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Wednesday, October 28, 2009 – Everyone Welcome
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Way south of Hollywood and the city, at southern tip of Los Angeles County, is San Pedro and the Port of Los Angeles. San Pedro is Croatian and Portuguese and Norwegian and Greek and Italian and Central American – a working port, with no glitz and no bling. A visit there will clear your head of nonsense.
And this is a typical corner in San Pedro, 13th and Pacific. The mural there is Gabrielino Nation: Spirit of the Sage, 1995, by Johanna Poething, Commissioned by Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC). And to explain, the Tongva were the Native American people who inhabited the area in and around Los Angeles before the arrival of Europeans. Tongva means "people of the earth" in the Tongva language (a Uto-Aztecan language) but the Spanish would have nothing to do with that. They named the local tribes after nearby missions, so they were called the Gabrieleño, Gabrielino, or San Gabrieleño, in reference to Mission San Gabriel Archangel. And then they were gone. But they're not forgotten.
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Cool poster, right?
It's next to the mural, as the mural was painted on the wall of the building that houses Random Lengths, the alternative newspaper in town. Read about it here and here – it's pro-labor in general and ILWU in particular, liberal and Democrat and Green. The editor, James Allen, is a bit of a San Pedro legend.
But Pedro was always a workers-of-the-world union town. Joe Hill got his start here.
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But no one is left out. Across the street is an old Streamline Moderne theater from the early thirties, now La Zona Rosa (The Red Zone) –
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And at this same corner you'll find Slavko's Harbor Poultry – 1224 Pacific Avenue – a local institution that has been here forever. But this isn't hip Hollywood. The big retro chicken was never meant to be ironic. This town doesn't do pop-art camp irony. It is what it is. Tell them it's cleverly surreal and very sly and they tell you, no, it's a giant chicken.
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And they have mural too –
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All text and photos unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 - Alan M. Pavlik
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