If you have doubts whether USC will raise enough money for proper Coliseum renovations, consider that it will break ground on the $1 billion University Village project this summer. Of course all the more reason it doesn’t need to charge $4,000 for a personal-seat license at the Coliseum.
More restrooms for bucket to clean. Nice.
Goodbye, horrible grocery store. Goodbye, horrible movie theater. Goodbye, strange food court. Goodbye, Denny’s that used to be a Bank of America. Goodbye to the remaining Bank of America location that got held up on a regular basis, including one robbery that led to the uncovering of the Rampart scandal. Goodbye, laundromat where we used to go after a homeless guy took a dump in our apartment building’s laundry room and the landlord wouldn’t bother to clean it up. Goodbye, Wendy’s — I have nothing bad to say about you.
SUCC: the squalid University. Thanks for the memories.
When I was at USC, we would go to Westwood for the record stores and movie theaters, but now those stores have vanished, and half the theaters are gone. The Westwood homeowners hate the idea of businesses that appeal to college kids. L.A. is just a strange place to go to college.
Dont be jealous. You are not nice.
Whoa…What building did you live in?
I spent that summer in an awful converted house on 30th Street between Orchard and McClintock. I came down with mono and spent half the summer sitting around watching trashy movies rented from the old Tempo record store over at the UV.
The UV might have been a dump, but it served a purpose for those of us who didn’t own cars. I have seen it go through a lot of incarnations – from the 501 Club (“if you are tall enough to put your money on the bar, we’ll serve you”), 32nd Street Cafe, Perry’s Pizza, Silverwoods, 32nd Street Market (what a mess),to the businesses that survived it all – 31 Flavors, Burger King, the BofA branch, the University Cinema (it was a neat place for about the first 3 months after it opened). The UV idea seemed like it should have worked – the concept never quite realized its full potential because the UV tried to serve two different customer bases with very different needs. It will be interesting to see what SC replaces it with. From the artists’ renderings, it looks like what is becoming a cookie cutter template from the university architect’s office. Hope it works out better for the university than the UV did.
P.S. the Denny’s was originally a Security Pacific branch. Remained a BofA branch for a short period after BofA bought Security Pacific.
Sounds like you were around before I got there. When I was in school, there was a short-lived brew pub at the UV that was actually pretty good, but the prices were above what most college kids could realistically pay for beer. Everything else there just always seemed to be sub-par in one way or another. I did shop at the 32 when I was a sophomore; my favorite memory of that place is the giant bug-zapper that hung on the wall over the butcher’s counter, encrusted with the shells of thousands of dead bugs. Did they ever clean that thing? I was so happy when they finally opened the Ralph’s at Vermont/Adams.
You’re right about the two very different customer bases. Judging by the new businesses that have appeared near the campus in recent years (seemingly oriented purely toward the students and faculty, from what I’ve seen), and the surging home prices in the more desirable areas of the city, it seems like the forces of gentrification have at long last gathered enough strength to begin the transformation of that neighborhood, and I imagine that the new UV will have little interest in serving both customer bases, no matter what the school is saying now.
The new version has a Las Vegas look in the drawings, but then again I won’t miss the old UV defensive architecture with its gates, balconies, and raised walkways that seemed designed to facilitate the quelling of riots.
I remember that brew pub; haven’t thought about that place in years!
Thanks for the walk down memory lane, WEB!
I think you meant the ‘901 Club’ – 501 West Jefferson was over at Flower near where Galen is today.
It is posts such as this where I wish that Scottie had majored in Business, instead of Journalism…..
I was just thinking that I wish he became a Trappist monk and took a vow of silence.
Wolf- do something constructive rather and destructive and start a formal campaign against PSL.
Ronny baby, what’s holding you up from starting “a formal campaign against PSL.”?
No disrespect to Mr. Fleishman, but Wolf is the one with the high profile platform, although Scottie is far more comfortable with complaining about things, rather than constructively initiate any meaningful change….
Because if he were successful, you wouldn’t have the same issue on which to post daily. Lord knows you wouldn’t want to come up with new material….the whole old dog, new tricks thing
USC: More money than God!!
There was this big empty ‘brownfield’ just north on Hoover @ 30th Street where a pack of dogs used to ‘nest’ – you could see that strange small Protestant church with the light on top which Phil Proctor used in “Don’t Squash That Dwarf Hand Me The Pliers” for the Firesign Theater album remember boyos?
“Oh blinding light…oh light that blinds…. I cannot see… look out for me!”
good ole’ Maury’s 32nd Street market – wooden all over especially the front entrance with that dutch door. The 901 was next to the LAFD station and always packed on Thursday nights because there were no night classes the next day. The only movie house within 3 miles or more was that dive over on Vermont next to the Trojan Bowl right across from the old post office at Jeff and Vermont. The capper was that dumpy Safeway across from El Rey’s on the SE corner of Vermont and Jeff – used to drag our laundry west on Adamas to this laundromat just past Normandie on the north side – there’s an old protestant church and got turned into a mosque as I recall. Heck I remember when at McClintock and 35th there was this empty field looking west towards Vermont with this big squat palm tree – nothing
I spent one year on Orchard 2500 block – we had three homicides there in 6 mos. – yup all family related – everything has changed for the better and oneillwatch has it down – Westwood – the old Raphs turned into that glorified gin mill ‘Bratskellar’ – go in there and wait until some ‘brewie’ went off on Troy and then go at ’em hard.
Tommy runs up Hoover in the fog and cold
Where is the requisite steel fencing?
are they going with the artificial urine odor, or the original campus version?