This year the Popular Culture Association conference was held in St. Louis, but I had a few days in Los Angeles beforehand. Anaheim: Disneyland (7 images— Disneyland’s entrance and railway station; the Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse statue; Sleeping Beauty’s castle; Storybook Land and the Casey Jones train; It’s a Small World After All building; 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride; the Thunder Mountain ghost train). Los Angeles: Walt Disney Concert Hall designed by Frank O. Gehry (5 images—the last being the ‘plaque’ on Gehry’s Delft rose sculpture dedicated to Lillian Disney); the Museum of Contemporary Art designed by Arata Isozaki; Watts Towers designed and constructed by Simon Rodia (6 images); the house directly opposite Watts Towers; the Anna May Wong caryatid, part of the Hollywood Walk of Fame statue designed by Catherine Hardwicke (2 images); Basil Rathbone’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; Grauman’s Chinese Theatre (1926) designed by Meyer & Holler (3 images); Capitol Records building (1956) designed by Welton Becket; Clifton’s Cafeteria (2 images); Piece Brothers cemetery (8 images—the graves of Marilyn Monroe, Dean Martin, Rodney Dangerfield (with the ‘ghost’ of Derham Groves in the background), Bob Crane and Sigrid Valdis (Colonel Hogan and Hilda from Hogan’s Heroes), Don Knotts (Barney Fife from The Andy Griffith Show), Billy Wilder, and Jack Lemmon). St. Louis: Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts designed by Tadao Ando (2 images); Sun Theatre (1913) designed by Widman and Walsh; the Pruit-Igoe site—which has remained vacant since the disastrous housing project designed in 1950 by Minoru Yamasaki was progressively demolished between 1972-1974 (2 images); Compton Hill water tower (1898) designed by Harry Ellis (2 images); Bissell water tower (1886) designed by William S. Eames (the uncle of Charles Eames); Grand water tower (1871) designed by George I. Barnett; Yit Mei and Javier; model for the ceiling of the lobby at the Magic Chef appliance factory (1947) designed by Isamu Noguchi, in the St. Louis Museum of Art; Gateway to the West (1963-1968) designed by Eero Saarinen (2 images); sample Gateway to the West elevator car; and Union Station (1894) designed by Theodore Link.
Anaheim
Los_Angeles
St._Louis
