Random Odds And Ends

This blog was never intended to be a one-issue blog. I know it seems like all I write about is Marymount, Marymount, Marymount. But there is so much more going on on the eastern side of The Hill that folks living in the Miraleste and Eastview areas might be more interested in than Marymount.

Asaka Grill Express has its informal opening last Friday and its Grand Opening was last Saturday.

Have I mentioned yet that no sushi is on the menu at that brand new restaurant?

Click over image to enlarge.

I was only able to scan the outer piece of the menu before my scanner decided it was done scanning for perhaps the rest of eternity.

The menu is very interesting starting from the Soy Bean appetizer and Sweet Potato Fries to the most expensive item on the menu which is the Salmon Teriyaki for just $8.95.

I feel it is only fair to offer a real review of Asaka Grill Express after it has been open for several months so the bugs have a chance to be completely worked out.

I will offer some comments from our first trip there just last evening (Monday).

What I found shocking is that the menu contains no mention of sushi or sashimi! If you head over to Asaka Grill Express hoping to sample a California Roll or some other sushi products you can certainly do so by walking about 75 yards north to Kobe Grill where there are many sushi pieces on their menu.

The photos of the items as Asaka Grill Express make the food look inviting. There is a variety of chicken, beef, pork, and fish dishes. Terri selected the chicken teriyaki burger for $3.75 and a side of sweet potato fries for $1.95.

I stuck with my usual chicken bowl with steamed rice/no vegetables because having that allows me to compare similar dishes from different restaurants.

Asaka Grill Express is just about midway between Kobe Grill and Maui Chicken in the Western Plaza shopping area.

The wait staff was very friendly and we waited what seemed to be an overly long time for our food to arrive which I expected because the restaurant hadn't been open for very long.

The booth at the restaurant have very high backs and the seats are so high I can't put my feet on the floor when I am sitting at a booth. There are also a few tables and chairs.

I think anyone who knows where Asaka Grill Express is knows that the restaurant has a very huge strike against it because of the almost non-existent parking in the lot due to Denny's being so popular and directly next door.

We watched as the left turn pocket on northbound Western overfilled with cars either being turned into The Terraces or attempting a U-turn so folks had a chance to find parking in the two lots on each side of Denny's.

We went around 5:00, walking there of course. The two parking lots were jammed for Denny's/Asaka Grill Express and there were plenty of parking spaces available at Marie Calender's.

At this point I have warm fuzzies for Asaka Grill Express and I hope they can survive the crush from Denny's patrons.

No, the drive-thru lane for Asaka Grill Express is not open and though the owners hope they can get it open one day, there is no timetable for that for reasons they didn't give me.

For those who may not remember, after Penguin Freeze was torn down at that location, Colonel Sander's Kentucky Fried Chicken was a long time business at that address and that is why there was a drive-thru in the first place.

A drive-thru spaghetti restaurant that served small portions of cold spaghetti and probably the worst garlic bread in the western hemisphere, P'Sketti was the immediate past occupant of that space and I still marvel at how long it lasted.

And now, without further ado, here is the semi-nude house in Rancho Palos Verdes!

There are plenty of cities and communities that have semi-nudes on the interior of a building, but Rancho Palos Verdes can boast of having a real semi-nude on the exterior.

This house, built in 195o needed a great deal of repairs when the owner first began removing a decaying wooden fence on his way to an entire remodel.

Times got tough and it appears the owner has abandoned the remodel after living in the house in its present condition for an unknown number of months.

If you want to enlarge the photos or even download them and try to zoom in on the side of the profile or under the living room window, you should see some of the original wallboards used in the construction of all 215 houses in the Western View tract of homes.

The wallboards that look a little like drywall but have plaster oozing out through holes in them are called button boards.

I think it was a pretty new material used in the tract instead of traditional lathe and plaster and it was probably less expensive than the wood for the lathes.

The kitchen cabinets in the houses were steel and I considered them to be leftover materials from WWII, along with the steel window frames that were originally at the houses.

You can see with the profile that the under drawers of the semi-nude are also visible.

I can imagine that this was one of the model homes used when folks started buying houses and moving in around May, 1950.

The house is located on the corner of Trudie Drive and Highmore Ave.(?) and is in the first tract of homes constructed west of Western Avenue in the then unincorporated area of Los Angeles County.

If you have a good eye, this next picture depicts where that house was as part of the brand new Western View Homes.
I have this photo along with the associated article published in the San Pedro News Pilot from May, 1950.

The buildings at the bottom of the photo are of the Channel Heights apartment complex. It was built as 'temporary' housing for shipyard workers and/or military during WWII/

The large building in the lower left is the Channel Heights market. By the time this photo was taken the apartment complex which was much larger than this picture shows was a project for lower income residents.

The market sits about where In and Out Burger now stands.

The canyon to the left of the market burned at least once every summer and we grew up knowing when we smelled the smoke, we knew pretty much where it was coming from.

The top of the photo shows homes in the Miraleste area. Those homes were also part of unincorporated Los Angeles County until about the time in 1973 or so when Rancho Palos Verdes became a city and the original city fathers wanted the higher-income residents of Miraleste in their city, while they seemingly held their noses at the other tracts that completed the Eastview section by 1975.

It wasn't until a vote by the registered voters in the Eastview area along with the other register voters in R.P.V. allowed for the Eastview section to become "somewhat" part of Rancho Palos Verdes.

What should be obvious to folks who are familiar with this part of town is that the homes around the Crestwood area and the housing tract named Mira Costa Terrace hadn't been started by May, 1950. Those two areas would become the second and third tracts of housing and the area just to the left (south) of Western Veiw Homes may be the actual site of the original Eastview or East View tract of homes. I haven't found confirmation of that yet but I know the names of all the other single-family housing tracts in that area so it may just take a process of elimination to figure out where the first Eastview is/was.

The most original looking house in the Western View Homes area is the 3-bedroom "Keenan" family home and it is very easily found and viewed by hundreds if not a thousand every day.

The "Keenan" family home is located at the northern end of Bayend Drive on Trudie. it is a yellow house with white trim and it is one of only a very, very few homes that still have the original window screens still on their frames.

Western View Homes consisted of 215 houses. 200 of them were two-bedroom, one-bath houses with attached single car garages.

15 of the houses were three-bedroom houses with a detached two-car garage.

I think there are still almost half of the 15-three bedroom houses still left in the tract.

With the two-bedroom houses, there were three different floor plans with obverse and reverse plans for each of the three.

My dad selected our house because it was the largest of the three basic floor plans for the two-bedroom model. in 1964 he added a third bedroom, 3/4 bath and walk-in closet.

I first arrived at the house viewed in the photo having yellow lines outlining the placement of my backyard on May 4, 1955. I was brought over the front door sill at the age of one-day old.

Across the street and one house down if the home of Mr. and Mrs. Graham. Mr. Graham was a merchant seaman from Scotland during WWII and when his ship made a call on San Pedro, he felt he was home and he brought his bride Lizbeth over from Scotland and they may be the only two original residents of the Western View Homes tract that were the original owners.

For those of you who don't know about my blog dealing with the Ponte Vista condominium development project, I post a weekly "Odds and Ends" post dealing with many things along Western Avenue in eastern R.P.V. and northwest San Pedro.

You are most welcome to follow that blog at: www.pontevista.blogspot.com. Now that a newer version of the old financial team is purportedly running the project, there may be some movement on that project that was considered to be a condo project of at least 1,950 condos in its last lifetime.

For all of you reading this that also travel along Western Avenue, I have a sour feeling that the problems now occurring with the left turn pocket on northbound Western at The Terraces will continue to get worse and there will be many accidents to further clog up traffic that usually is at a standstill from about 2:30 every weekday afternoon until at least 7:00 PM in the evening.

Please be very careful and slow down because there will be crazy folks who want to flip a U-turn thinking they have plenty of time and space but didn't figure that time and space would run out sooner than they had guessed.

Western Avenue is a State Highway so anything that needs to be studied or done with trying to mitigate the situation has to go through Caltrans. I think our Council let me know at one of their meetings I spoke about the problem at that they don't want to touch it with a ten-foot pole and I should go to Caltrans for help.

Have you been to the Terrace Cinema yet. Tuesday's and Thursdays all 2D movies are just $4.00 admission any time, any show. 3D movies are two dollars more than whatever the regular admission is. No ticket is more expensive than $9.00 or $11.00 for 3D and most of us got two for one coupons and free tiny popcorn coupons. Both of them expire on June 30 and I expect that since so much money was spent to place all new seats in every theatre, have digital projection in every theatre, and a remodeled lobby and concession stand, that on July 1, the admission prices may just go up at least somewhat.

The spectre of having a 200-foot wide, up to 500-foot deep hole dug somewhere along Western Avenue still cannot be let go.

The Clearwater Program of the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts is slowly ramping up to have a replacement Joint Outfall tunnel system built for the two existing outfall system tunnels that run basically far under and along the path of Western Avenue to the ocean off of Royal Palms.

More than 99% of knowledgeable folks surveyed about where they want to see the giant hole for the placement of tunneling equipment and the removal of dirt and the drop off site for the materials used to build the tunnels want that giant structure built on Terminal Island, away from residential areas.

There were about 16 sites selected in the scoping process for further study and selection for the location of the Outfall System above ground construction site.

Besides Terminal Island, Eastview Park, an R.P.V. managed park near the intersection of Western and Westmont, and on land owned by the Sanitation Districts is one of the sites.

So too on land near the intersection of Western Avenue at Palos Verdes Drive North inside the Defense Fuel Supply Point.

Peck Park is also in the running as are Averill Park, Royal Palms, the Upper Reservation of Fort MacArthur (Angels Gate Cultural Center). Ken Malloy Park/Harbor Lake, and some others that would also cause chaos for at least eight years.

Through an information source, the Terminal Island site has become somewhat out of favor, replaced by somewhere closer to the route the two existing tunnels have. That means closer to Western Avenue.

The newest Outfall System tunnel was built in 1957. For what seems like an eternity work has been done on a replacement pumping station on Western at Avenida Aprenda. Residents living near there have been told that the fence may be gone within several months, but that has been said many times over a very long period.

Now some useless trivia:

"The Monster", Seaport Luxury Homes, the new multi-story structure on Fitness Drive is NOT part of Ponte Vista and was built having 136 units to be for sale condos. No major zoning changes were necessary because the area was zoned for commercial when the tennis club was located there. It is now not yet completely filled with folks who lease or rent.

If you ever travel along Gaffey Street, south of Capitol, the big area of land having grading and dirt work done there is planned to have 134 'patio-style" condos built there after all the contaminated soil from the old petroleum storage facility is gone and the lawsuit filed by Y and S Auto if over with.

Western Avenue was and still may be the longest continuous Avenue in the world. It begins at its intersection with Paseo Del Mar, by Royal Palms and it continues to a curve where the asphalt becomes Los Feliz near on of the entrances to Griffith Park.

Western Avenue is also found north of Griffith Park near the Burbank area.

Rancho Palos Verdes is home to the fastest moving roadways in the Western Hemisphere.

The 0.8 mile Portuguese Bend slide area sees constant movement of Palos Verdes Drive South and what remains of Cherry Hill Lane.

Older and even some current maps show Cherry Hill Lane north of Palos Verdes Drive South. Now that same lane is south of Palos Verdes Drive South.

The taxpayers of the city of Rancho Palos Verdes are responsible for the continuous repair of the roadbed.

Two of the now four large supermarkets in the city of Rancho Palos Verdes are located along Western Avenue. Trader Joe's and Smart and Final ar the two.

The two other large markets in the city are the Ralph's Fresh Faire on Hawthorne and the brand new Trader Joe's on Hawthorne just by its intersection with Palos Verdes Drive West.

Palos Verdes Drive South becomes Palos Verdes Drive West at a point on the curve at Point Vicente.

Technically, all four corners of the intersection of Trudie Drive/Capitol and Western are in the city of Los Angeles, but only a very few feet on the west side of Western Avenue.

From Palos Verdes Drive North and to the north of that and all the way to Summerland Avenue, Caltrans is responsible for the intersections that have signals.

The Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) controls the signalized intersections of Western Avenue begining at 1st Street to 25th Street.

Approximately 80% of the school age children residing in the Eastview section of R.P.V. attend Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District schools while the two Los Angeles Unified School District schools located within the city of Rancho Palos Verdes have the remaining approximately 20% of elementary and intermediate school age students.

About 600 students are bussed every school day to and from Dodson Intermediate School from communities including Wilmington.

Dodson has a performing arts magnet program so students from other communities including Lomita and Harbor City can attend.

Only ONE metro bus route runs along Western Avenue. It is Line 205 and its northernmost terminus along the Harbor Freeway at the Imperial Metro Station of the 'Century' Freeway.

There technically is no "Century" freeway in the Los Angeles basin. The 105 freeway is the Glenn M. Anderson Freeway named after a long serving Congressman who sought money for the multi-decade project.

O.K. Now you see what it is like to have the author of this blog on Phentermine to help me lose weight. I usually write almost endlessly. Now on what is really an 'upper' I truly write endlessly.

Where oh where is there an editor for me?