Ron's Log

Hinds Pumping Plant

The Hinds Pumping Plant is the pump on the Colorado River Aqueduct that you can easily see from I-10 east of Coachella Valley. Most people call it Hayfield, since that's the name on the exit. But in 1967 it was renamed for Julian Hinds.

This is the last pump on the aqueduct and raises the water up above 1,700 feet so it can cruise the rest of the way into the L.A. area. Here's the Google satellite view of the pumping plant.

All my photos of the Hinds plant can be found here or if you want to see these plus all my photos from the Eagle Mountain Pumping Plant, go here. Here are some samples:

You can see where the reservoir used to be. They used the reservoir only for the first few years, but it was unlined and too much water was lost into the ground.

This used to be the intake from the reservoir.

Gardner looking over the sand trap.

If all nine pumps are turned on the water overshoots the tunnel and carves away at the rocks above. This is the point where the water enters the tunnel under the Little San Bernardinos. It's all downhill from here as the water travels around Desert Hot Springs, under White Water Canyon, under I-10 and then under Mt. San Jacinto.

After passing through the sand trap.

In 1967 it was renamed from "Hayfield Pumping Plant" to "Julian Hinds Pumping Plant."

Before R2D2 and C3PO...

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Eagle Mountain Pumping Plant

As I was moving to Coachella Valley I was driving my rented truck on I-10 approaching from the east when I was startled by the sight of what I now know is the Hayfield pumping plant and could only wonder what it was all about - it was my first time on I-10 east of the valley. A few months later when my friend Carlton was visiting we tried to just boldly drive right up to it, only to be thwarted by security. I can recall going on my second 4WD trip with Great Outdoors when Ed and Gardner stopped to show us one of the many syphons of the Colorado River Aqueduct, thus explaining the tailings that one can see in many places along I-10 and other parts of the aqueducts route.

In the few years since then I've had many opportunities to visit parts of the aqueduct, whether the parts within walking distance right behind Desert Hot Springs, or the far flung isolated parts in the desert like Iron Mountain. You can see some of my photos of the aqueduct here on Flickr and here on Iperntiy. When you explore bits of the aqueduct out in the desert, out where they thought no one would ever admire their craftsmanship, even the discarded bits give evidence that the designers, engineers and workers who built the aqueduct considered themselves the spiritual heirs of those who built Rome's aqueducts.

Here is the Wikipedia page on the aqueduct: 242 miles long, 63 miles are canals, 92 miles are tunnels, the remainder is conduits and syphons. There are only five pumping stations to raise the water up and get it across California to Los Angeles.

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California was created to build the aqueduct. Los Angeles had earlier built the aqueduct from Owens Valley, but that was strictly for the City of Los Angeles. The MWD included surrounding cities. Construction of the aqueduct went on from 1933 to 1941. The presence of the aqueduct was essential in the siting of Pattons' training camps in World War II as he illegally took water from the aqueduct.

Today the aqueduct supplies 1.2 million acre-feet of water to Los Angeles per year. In addition, small amounts are taken in Desert Hot Springs and Whitewater Canyon for aquifer regeneration.

When I got word that a member of Great Outdoors Palm Springs was an employee of the MWD at one of the pumping stations and had offered to lead us on a tour, there was no holding me back. We first went to Eagle Mountain Pumping Plant which you can examine on this Google satellite image. Eagle Mountain is close to Desert Center. You can see Eagle Mountain railroad snaking near it.

Roy, our co-member and leader told us that the MWD is very open to groups that want to come visit a pumping station. I won't address the security systems we went through, but I will say that I was delighted with the freedom we were given once we got inside. We followed along with Roy, but we were free to wander here and there and take photos of EVERYthing. Roy emphasized we could take photos of EVERYthing. The only explicit restriction was not to touch any knobs or levers in the control room.

The basic parts of Eagle Mountain Pumping Plant are these: a residential area for the employees, the aqueduct coming into a reservoir, huge transformers handling the gigantic amounts of electricity coming in from four sources that is used to power the pumps, the pump building itself which has the motors at street level with the actual pumps below, the control center in the pump building, and then the most noticeable part of the whole scene: the pipes rising up more than 400 feet and penetrating the mountainside where the water enters a tunnel to flow eventually to the next pumping plant, Hinds.

After visiting Eagle Mountain we went to Hinds and did it all again. I'll get to those photos later. Now I've got only photos from Eagle Mountain.

Scott's photos can be seen here.

Ed's photos can be seen here.

My photos can be seen here. These are some samples:

Some info on the MWD seal.

Indian Orchard, Massachusetts.

Short videos:

Me at Hayfield

Photo by PSHiker.
That's me, Scott, Ed and Peter at the top of the Hinds pumping station (most people called it "Hayfield") of the Colorado River Aqueduct. We are looking down at the point where the water pumped up is dumped into the portion of the aqueduct that flows through the Little San Bernardinos as they run along the edge of Coachella Valley.

My photos are coming.

Fresh Cactus Photos

Carissa Nwene's Sidewalk

I haven't seen it mentioned yet in either the Desert Sun or Desert Local News that the new sidewalk on Palm Drive between Camino Aventura and Camino Campesino built in response to the hit and run death of Carissa Nwene has been complete for about two weeks. Maybe they talked about this at the city council meeting that I missed.

So I stopped there this morning to get a few photos. The complete set of photos is here, and these are some samples:

How many drivers actually observe this speed limit as they come into Desert Hot Springs? I try to get it down to 45 MPH, but there's always somebody behind me who wants to run right up my ass when I do that, so they pull around and pass.

Carissa's memorial which was moved further back from the road during sidewalk construction.

The new full-size bike lane.

TING Hike in the Mecca Hills

A group that calls itself "TING" comes to visit Palm Springs twice a year and asked me to lead them on a hike in the Mecca Hills today. I was surprised to see how many Mecca Asters are still blooming.

Kangaroo Rats

Scott found a couple of baby kangaroo rats lying on Graham Road near Chuckwalla Road with no mother in sight. He moved them off the road, but their chances of survival seemed slim. Why would these blind babies even be outside the nest?

In the following video you can see and hear the baby's heartbeat:

Kangaroo Rat Pup(0538)

Bradshaw Trail

Yesterday I rode along on a Great Outdoors 4WD outing on part of the Bradshaw Trail. Other than little bits of dirt roads near Dos Palmas, this is the first time I've gotten to see the Bradshaw Trail which is drivable by any vehicle with good ground clearance. We started along the Coachella Canal near Dos Palmas and headed east, paralleling and crossing the Eagle Mountain railroad.

A lot of the Bradshaw Trail runs along the border of the Navy bombing practice range which is lined with warning signs. A few dummy bombs were near the road in order, I suppose, to satisfy the curiosity of travelers and discourage them from trying to explore in the bombing range.

You can see all the photos here, and these are some samples:

Another Cactus

Not sure if those are going to be flower buds or just more cactus. It formed similar, but much smaller buds last year and they eventually dried up and fell away, so I think those were flowers.

Barber Shop

On Pierson Boulevard in Desert Hot Springs.

Dodge Brothers -Detroit-U-S-A-

Photo by shadowplay. Click on the photo to read comments discussing what appears to be a Star of David.

Ricoh G600

Ricoh has announced the G600, a water and dust resistant camera in a shock resistant case. You can even take it underwater as far as 1 meter and it will still work. It's got 10 megapixels with a 5x zoom which is equivalent to 28-140 mm. The lens zooms within the body of the camera, so it never sticks out. It's got a "skew correction" mode to correct for parallax, something I've done a few times in Photoshop. It'd be nice to see how well this works in a camera. Price and availability are not stated.

Official Ricoh page here.

Sidewalks

Some of the new sidewalk construction in Desert Hot Springs:

3rd Street.

2nd Street.

1st Street.

Seen In The Desert

Seven Hours In Fenway Park

Time lapse video using a camera mounted in a corner of Fenway Park. It begins in the afternoon before the game. The camera pans through 90 degrees and an entire ball game before the short film ends after 1 minute and 27 seconds.

Death Valley Snow

Photo by hexod.us. This is snow at 10,000 feet (give or take a thousand) on Telescope Peak in Death Valley National Park. In the distance you see Badwater at something like 290 feet below sea level.

Paris at Night

Huge panorama of Paris at night.

An Update On The Phallic Cactus

More Cactus Blooms

In my yard:

Art at Coachella

Photo by joshc.

Ain't that sump'n. Ever see anything like that before?

UPDATE: Wired has several good photos of art that was on display at Coachella, featuring Big Rig Jig, above. The art display at Coachella does fainly resemble that at Burning Man, in a small, cramped, safe, grass-covered sort of way.

Palm Springs Modern Home Tour - Hurd House

We come to the very last house on the modern home tour, the Hurd house, which is on the Tamarisk Country Club in Rancho Mirage at 37380 Marx Road. I'm almost reluctant to show you the photos of this house because I think they can feed the "golf course syndrome." The golf course syndrome is something that may exist only in my imagination, but this how I imagine it works: Some middle-class couple working their way up through life in some part of the world where things like snow, humidity and flying insects are constant nuisances, entertain themselves by leafing through Better Homes & Gardens or Architectural Digest admiring those over-saturated color photos of beautiful places where they might take their nest egg and retire. Repeatedly, one's eyes are drawn to the images of country club retirement living: great swaths of perfect, green grass lying under an endlessly perfect blue sky, framed by sharp, dramatic mountains. Amidst that the magazine photo shows a strikingly designed home where, on the verandah, we see the happy, gray-haired owners serving chilled cocktails in colorful glasses to a few stylishly dressed, well-tanned friends who are lounging about on all sorts of poolside furniture. In the background of the shot, slightly out of focus, are a few golfers standing around their golf carts. In short, Palm Springs.

So one member of the couple says to the other "Oh, darling, this is where we must retire - to a country club in Palm Springs." "But sweetums," the other one replies, "we don't play golf!" to which the first one replies "Who cares sugar, maybe we can learn. Just look at this! Oh, honey, I must have it." And they can afford it, so five, ten, fifteen years down the road there they are, just like the people in the magazine photo. They never took up golf, but they've got a tan, and some large chunk of their country club dues go to pump a gigantic amount of water out of the aquifer to spray it across the greens that lie around their home, so that the happy couple can take photos of themselves to send to friends they left back in snow country to make them jealous so that they, too, can buy a country club home here.

But that's just my theory to partially explain why we have so very many golf courses here with so very few players on them.

Anyway, the Hurd house, country club living. If you want to retire that way, get here soon.

It's a real party house; probably the real estate people would say it's designed for entertaining. The owners celebrated the place by letting us go without our booties, to actually use the toilets in the house, and to enjoy drinks from the bar and food from a little buffet in the kitchen.

The central axis of the house seems to be a small, internal courtyard with a fountain, surrounded by glass walls on all four sides. Overhead may have been originally open to the sky, but it's covered by shade cloth now. On the four sides of this courtyard are the entrance to the house, the swimming pool area, the "formal" (the biggest, anyway) living room, and the formal dining area. Beyond those areas are more glass walls to the outside, so the effect is glass-on-glass throughout. Here's what our tour booklet says about the house:

Designed by C.H. Barlund and built in 1967, the Hurd House, so named for the original owner, F. E. Hurd, is a fine example of Desert Modern; Barlund, a Finnish architect, also designed the 1967 Dillman House at 40780 Thunderbird Road, Rancho Mirage. In the Hurd House he has combined the design simplicity of Desert Modern with touches of the luxe formalism of International Style to create an exceptional example of the Rancho Mirage country club esthetic.

Situated on almost an acre (.93 acres to be exact), the 6,178 sq. ft. L-shaped Hurd house contains a swimming pool in the courtyard with southerly views to the seventh fairway of the Tamarisk Country Club golf course. Just two fairways over (on the 17th to be precise) is the 1957 house designed by William Cody for Frank Sinatra. Other neighbors included the Marx brothers, Jack Benny and Red Skelton.

The flat roof and slender fascia raised on thin posts dematerialize the house, an effect intensified by the reflection of the landscape in the long band of floor to ceiling windows and sliders, so that you feel you are looking through rather than into the structure. Simple design choices often carry significant consequences and this effect of dematerialization is one of them. Compare the relation of the Hurd overhang resting atop the posts with Cody's design for Abernathy. There the architect chose to suspend the roofline from the posts (not unlike Mies' decision to 'hang' the Farnsworth from steel beams) which adds a dramatic delineation between porch and patio. Barlund chose instead to de-empathize [sic?] the role of the posts - they appear less to offer support than to articulate a rhythmic progression around the three-sided courtyard. Neither roof nor posts prevail here, all is a comfortable stasis. The treatment resembles that Cody used on the
aforementioned Goldberg House on Southridge.

The wide eaves shade a deep patio that runs on all three sides of the courtyard; the long southern side was originally screened. Most of the rooms of the original 5 bedroom, 3.5 bath, design open to this covered area with a view of the pool. The pool, partially nestled in the two projecting wings, projects beyond them leading your attention to views of the fairway and the mountains in the distance.

The new owners purchased the house in 2006, falling in love with the expansive lot, the extensive glass, the wide overhangs and the Hollywood history of Tamarisk Country Club.

The house had not been much changed from its original 1967 iteration, though it had suffered some from lack of maintenance. The new owners sought to accomplish a sensitive restoration with only the kitchen receiving significant alterations. For the rest of the house, it was a case of 'spit and polish' to restore the glamor. Having originally purchased the house with the intention of 'flipping it', the owners instead fell victim to its -- quite evident -- charms, captivated now by the light and vistas from every room.

For the Hurds and now enjoyed by our twenty-first century owners, Barlund* designed a simple stylish hallmark in perfect harmony with the gracious life style of the storied country club and golf course surrounding it.

The house is a testament to another time when Hollywood's stars wandered the desert landscape, golfed with the great, partied with peers, drank until dawn, while the rest of us, daydreamed, the thoroughly-thumbed copy of the latest Photoplay dangling deliriously at our slumbering side.

[*Note that the house has been attributed to the firm of Patten & Wild; information on them has proven impossible to come by. The plans in the possession of the current owners, while including the name Patten & Wild, do show that the plans were drawn by CH Barlund, S.A.F.A. As the recognized architect of at least one other Rancho Mirage house, Barlund is likely a better attribution. There is no record of either a Patten or a Wild at AIA headquarters in Washington, D.C.]

Go here to see all my photos of the Hurd house or here to see photos from all eight houses on the tour. These are a sample:

Fisheye

Back when I led that naked hike for money, one of the photographers surprised me when he whipped out a cheap, little fisheye film camera. Said he got it at Urban Outfitters, and here's the page where you can see it and buy it. I bought one and have done my first batch of photos. The lens quality is much better than I had expected, based on the sample photos that Lomo sends along with it. The detachable viewfinder is cute, but not too helpful. The field of view on this camera (and the viewfinder) is about 170° so when you look through the viewfinder the lens below it fills about a quarter of the image you see. Most of the photos you see were shot without any viewfinder. I just pointed the camera in the general direction of the subject and clicked. The camera has two shutter speeds: bulb and whatever the other one is. The aperture is whatever it is. The only variable the photographer can play with is the film. They recommend high speed film, and I used ASA 200 for these shots.

The eastern chapel at Camp Iron Mountain.
	A cactus in my backyard.
The Lucky 7 Well along Dillon Road.

Dos Palmas Fire Aftermath

There was a fire in Dos Palmas April 13-15. According to the Desert Sun more than 300 acres burned. Yesterday, Pat and I headed out there to see the damage for ourselves. To our great fortune, in the parking area when we got there was a team of fire recovery people headed up by a BLM employee who talked to us. There is still no caretaker at Rancho Dos Palmas, he told us, and then he whipped out a big aerial photo of the preserve. The fire burned across most of the overgrown area east of Rancho Dos Palmas. Here's a map:

The area I've colored red is what burned. The green area is Rancho Dos Palmas and the old fish ponds nearby. That area, which is enclosed within barbed wire fences and managed by the Center for Natural Lands Management was NOT burned. That's the area where most of our earlier hikes have been. The red line shows where Pat and I hiked yesterday. You can see we only went into a small corner of the burned area. We stayed in the fish ponds area where the ground was solid enough to walk on. Further out we would have been walking in a muddy marsh.

The Google satellite view of Dos Palmas can be seen here.

Photos from my earlier visits to Dos Palmas can be seen here, here, and here.

I expect recovery from this fire will be fairly rapid, since palm trees are adapted to fire, and the area is VERY wet. Too bad the fire probably didn't kill any tamarisk trees.

My complete set of photos from yesterday's visit can be seen here, and these are a few samples:

This is equipment for a replanting project that's been going on for awhile. It didn't look like the fire got to any of the new plantings.

More Identity, Please

Here's another flowering tree that I hope one of my readers can identify. I saw these at the Dos Palmas Preserve, east of the Salton Sea. Is it some variety of mesquite or acacia?

Palm Springs Modern Home Tour - Menrad House

The penultimate house on the modern home tour was the Menrad house at 1070 Apache in Palm Springs. You can see all my photos of the Menrad house here, and all my photos from this tour here. These are some of the Menrad house:

Here's the description of the Menrad house from the tour booklet:

The Menrad House

The Alexander Company, run by father and son George and Bob Alexander, were tract homebuilders in the San Fernando Valley. In 1955, they hired a young architectural team; Dan Palmer and William Krisel to design a tract in the San Fernando Valley called Corbin Palms. These were of a modern design and sold well and made the company more money than traditional designs.

In 1956, Bob Alexander decided that there was too much competition for homebuilders in the San Fernando Valley and he decided to look to Palm Springs. Their first project here was the Ocotillo Lodge and it too was designed by Palmer and Krisel. The hotel was located in front of what would become the Twin Palms Neighborhood. After the hotel was finished, they decided to try a small tract of homes behind Ocotillo. Palm Springs was a place of custom vacation homes, so this was really a new concept for the desert. Mr. Krisel had just completed his own custom home in Brentwood, which Bob Alexander really liked. The Alexanders specified that certain things in this new home also be incorporated into the tract houses then under consideration for Palm Springs. So lots of clerestory windows, an atrium in the master bedroom and the post and beam construction technique were incorporated into the new project.

In 1957 the first homes were completed. Even though the floor plans were essentially all the same 40 x 40 foot square, the different rooflines, rotation of the home on the lot and unique exterior finishes gave the homes a custom look. There was no brochure and no advertisement ever created, but the homes sold like hot cakes, many to guests of the Ocotillo. They were priced at around the $30,000 range, which was not particularly cheap for the time and many of the buyers were doctors, lawyers, successful people in entertainment and other captains of industry. This was their first taste of desert resort living, and many would move on to more elaborate custom homes around golf courses. However, Palmer and Krisel were the first ones to create in Palm Springs a modern, custom-like tract that was appreciated by the buyer and profitable for the builder. With Twin Palms, the Alexanders started something that would forever change the face of Palm Springs. Their work, and that of other builders such as Fey and Meiselman, who replicated their concept of the clean lined modern tract home, caused a rapid increase in the population of the city during the post-war period.

The Alexander Company went on to build many more homes in Palm Springs, with Palmer and Krisel and other architects as well. Later examples no longer included the atrium. And to lower the costs, the HVAC, which was unique at that time for combining heating and air and dueling it through the foundation, (an article on this pioneering system was written in Progressive Architecture) moved from the foundation slab into soffits which had the effect of lowering entry and hall ceilings and changing the overall open effect of the original design. After many years of neglect, these homes are now beloved icons of the desert.

This example of a Palmer and Krisel home was built in the first of three tracts of homes, originally called Smoketree Valley Estates, now known as Twin Palms. This house is mostly in original condition. The kitchen, which was originally enclosed, had been remodeled in the 1980's. It has since been re-imagined and designed by architectural designer Phillip K. Smith using a Julius Shulman photograph of the original P & K design as a guide. The bathrooms have had the cabinetry rebuilt as originally designed. Ninety percent of the furniture seen in the house today was available for purchase at the time the house was built. William Krisel, also a landscape architect, designed the front landscaping in 2006.

Fullerton Fox Theater

While walking around Fullerton my eyes were drawn to old, closed Fox Theatre. Light wasn't good for me to get much in the way of photos, but here are three:

Came home and Googled it and found its own website where I saw that occasionally movies are projected on the outside back wall of the building, which explained the marquee announcing movies. I tried to imagine how they could pack a crowd inside a structurally unsound building.

Here Paul McElligott has photos taken of the interior of the building, and if you follow this search you'll find more photos of the Fox Theatre in Fullerton.

The theater was built in 1925 and renamed the Fox Theatre in 1930. It was closed and abandoned in 1987. It got local landmark status in 1990 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in October 2006.

Here's the L.A. Times story on the theater's restoration. $9 million has been raised to pay for it, but the project remains a whopping $17 million short of its goal! The city of Fullerton has made $3 million available. City Councilmember Richard Jones sounds like a practical man with hardly a crumb of romance in his soul:

Councilman Richard Jones, the only council member to vote against the loan, said he didn't understand why the city should pour any more money into the Fox.

"I want this to fly. It could be a crown jewel for our city that people would gather around," Jones said.

"But I don't want it to suck the city's resources. I don't want to keep spending money on something that could be the Titanic."

Jones questions whether restoring a structure built in 1925 is worth the large investment.

"I know a lot of people would scream, holler and cry if we tore down this 1920s theater," he said.

"But if you take a bulldozer and start from scratch, it wouldn't take nearly as much to build and you could still make it look like the traditionalists want it to look."

The foundation that owns the theater hopes to have it restored for a grand re-opening in 2010. "Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt, both Fullerton natives, have expressed interest in performing at the opening, according to reports."

Identity Please?

Here are some photos of a tree I saw on the street in Fullerton on Friday. I don't know what it is, but I'm sure it will be easy for some of my readers to identify.

Hiking in Joshua Tree

Great Outdoors is having a campout in Joshua Tree National Park this weekend. I went up and joined them on hikes on Ryan Mountain and in Hidden Valley yesterday. The weather was perfect, with great air clarity for good views from the peak of Ryan Mountain. Some pics:

More photos here.

Over in Fullerton

One of my great nieces, Katrina from Idaho, has been over in the Anaheim area for the last few days to participate in a choir festival. I went over to hear her choirs perform on Friday at Fullerton College in Fullerton. She's from a small town and her high school has only 900 students, so it was pretty impressive that they managed to send more than a hundred students down here by bus(!) to perform.

On their first day here they were taken to Newport Beach where the Sunglass Hut seemed to be a major hit, as there is a deficiency of sunglasses in Idaho. Many of the students thought they could get a tan in one day at the beach by skipping the sunblock. Lessons were learned. After performing on Friday, they were hitting Disneyland on Saturday and then from there immediately heading back to Idaho, traveling all night and much of today to get home. I hope somebody took a good headcount before they left, as every one of them I talked to wanted to stay here in southern California. A couple of photos:

Her genes come from the short side of the family; she's 15 years old.

Katrina in the middle posing with a couple of her classmates. Note the eyewear.

The photo below is of a show choir from Esperanza High School in Anaheim. Not Katrina's high school, but I thought the pink jackets were quite impressive. I wonder if I contributed to the "Friends Of Esperanza High Music Department" could I get one of them in my size.

Damn These Cacti!

This flower appeared today on another cactus that's been growing in my front yard for at least three years, but this is the first time it's bloomed.

Cactus Doing Well

I transplanted a single cactus pad into the ground about a year ago, and look how well this thing is doing now!

Palm Springs Modern Home Tour - J. Porter Clark House

Oh no, I didn't forget the modern home tour. We still have three houses to look at. I hope you've been taking notes, because there will be a rigorous exam when we finish!

The fifth house on the tour was the J. Porter Clark house at 1200 Paseo El Mirador, Palm Springs. We weren't allowed to go inside this house, either due to its delicate state, or our hefty weight. Here are a few pics:

You can see all my photos of the J. Porter Clark house here.

Here's what the tour organizers told us about the Clark house:

The Clark Residence

By the end of the 1930's the population of Palm Springs had more than tripled, from a little over 1,000 people in 1930 to about 3,400. That staggering growth rate was accompanied by a great burst of Modernism by the end of the decade. The Kocher-Samson Building, by Albert Frey and A. Lawrence Kocher, was completed in 1934 (760 N. Palm Canyon Drive). Completed in 1937, the Grace Miller House is a diminutive temple for perfervid believers in that apodictic modernist deity, architect Richard Neutra. (Really, who's more infallible, Neutra or the pope? Rest assured that the true Holy Trinity is, incontrovertibly, Mies, Kahn and Corbu.)

Then in 1939 came the irresistibly winsome house designed and built by John Porter dark, a bold metal and glass aerie poised on the slightest of daringly canted piers, mid-air over a desert landscape, his first bachelor home and then family home, enjoyed until he died in 1990.

When you look at the house today, you must reconstruct it in stages. Look initially at only the simple two story structure, eliminating everything to the east, including the rain guard over the stairs, for that was the starting point. What a perfect volume it is, perhaps 800 sq. ft. of living space; the upstairs comprised the living room, kitchen, bedroom and bath. The living room opened to the the east balcony with large windows to the south and east, ribbon windows on the north. The bedroom, (now the dining room) opened to the west with captivating views of the mountains. A small galley kitchen shared the line of ribbon windows on the north side as did the bathroom (sacrificed in a later remodel to enlarge the kitchen).

Below these enveloping spaces was the carport and a covered porch (where today you can see the Mexican fetish spirits of J. P. and Louisa dark hanging on the wall in appropriate filial devotion.) It is easy to picture the real Clarks on the balcony in the late afternoon, the hot sun behind the house to the west, a breeze across the desert ruffling the leaves of that great American elm (alive even today though struggling; sad to report, its twin, which stood just to the east, died just five years ago; the carcass recently removed, after it toppled over in the wind).

The Clark's lot was carved from acreage that had been part of the El Mirador Hotel property, illustrious in the 1920's, bankrupted in 1932 due to the depression, then purchased and re-glamorized by Warren Pinney. Two other owners were offered the same opportunity to build on the old property; they were, fanfare with drum roll for Modernist deity worshippers, Albert Frey, who built his radical Frey I here in 1940; and E. Stewart Williams, who built his own mesmeric residence here in 1956.

Then as now, a small patch of grass enveloped the dark house, seemingly holding the desert at bay; the current homeowners " Clark's youngest son, his wife and their three daughters, residents since 1991" are working to restore the desert landscape, hence the request that you not cross it to reach the house, but follow the outlines of the old driveway. Cars entering the property followed that curve to the gravel car park area by the carport. There was no pool then, it came in 1980. Only the pristine metal building rising from the contained plot of green, that slash of red deck an aggressive structural irruption or a provocative come-up-and-see-me-sometime.

As you look inside the living room from the balcony, note the original hi-fi cabinet and globe lamp; the Eames chairs and the lamps by the couch are original to the house. Carpeting covers what was the original maroon linoleum floor.

With children came pressures for expansion; and the solution, as devised by dark, was quite simple: a series of three bedrooms in a one story wing attached only by the rhythmic reach of that dramatically suspended rain guard. Thus the bedrooms were added in 1946, an unprepossessing but extremely comfortable one-room deep structure that looks like the wake to the two story ship in front of it. (The storage area was added in 1972).

Note that on the upper level the corrugation is aligned vertically; on the ground level it is horizontal, a simple trick to heighten the verticality of the upper structure and increase the visual impact of the lower without overbuilding the footprint.

The flat planes of glass and corrugated metal separating bedrooms from living area act less as connecting planes than as an artful articulation of interior and exterior, where exterior is the new entry court to the north. The 'front door' is that glass slider that lets you 'in' off the covered porch with its long cantilever supported by that totally improbable steel pipe. It's like walking into a one-walled atrium, a very expansive atrium.

If you walk out the 'front door' to the new entry court on the north side of the house, note that the fountain was added in 1966. Looking at the early structure, you can see where a stair came down the side from the entrance balcony. That stair was removed and the new stair added to the west of the house to provide access to the dining area and kitchen when the house was enlarged in 1946.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Friday. I hadn't been there in probably 20 years or so. I remembered certain pieces, but did not remember my way around at all. So, without a guide, and without referencing any of the maps in the museum, I simply wandered to whatever seemed interesting at the moment. It was a wonderful time! A bit like Burning Man, except I had clothes on and was not riding a bike. I never knew what I was going to see around the next corner. I went crazy with the photos. Below are some of them, but you can get to the complete set by following this link.

Hercules in youth and with beard.

Demidoff Vase.

Caligula.

This "Crucifixion" by Dali was the only piece of relgious art on display in our house as I was growing up.

Temple of Dendur.

Ugolino And His Sons.

Asmat Bis Poles: Form and Imagery Each Asmat bis pole is carved from a single piece of wood. To create the pole's distinctive form, carvers select trees with plank-like buttress roots. During carving, all but one of the roots are removed, and the tree is inverted, so that the remaining root forms the wing-like projection (cemen) at the top. Bis poles consist of several components. The main section (bis anakat) with the carved figures portrays the deceased individual for whom the pole is named and other recently deceased relatives. The cemen represents the pole's phallus and incorporates motifs symbolic of headhunting, which is also associated with fertility. The lower portion of the pole is called the ci (canoe) and at times depicts the canoe that transported the ancestors to the afterworld (safan). The pointed base (bino) is often inserted into the ground.

PIPE ORGAN Boston, 1830 Thomas Appleton (1785-1872) The oldest and finest extant product of the renowned Boston craftsman, Thomas Appleton. Built in 1830. perhaps for South Church in Hartford, Connecticut, it was reinstalled by Emmons Howard in 1883 at Sacred Heart Church in Plains, Pennsylvania, where it was discovered unused and neglected in 1980. The organ's conservative tonal design and mahogany Greek revival case reflect British models of the late 18th century. Standing over 15 feet tall, with gold-leafed facade pipes (diapasons), the organ comprises 16 ranks, totaling 836 pipes, two 58-tone manuals and a 27-note pedalboard, the latter replacing a shorter original. A hand-pump on the organ's right side supplies wind to the bellows. The pipes of the upper manual are mainly enclosed in an elevated box with louvres that can be opened by means of a pedal for dynamic expression. The rest of the manual pipes are disposed above the recessed console, while the blowing apparatus and key and stop mechanisms occupy the lower part of the case. The pedal rank rests on a separate windchest behind the case. Tuning is in unequal temperament, pitched at A=435.7 Hz. Appleton's carving and joinery are particularly skillful. Before being hired by the prominent organ builder William Goodrich in 1807, Appleton had served an apprenticeship with the cabinetmaker Elisha Larned, doubtless under the influence of his father, a house carpenter. Following a period of partnership with the piano makers Hayt and Alpheus Babcock, Appleton opened his own shop in 1820. In 1839 the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics Association awarded him a gold medal, and his reputation continued to grow until he retired in 1869, by which time his numerous instruments were serving churches as distant as California and South Carolina.

Coming Into Palm Springs

We flew over the Grand Canyon during my flight from Denver to Palm Springs. The time of day would have been excellent for photos, but there was a lot of haze in the air, so none of the photos look good. Too bad, because we had a good view of the tourist spots at the South Rim.

Continuing into California I spotted Danby Dry Lake, which is the biggest feature near the Iron Mountain pumping station on the Colorado River Aqueduct next to where Camp Iron Mountain was located during World War II. I took several shots there, and have added notes to all of them to help draw your attention to the details I was able to pick out. Here's one of Iron Mountain.

Click it to get the annotated version.

Less romantic, and more familiar was Cathedral City Cove.

It's got notes too, but maybe you don't even need them to find CCBC and other landmarks.

Highland Falls

I got this photo during take-off from Palm Springs last week. The graded area is the southern half of what was to be Highland Falls, a double-golf course residential development at the west end of Pierson Boulevard. The Colorado River Aqueduct can be clearly seen running across the photo below the graded area. In addition, the abandoned naked resort, the so-called "Nude Bowl" is visible in the foothills behind the graded area. Click on the image (or here) to go to Ipernity where I have added notes to the photo highlighting these features as well as others.

Coney Island

Coney Island was, as I expected, a bit run down. The boardwalk itself is in pretty good condition, but the amusement park structures and rides look like they couldn't pass any tough inspections. Still, despite the worn appearance and the sparse crowd, the few little kids that were there seemed to love it like crazy! On many rides there was only one kid, but that didn't seem to bother any of them. I had a hot dog at Nathan's, so now I can say I've done that. The subway stop at Coney Island has an actual, open and functioning restroom. Naturally, it was filthy, but an open subway restroom! Don't see many of those in NYC! Here are some of my Coney Island photos:

"Shoot The Freak," which looks like a junky, half empty lot where you could shoot somebody with paintballs.

A Coney Island lifeguard station. So friendly, accessible and inviting! I suspect their lifeguards wear SWAT outfits.

You can see the rest of my Coney Island photos here, along with all my photos from this trip to New York.

More Photos Around Manhattan

The view from my room at the Y.

Andy and Carlton.

Fifth Avenue shopping with nipples.

More Tom Otterness.

One of those outdoor high-def TVs.

Standing in line for The Daily Show.

New York Public Library

Apple - Fifth Avenue

I didn't get a chance to visit the Soho location, but I think if you're goal is serious shopping for an Apple product, the 14th Avenue location is better than the famous Fifth Avenue location. OTOH, if you want 24-hour, 365-day borging to the anti-christ, that would be Fifth Avenue. I did breeze through a couple of times to briefly check email. Carlton and I hit the 14th Avenue store to play with a MacBook Air and an iPhone. Hey, howthafuck do you close a window or go back when using Safari on an iPhone? I couldn't figure it out.

BTW, has anyone visited the Chinese factory where they're churning out these glass spiral staircases?

Inside The Metropolitan Opera House

Signs of Satyagraha

The NY Times pre-performance report on Satyagraha at the Met. And here a review of the performance by a critic who doesn't seem to like Philip Glass, oh dear.

But through it all was this annoying music, sticking to the ear like gum to a shoe. And the restlessness was heightened by the Met's curious decision not to translate Constance de Jong's Sanskrit libretto on the company's seat-back title system, instead occasionally projecting words onto the sets, where they often were hard to read. That miscalculation made an already long evening of nearly 4 hours seem interminable.

I've listened to Satyagraha about a zillion times and never felt the need to have the Sanskrit translated.

Buy an MP3 here.

UPDATE: The NY Times review of Satyagraha.

The libretto, assembled by the novelist Constance DeJong, consists of philosophical sayings from the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred Hindu epic poem. Mr. Glass honors the text by keeping it in the original Sanskrit and setting every syllable clearly. This production dispenses with Met Titles on the theory that the audience would actually be distracted by paying attention to the words, which at best serve as commentary. Instead key phrases in English are projected on a semicircular corrugated wall that forms the backdrop of the production’s gritty and elemental set.

"Satyagraha" invites you to turn off the part of your brain that looks for linear narrative and literal meaning in a musical drama and enter a contemplative state — not hard to do during the most mesmerizing parts of the opera, especially in this sensitive performance. For example, in the hauntingly mystical opening scene when Gandhi reflects on a battle between two royal families depicted in the Bhagavad-Gita, Mr. Croft, in his plaintive voice, sang the closest the score comes to a wistful folk song while undulant riffs wound through the lower strings.

NYC Photos

Sorry folks, not much time for updating. I am, however, uploading photos, which you can view as they come along. At the moment I'm sitting out on Central Park West sucking off some kind person's free, unsecured wi-fi signal. In a bit, Carlton will be escorting me to Coney Island.

Palm Springs Modern Home Tour - Sieroty House

Next on our tour of homes was the Sieroty house at 695 Vereda Sur, Palm Springs. Here's the info from our tour booklet:

During 1938, Mr. and Mrs. Julian Sieroty brought their family to vacation in Palm Springs. They rented a house and fell in love with the desert. That house was the Halberg house, and it was designed and built in 1936 by Albert Frey. Mr. Sieroty had purchased some property three blocks away from the rental house and asked Mr. Frey to replicate the house on his lot.

Though the Halberg House is completely altered, the Sieroty House, its twin, is fortunately here for us to view today. To quote from Rosa, "Frey designed a planar roof that extended over the volume of the house and carport to shield the windows from the sun. The volume of the house was broken up in elevation by the articulation of the fireplace and windows."

For its time, this house was very avant-garde. This house was completed in 1941 and was celebrated with a Thanksgiving dinner to which Albert Frey was invited. This house is a wonderful example of Frey's early desert work which was done primarily in the moderne style. At the time, the house stood alone in the landscape. Albert Frey was a great colorist and the original rental house was a bit more daring in the use of interior colors. Beth Meltzer says that each wall was a different color and her parents were not quite ready for that. However you will see some of Frey's influence in the current color schemes of the bedrooms. The house has very large windows in the living room, unusual for the time but influenced by the modern notion of bringing outdoors in. This allowed Frey to capture views of the surrounding dunes and the mountains in the distance. The family did not spend much time at the house in the early years, as naval personnel working at the nearby hospital that had been converted from the El Mirador Hotel occupied it.

After the war, the house was enjoyed for many years by the Sieroty family and many friends and relations. With time, the living room glass walls were extended out to the edge of the covered patio and made into sliders and a staircase to a rooftop sunbathing deck was removed. In the 1950's, Chester "Cactus Slim" Moorten was commissioned to do the cactus garden and brought in many of the boulders seen on the property. The pool was added as well.

As time went on, however, the family's use of the house decreased. By the 1980s, Beth Meltzer says the house had gone to seed. Beth and her brother Alan, who had inherited the property, decided to restore it. They wondered if Albert Frey was still around. They decided to give him a call and to their delight, he was very willing to help them with the project. By 1989, the restoration was complete and was celebrated with a Thanksgiving dinner to which Frey was again invited. This house, perfectly preserved, is a wonderful capsule of a time gone by when Palm Springs was all about horseback riding and tennis and the post-war boom of mid-century tract homes was still 15 years away.

All my photos of the Sieroty house can be seen here. This is a link to the collection of all my photos from the tour. Here are some of my photos of the Sieroty house:

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Very Local Cactus Flowers

Now I only have to walk a few steps to see flowering cacti.

The Eyes Of Dick

Genuine photo on the Whitehouse.gov site. Check it out. I haven't fiddled it a bit.

Palm Springs Modern Home Tour - Abernathy House

After strengthening ourselves with a healthy lunch, we all descended on the Abernathy House at 611 Phillips Road, Palm Springs. Here's what our booklet told us about the house (slightly edited):

In the Abernathy House, 1962, built for Ralph Abernathy and his second wife, Madge Phillips, William F. Cody eschews the tight rectilinear classicism of Goldberg in favor of a loosely woven fabric of sumptuous pavilions, a compound of organic perfection.

The house is a beauty. It has all of the Cody touches that we expect, the impossibly attenuated line of the colonnade fascia. The slump stone, pure white; its robust horizontality the antithesis of the strict grey verticality of the wood siding. The formality of the forecourt. The simple pavilion-hipped roof lines, most perfectly expressed in the car shelter, undulating across the grounds with rigorous discipline.

If Frey and Wexler thrust wall planes past the habitable footprint making a visual claim to the outside, Cody is much more controlled here. Outside is out there, in here is inside; they meet at the physical envelope but they don't intermingle; with Cody, even when walls are glass and slide open, you know when you're inside and when you're not. He is a master of envelopment, of engendering comfort and security. In Cody's work, there is a physical articulation of sense of place, belongingness, an affinity, in the purely biochemical meaning translated into architecture. He makes a house a home, no matter how