staff were very friendly. We had fun exploring Cut and Bent, a special exhibition on the ground floor, of art made by various contemporary artists from tin and other found objects.

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Then we went upstairs, where there were some beautiful wooden furniture pieces on display and also a large collection of paintings by noted regional artist Rosalyn Gale Powell called the Garden Path, featuring (but not limited to) her floral pieces.

Admission to the Museum of Art is free. There is a donation box by the front desk, and we made a contribution. Garden Path runs through June 7, 2015, as does the Cut and Bent exhibition.

After our museum visit we ate a great lunch at Bainbridge Bakers next door. Paninis for Bob and our daughter; quiche for Meredith. Other dining options on site include a small café inside the museum, and the Alehouse next to the bakery café (patrons must be at least 21 to get in). Parking is free but somewhat limited, both in quantity and time (3 hour maximum). Handicap access to and inside the museum is good. The art museum and eateries share parking with a children’s museum.

After lunch we drove to the north end of the island and walked through the Bloedel Reserve, a public garden founded by the Bloedel family on the site where they resided from 1951 to 1986. It first opened to the public in 1988. The walk around the grounds is about a mile and a half long, mostly flat with some gentle slopes in the second half of the walk. The main trail is bark covered and not suitable for wheelchairs; there is an alternate and shorter paved route that wheelchair patrons can use.

Halfway around the circuit is the Bloedel residence, a beautiful home on the bluff overlooking Port Madison Bay. The ground floor is open to visitors and staffed by a docent whom we found quite helpful. We enjoyed the walk and the variety of plants and environments we saw – meadow, woodlands, marshy areas, moss garden, camellia walk, and Japanese garden, along with a couple other areas.

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Admission to the Bloedel Reserve is $15. There are no eating facilities on the grounds.

From Bloedel we drove north to catch another ferry, from Kingston to Edmonds.

Getty Center — Turner

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Getty Center
Sepulveda Pass
March 8, 2015

We went to the Getty Center primarily to see the special exhibition J. M. W. Turner, Painting Set Free. We first stopped in the museum café, though, and had some sandwiches. It was a beautiful sunny and clear day, so we seated ourselves near the windows and had a good view of the gardens and the surrounding hills while we ate.

We then went to the Research Institute building on the Getty campus, to see a special exhibition of art associated with the First World War: World War I: War of Images, Images of War. There were propaganda images from all the major countries involved in the war, both Allies and Central Powers. They were also drawings by artists caught up in the war, illustrating the horrors of war and its aftermath. At the end of the exhibit short video clips were running, from silent movies made soon after the end of the war. Those videos recreate the battlefield, as imagined by filmmakers soon afterwards. That exhibition closes on April 19, 2015, and we had been planning to see it for quite a while, since we are both interested in history generally and the history of World War I in particular.

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We then went on to the special exhibition building. The Turner exhibition focuses on the last decade and a half of his life. We both liked his nautical paintings, particularly Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, which is the iconic painting used in the museum’s poster for the exhibition. Also of interest were the series of watercolors he did while traveling in Europe. He used those as studies to show potential patrons, who could then commission a larger oil painting of the subject. The watercolors themselves were well done and capture the imagination although they are smaller and simpler than his oil paintings. Several of the large oil paintings in the gallery were unfinished. Turner painted the base and general background on those but had not added detail. Bob was very interested in his painting Hero of a Hundred Fights, showing an industrial forge and reworked to add a bronze statue of the Duke of Wellington being removed from its mold. The Turner exhibition will be at the Getty through May 24, 2015. There was an extensive review of the exhibition in the Los Angeles Times about two weeks before we went.

Margaret grew tired near the end of the exhibition and wanted to leave early, so Meredith took her out while Bob finished looking at paintings in the last gallery, then we swapped off, and Meredith went back into the exhibition. Bob and Margaret strolled around on the plaza level and enjoyed the view out over the pass looking south.

Admission to the Getty is free, but parking costs $15. Despite numerous signs telling people to pay at a machine before going back to the car, we managed to get stuck in the exit lane behind someone who failed to do so. After that minor delay we headed back to the Valley and met up with Kathleen, Meredith’s sister, for coffee.

Wheelchair access at the Getty is very good. There are several levels but the buildings mainly connect just at the plaza level, so one has to go up and down in elevators as you move from one building to another, and the elevators can be a bit slow.

Gillette & Paramount Ranches

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King Gillette Ranch
Paramount Ranch
Santa Monica Mountains
February 21, 2015

We probably would not have thought of the Santa Monica Mountain nature reserve as a place with historical or cultural resources, if we had not seen the Gillette Ranch listed in the Passport 2 History. We have enjoyed exploring other historical sites we found in that booklet, and decided this time to visit the ranch. As we explored the National Park Service website in preparation for our visit, we read about the nearby Paramount Ranch as well, and decided to see both ranches.

The Gillette mansion was built by architect Wallace Neff in 1928 for King Camp Gillette, founder of the Gillette Safety Razor Company. Hollywood movie director Clarence Brown purchased the property in 1935 and added to it. It had a series of later owners including the Claretian religious order, which ran a seminary there and build a dormitory and some classroom buildings. The property has been part of the public park since 2005. The visitor center is located in what used to be the stables. It features an informative video about the entire Santa Monica Mountain park area and exhibits about the local environment. We went on Oscar weekend, so there was a photo exhibit set up showing still photos from various movies filmed in the surrounding area.

Gillette_Ranch

After we explored the visitor center we walked out and around the Gillette mansion and Claretian dormitory building, then went back to our car. From there we drove several miles over to the Paramount Ranch.

Several film studios once owned extensive acreage in the Santa Monica Mountains, including Paramount Studios. Numerous films and television shows have been filmed in the area from the 1920’s on, either on the Paramount Ranch property that we visited, or in nearby areas owned by other studios. The long list of films we perused on the park website, that were filmed at least in part on the Paramount Ranch, included (to name just a few films), Morocco (1930), several W. C. Fields movies, numerous Westerns in the 1920’s and 30’s, Beau Geste (1939), The Love Bug (1968) and its sequels, and most recently American Sniper (2014). The area we explored was the Western Town. Featuring about 20 wooden structures built as a movie set in the 1950’s, it looks like the stereotypical old western town. That set was used for various productions for several decades, including the television show Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman in the 1990’s. It is apparently still used from time to time for film shoots or other professional photography, requiring special permits from the National Park Service. A ranger said that visitors may take photos for personal use, however. (We are not entirely sure if we are allowed to post the photos we took at the Western Town, so will not do so here.)

The Santa Monica Mountains are a beautiful area with many hiking trails. We did not explore them with Margaret, of course, but we saw many other visitors out for walks and several equestrians. At the Gillette Ranch we stayed on paved paths. At the Paramount Ranch we were able to push her wheelchair over the hard packed ground in the Western Town.

There were no dining facilities at either of those stops, but there are a number of communities in and around the Santa Monica Mountain area. We decided to stop in Calabasas on our way, and we ate at the Sagebrush Cantina, a restaurant we know and like. Margaret was not in a decisive mood when it came to ordering lunch, but eventually she settled on the chicken mole enchilada, which she enjoyed very much. We each had carnitas tacos, which were excellent. Margaret was quiet at first, but then opened up to reminisce fondly about her grandmother, after Meredith mentioned a letter she had received recently from Margaret’s cousin Jocelyn. Margaret also remembered an archaeological dig she had been on many years ago in the Wood Ranch area of Simi Valley.

Admission to the two National Park sites we visited was free. However, the surrounding area also includes state and local parks. The ranger staffing the Gillette visitor center explained to another guest that there is a day use/parking charge at the nearby Malibu Creek State Park. The park staff at both sites were very friendly and helpful.

After our visit the Los Angeles Times wrote up the Paramount Ranch site — both the Western Town and surrounding trails — in its recurring “LA Walks” column.

Timken Museum

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Timken Museum of Art
Balboa Park, San Diego
February 15, 2015

First, let us say this is one of our most favorite museums! Located in the heart of Balboa Park in San Diego, the Timken is a small museum with an excellent art collection which offers free admission.

We have been here many times over the years; we often stop by when doing something else in Balboa Park. On this most recent visit, we hiked 4 miles round trip, from the northwest corner of the park around the Aerospace Museum and back to where we started. We stopped at the Timken partway through the walk.

Timken_Raphael

We made this visit to see a special exhibition: Raphael’s painting The Madonna of the Pinks, on loan from the National Gallery in London. It will be here through April 26, 2015. Later this year the Timken will be exhibiting another piece on loan, Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, from May 11 through September 11, 2015, on loan from Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. In exchange the Timken is lending its prize possession, Rembrandt’s painting Saint Bartholomew, to the National Gallery and the Rijksmuseum.

The permanent collection spans nearly six centuries, from early Renaissance to late nineteenth century paintings, and includes pieces from Italy, the United States, France, and the Lowlands. The museum also houses an extensive collection of Russian icons. The guards are very pleasant, and they are also knowledgeable about the collection, more so than we have found at most museums.

Bob was particularly taken by an 1880 Eastman Johnson painting in the American gallery, The Cranberry Harvest, Nantucket Island. Meredith enjoyed seeing an old favorite, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1557 painting Parable of the Sower. Many years ago our youngest daughter, then in grade school, realized as soon as she saw the painting what parable it illustrated, displaying her Scripture knowledge without prompting from us.

As noted above, admission to the Timken is free. Please do make whatever donation you can afford, though; fine art needs conserving, and like all museums the Timken needs funds to operate. Parking is free in Balboa Park. We did not have Margaret with us this time, but handicapped access seems adequate here. There is no café in the museum; there is a café nearby in the park and several other grab and go snack options.

LACMA-Delacroix

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Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Wilshire Boulevard, Miracle Mile
February 7, 2015

This visit fell on the first full weekend of February, so we took advantage of LACMA’s participation in the Bank of America Museums on Us program, and strolled around the art museum campus today. Last month we had noticed an article in the Los Angeles Times about an Eugene Delacroix painting on exhibit for a short time, Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi. The painting is on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts in Bordeaux, France. It is an allegorical painting made in 1826, featuring a feminine figure symbolizing Greece mourning over those killed by the Turks during the unsuccessful defense of the port city of Missolonghi. The exhibition did a good job of explaining the symbolism in the painting itself and also showing other contemporary pieces to give context to the work.

LACMA Colombia

We also went through a special exhibit, A Journey through the Cauca Valley, featuring prehistoric Colombian ceramic pieces in the Art of the Americas building, and we strolled through part of the permanent collection in that building as well. Although the Delacroix exhibit was easy to find, the Colombian and one other small special exhibition (Louise Nevelson) that we looked for were not well marked, nor did the guards we spoke to know where they were, which seemed a bit odd. Even a docent wearing a red apron with large lettering that said “ASK ME” could not tell us where the Nevelson exhibition was. Nevertheless, it was a pleasant outing. Our hunt for the special exhibitions let us through various galleries in the permanent collection we might not have browsed otherwise, and we enjoyed many of the pieces we looked at along the way.

The museum is located at the west end of Hancock Park; the Page Museum, better known as the La Brea tar pits museum, is at the east end of the park. We parked at the east end of Hancock Park, in the lot that is actually associated with the Page Museum. That lot cost us $10, the weekend rate. There is also parking in a garage at the west end of the museum, which costs $12. We strolled through part of the park, stopping to listen to a busker play first a piccolo and then a banjo.

Admission to LACMA is $15 for adults, $10 for seniors. Wheelchair accessibility throughout the museum is good, although we had to make frequent use of elevators, because different parts of the campus are connected on different levels, and there is a fair amount of going up and down to get from one building to another.

We had lunch at Johnnie’s New York Pizzeria, just a short walk east of the museum on Wilshire. That is our go-to lunch destination when we visit a museum on Wilshire’s Museum Row. We enjoyed Johnnie’s, as always, and the staff recognized us. Margaret and Bob had their usual dishes there, turkey panini for her and chicken panini for him. Meredith tried and liked the Chicken Puttanesca.

We had a nice visit with Margaret, apart from a little upset at the beginning. Bob’s aunt Min writes Margaret frequently and encloses photos with her letters. When we visit, Margaret always likes to share the latest letter she has received from Min. She had some trouble finding it this time, and snapped at her caregiver. He is very patient and hunted the letter out without taking offense, and we went on our way. After that, Margaret was calm and fairly alert and verbal. She asked after our daughters and commented on a news article Meredith had sent her a couple of weeks ago, about the possible restoration of the Southwest Museum. Margaret also mentioned her recent visit with Jennifer, the independent geriatric care manager we have check in on Margaret monthly, and she proudly told us that she had beaten Jennifer at Scrabble. We suspect Jennifer may have let her win, but we had heard independently that Margaret had done quite well with word formation. All in all it was good to see Margaret functioning well on this visit.

Huntington Library

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Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
San Marino
February 1, 2015

The two of us made this visit without Margaret. Pasadena and the adjacent area boast several excellent museums, but they are too far from the San Fernando Valley to make it easy to bring her here.

We were in Pasadena for the weekend volunteering as extras on the set of Phd Movie 2, the second movie based on Jorge Cham’s webcomic, Phd Comics. The first movie can be streamed here. We were in several scenes filmed Saturday, on the Cal Tech campus, but they did not need us for Sunday, so we headed to the Huntington right after church.

Huntington_entrance

The Huntington is an extensive facility and even though we were there all day – weekend hours are 10:30 AM to 4:30 PM – we could not see it all. We decided to focus mainly on art, skipping the library building and seeing only part of the gardens. We first toured the European art collection, which is housed in the building which used to be the Huntington family mansion. It has a particularly strong English collection, including such artists as Gainsborough, Constable, Turner, and Reynolds. The museum has a particularly well known Gainsborough piece, The Blue Boy, and across the gallery is a portrait by Lawrence of a young girl known as Pinkie. The bulk of the European collection dates from the 18th and 19th centuries.

We next went on to the American art building. It holds pieces representing all periods from colonial through modern, and it was interesting to look at the pieces that were contemporary with the European art we had seen in the prior building. In the special exhibit gallery in that building was Samuel F. B. Morse’s painting Gallery of the Louvre dating from 1831-1833. Best known as the inventor of the telegraph, Morse began his career as a painter. In this colossal work he shows a gallery within the Louvre, populated with nearly 40 selected paintings of his choosing, including a variety of both sacred and secular works, such as the Mona Lisa, Caravaggio’s Fortune Teller, and a Raphael Madonna and Child.

In both buildings the decorative arts were also represented, and there were contemporary furniture pieces displayed with the paintings and sculpture, particularly in the American collection. We particularly enjoyed a room in the American art building given over to Arts and Crafts pieces and the work of Greene & Greene.

We went on from the American art building to see a special exhibition in a third building, the Boone Gallery, which was displaying photographs by Bruce Davidson and Paul Caponigro. The exhibition displayed photographs they each took during visits to Britain and Ireland in the 1960s and later. The exhibition was quite extensive and really gave a sense of photography as an art form, with compelling photos both of locations and people.

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As we walked around the gardens from one building to another and briefly over to the Chinese garden at the far end of the property, we saw many families with small children. We had not seen small children in the art galleries (wise parents), but we can understand that the gardens would be a wonderful place to stroll with family on a nice day. We saw a number of beautiful flowers in bloom. The rose garden, of course, was dormant given the time of year, but must be spectacular when in bloom. We did go into the conservatory building and stroll through the rain forest and bog rooms, looking at various orchids and also carnivorous plants.

Although we did not have Margaret with us, we did look around to assess wheelchair accessibility, which generally seems quite good. The grounds are so extensive that it might be a challenge for a manual wheelchair user, just because of the distances, but the grounds are mostly flat or gently sloping. We were surprised to see that the elevator in the European art building was out of service, and if we had brought Margaret we would not have been able to take her up to the second floor. A guard told us that was a rare occurrence, however.

We picked up sandwiches in the café and ate at tables outdoors. We each chose smoked salmon with cream cheese on a bagel and had some fresh fruit on the side. The food was pricey but of good quality.

Admission is $23 for adults. There is no additional charge for parking.

Strathearn Historical Park

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Strathearn Historical Park
Simi Valley
January 17, 2015

When we were brainstorming something new to do on this visit, we read through the Passport 2 History booklet. This booklet, and the related website, list over 60 historic sites throughout Southern California, from San Luis Obispo County down to San Diego County. We knew from going to the Reagan library that Simi Valley is not a bad drive from Margaret’s home, so we picked this site.

StrathearnPark

There are about a dozen historic buildings located in the park, which covers a little over 6 acres. It is named for the Strathearn family, who bought the land in the late 19th century. The park is open on weekdays from 9 AM to 3 PM, but docent led tours of the interiors of the buildings are only available five days week in the afternoon, including Saturday and Sunday.

We timed our arrival for 1 PM on the dot, just as the park opened, and began our tour in the visitor center. There is a nice collection of artifacts on display in the visitor center, in glass cases grouped to show the Chumash era, the Spanish era, American frontier era, and the early 20th century. Meredith was rather disconcerted to see a collection of nondescript telephone books and a black standard rotary dial telephone on display. When the everyday objects of our childhood become museum pieces, we really start to feel old!

We sat with a couple other visitors and watched a video in the visitor center which gave an overview of history in the valley over those same periods. The substantive content of the video was quite informative. The production values left a bit to be desired but were adequate for the purpose.

A pair of Cub Scouts and their parents and siblings joined us, and we all headed out on a docent led tour of the various buildings and outdoor exhibits in the park. We particularly liked the original St. Rose of Lima church, the Simi Adobe / Strathearn House, and the antique car and carriages.

The church, like most of the buildings in the park, was relocated from its original location, in this case at Third and Pacific in the old town area of Simi. It was first built by Presbyterians in 1902 but was soon sold to the Catholic diocese and converted to a Catholic parish church, and it was used as such until 1964.

The Simi Adobe, which was later incorporated into the Strathearn House, is the oldest building in the park, and that combined building is one of the few which was originally located on the site. The adobe portion of the building was the headquarters for the Spanish era rancho and dates from about 1810. It is reduced in size from what it was originally; it is now just one story, and the room at the back end of it was destroyed in a fire and not rebuilt. In 1892 the Strathearns added a two-story Victorian frame house to the front of the adobe building. They used the adobe portion as their kitchen and dining room. The entire building is well outfitted with furniture and furnishings from the era. A small part of the floor and wall in one room of the adobe section have been removed and encased in glass, so that one can see the adobe wall and wood floor structure.

Bob went inside the Colony House, which dates from 1888 and was relocated from Second Street and Ashland. That particular building is not wheelchair accessible. It is a prefab building from the abortive “Simiopolis” development in the late 19th century. It was used for many years as a church and minister’s home. Although quite attractive in outward appearance, it is uninsulated and cannot have been very comfortable to live in.

One of the barn buildings contains several well preserved antique carriages, and we all enjoyed seeing a 1926 Model T kept in one of the garage buildings that date from the Strathearn family’s time. Margaret chuckled and called it a “bug eyed monster.”

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Other buildings we saw included the local library, built in 1930 and used until 1962; a barbershop; several barns and farm outbuildings with extensive period equipment displayed; and a former garage restyled as a general store and used as the park’s gift shop.

Admission is $3 for adults. Much but not all of the park is wheelchair accessible. Several buildings cannot be entered by wheelchair, although we could see into the library fairly well from outside. With help we lifted Margaret’s wheelchair up one step into the adobe. She could not go up to the Victorian era part of Strathearn House, however, nor could she enter the Colony House.

The park does not have a café or snack bar. We had stopped for lunch on our way to the park in any event, at a sandwich shop nearby that we found on Yelp, Old School Sandwiches & Salads. We all enjoyed our various sandwiches – roast beef, tuna, and chicken – and the two of us were impressed with the chili we had with our half sandwich combos. It seemed nicely made from scratch, with several types of beans and a nice blend of meat, vegetables, and mild spices. They use fresh bakery bread for their sandwiches and pride themselves on fresh and mostly local ingredients. We recommend them to anyone in the area.

Museum of the San Fernando Valley

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Museum of the San Fernando Valley
Northridge
January 3, 2015

A brand new museum in the San Fernando Valley, near where Margaret lives? We are so there! We read about this museum in the Los Angeles Times, which ran an article when the museum opened in December.

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The museum is in an office building, at 18860 Nordhoff Street in Northridge, in a relatively small suite on the second floor. Although it is not large, it is well laid out, and the exhibits are well labeled. The docents were friendly and very well-informed. There were three volunteers working the museum, basically one per room, and they were all enthusiastic. We think this museum has the highest docent per square foot ratio we have seen.

The World War II room has a corner devoted to the remarkable ace pilot Clyde East, including a piece from the fuselage of his fighter plane “Lil Margaret.” A QR code on the wall gave us a link to an extensive video about him. Clyde retired to the Valley after a long and distinguished career in the military and just passed away within the last year. Museum volunteer Art Sherman was on duty and showed us around that room, explaining all the items on display, including items he had donated to the museum from his time in the Army Air Force, as a bombardier and intelligence officer. Among various items in the room are interesting photos of the camouflaging on the Lockheed facility, several aerial maps, and photos of the “Wings over Wendy’s” veterans group which meets in West Hills.

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Another room features photos and artifacts provided by the Westmore family, leading make up and hair design artists in Hollywood for many years. Other walls feature photos taken by leading photographers Leigh Wiener and George Hurrell, historical photos from the Valley News, and architectural photos of noted Valley buildings, both old and modern.

The final room is devoted to art created by Valley artists, most notably sculptor Henry Van Wolf.

The museum organization has existed for about a decade, but this is their first opportunity to display their collection in space of their own. They have done an excellent job. Admission is free, but donations are gratefully accepted. The museum is currently only open three days a week.

Wheelchair accessibility was fine, with an elevator up to the second floor. Parking was ample and free, at least on the Saturday we visited.

The website needs a little updating; it appears to date from before the opening, when the “museum” was just an organization with a collection but no site to display it. Hopefully the website will be updated soon, to reflect the recent opening and give potential visitors easier access to practical information like opening times.

We had lunch at Maria’s Italian Kitchen in Northridge before going to the museum. We have eaten there before, and other family members like it, too. Food and service were both excellent. Margaret had a chicken panini; Bob had a meatball sandwich; and Meredith had a salad. We were all pleased with our food.

Over lunch we filled Margaret in on family business. She was sorry to hear of her older sister’s recent hospitalization, and we helped her write a get well card.