Contents

• High Anxiety -- Cover feature on the tense last days of the Internet boom in Los Angeles. I was assigned the story during the height of the dot-com gold rush, only to witness most of my sources go bankrupt. The resulting story, the anchor of a package called "LA-Dot-Com," won a 1999 award from the L.A. Press Club for best feature story. • Cool Millions -- Feature about entrepreneurs who capitalized on the hip reputation of Los Angeles' Eastside. As the headline said: “Getting rich in an area that prides itself on being the anti-Westside can get complicated. How do you hang on to your street cred when the natives blame you for selling their little piece of boho rhapsody down the river?" • Bowled Over -- Front-of-the-book feature about a movement to save an unlikely architectual monument: the Holiday Bowl. This Crenshaw-district bowling alley is one of dozens of fast-disapearing diners, drive-ins and other Googie monuments. Sad, sad, sad. • But is it Garbage? -- Another story of an endangered pop landmark, this one a crumbling roadside attraction in Simi Valley called Bottle Village. I first wrote about the place as a beat news reporter for the Daily news in the Valley but returned with friends a few times afterward – it truly is a a magical, spooky and affecting place. So far, neither the taxman nor the neighbors have managed to bulldoze it, thanks entirely to a group of artsy out-of-towners, God bless ‘em.

High Anxiety

The days of wine and IPOs of six months ago a fading memory, L.A.'s dot-coms are suddenly fighting for their livelihoods. September, 2000 John Collier should be basking in this moment. Standing on a red carpet, his face lit by banks of swiveling klieg lights, Collier watches as a pair of sweet young things in snakeskin pants glide through the front door of the West Hollywood nightclub rented out tonight for the launch of Icebox, an animation Web site he dreamed up a year ago while sitting at a kitchen table with an old Harvard writing buddy. "Everything about this is bigger than we ever planned," says Collier, one of Icebox's four cofounders and a television writer whose credits include The Simpsons. "We planned on getting 8 writers to contribute -- we ended up getting 60. We planned on raising a million. We got $17 million." Inside, a whirlpool of Web-shop workers, development execs and animators swirls around a 10-foot-long ice statue molded into the company's logo. Run-D.M.C., hired as the evening's entertainment, plays for a packed house of 1,300 from the entertainment and Internet arenas -- EarthLink founder Sky Dayton is nibbling a stick of satay across the room from Rod Stewart; Tori Spelling is lounging in the back near Mike Judge. The bar is open, the hors d'oeuvres are plentiful, and the guests are madly cross-pollinating. Collier is showing few signs of satisfaction. In fact, he's looking downright depressed. "I would have preferred to charge admission for this," he says. "I see an open bar and my heart just stops." Call it a symptom of the new Internet anxiety. All across L.A., Internet execs who just months ago were posing for Helmut Newton portraits and pontificating on their part in the information revolution are suddenly scrutinizing bar tabs and retooling business models. Meanwhile, capital is fast drying up on a whole category of locally produced Web attractions that were billed as the beginning of a new era of interactive entertainment. "We knew the bubble was going to burst sometime," says Web consultant Liz Heller, doyenne of L.A.'s digital set and former vice president of new media at Capitol Records. "All we talked about before April was `When's it going to happen?' Then it happened, and we were all, like, `waaaaaah!'" The meltdown of the Nasdaq in April marked a turning point for the whole wired economy, but nowhere has the depression been felt more keenly than in the region boosters call "the digital coast." That's because the very things that Hollywood is so good at -- spending money! looking fabulous! making mediocre television! -- have suddenly become big no-no's in the world of new media. Frugality is in, along with a concept altogether absent from most Web sites spawned in the image of Hollywood: profitability. And just as fast as they have popped up, L.A.'s dot-com enterprises have been scaling back or biting the dust. The Web broadcaster Digital Entertainment Network was first to go, flaming out in March amid lurid tales of mismanagement, profligate spending and a lawsuit alleging that the founder molested a teenage boy. Farther down the coast, the founder of the San Juan Capistrano start-up Pixelon was ousted after hosting a fall-of-Rome launch party that cost upwards of $15 million (it didn't help that he was later exposed as a convicted con artist and fugitive wanted by authorities in Virginia and Tennessee). Then there are the more mundane cutbacks and consolidations, claiming such previously red-hot L.A. start-ups as eToys (which saw its stock plummet from a high of $84 per share to a lowly $6), FasTV (which closed suddenly in July and laid off its entire staff), Sony's on-line game division (which laid off 60 Los Angeles workers), eParties (which closed its Santa Monica office) and LOADtv (which laid off 42 people). Amid the open-plan workspaces of L.A. Web shops -- which have lately gone from funky and cheerful to creepy and oppressive -- watercooler chatter has turned from stock options to severance packages. "The Web is turning out to be Hollywood's Vietnam," says David Wertheimer, a former executive at Paramount who heads the entertainment site WireBreak.com. "You've got a lot of people who came in with no idea what they were doing and got beaten up badly. Now they're retreating and claiming victory." So now that prickly skepticism has set in, what's a pumped-up Hollywood dot-commer to do? Some industry refugees have cut their losses and fled back to jobs they ditched to join the gold rush, or headed north to more stable and less sexy outfits in Silicon Valley. Those staying the course are eliminating perks, shelving plans for mind-boggling IPOs and reinventing themselves as skinflint technologists while boldly crowing about the removal of fringe competitors. In private, nearly everyone admits to a wistful nostalgia for the easy-money glory days of ... six months ago. "People in this space built fast, hired fast and spent fast," says Heller. "Now, all of a sudden, it's all very scary and very competitive." ••• FOR MANY WORKING IN THE L.A. INTERNET industry, the recent mood swing feels like deja vu all over again. A similar outburst of anxiety swept across the basin in 1998, when the first crop of Hollywood's on-line experiments withered and died. The Internet industry in Los Angeles actually dates to October 29, 1969, when a Bronx-born computer scientist at UCLA named Leonard Kleinrock flipped a switch on a refrigerator-size processor that sent information spewing through a phone line to a campus computer. He called it "packet switching." The idea was picked up by computer scientists at MIT and Stanford, who further developed the vast shared network that became the Internet. And while fortunes were eventually made on the new technology in Silicon Valley and Seattle, entrepreneurs in Los Angeles were late to the game. It took the arrival of out-of-town emissaries from Microsoft, America Online and Intel to get the L.A. Internet industry off the ground. Big tech companies hit Hollywood in the mid-'90s with a mission: Add pizzazz and production values to a network originally used to transmit academic and military data. Microsoft enlisted a staff of fringe Hollywood players to build the Microsoft Network (MSN), an on-line broadcaster featuring "channels" and "shows." America Online wooed television legend Brandon Tartikoff to develop a slate of Web attractions. Intel invested heavily in a Marina del Rey start-up called American Cybercast that produced an on-line Melrose Place knockoff called The Spot. While buzz began to build about this new genre of entertainment, the people doing the work -- mostly techies who had previously worked in CD-ROMs and video games -- were still very much outsiders in Hollywood. "I remember when I first moved here and told people I made Web pages. I might as well have told them I made shoes," says Peter Luttrell, a software engineer who got his start in the digital stone age of 1994. "They couldn't have cared less." Web producers like The Spot's Scott Zakarin fought hard against the geek rep, casting themselves as rogue pioneers leading the way toward the ballyhooed "convergence" of the Internet and broadcasting. But a funny thing happened on the way to the promised land: Everyone went bust. Facing fierce competition from AOL, MSN scrapped its original programming in 1996. The death of Tartikoff came two months before the launch of America Online's doomed Entertainment Asylum. And after burning through $6 million in one year, American Cybercast declared bankruptcy in 1997. The problem for these entertainment-oriented sites remains the problem today: The vast majority of people who spend time on the Internet chug along on dial-up modems, and for them, video and other so-called broadband content are pretty much unwatchable. Besides the technical difficulties, the economics are messy (as would-be Web programmers discovered, content is appallingly costly--even the subcable drivel that appeared on most Web sites), and on-line ads generated more irritation than revenue. The first wave of entertainment-based sites had scarcely vanished into the ether when a second, more moneyed Hollywood player began poking around for a piece of the action, and on-line entertainment once again got hot. Among the dealmakers who launched Internet initiatives in 1999 were DreamWorks chiefs Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg, Imagine Entertainment heads Ron Howard and Brian Grazer (who teamed up on the short-film Web site Pop.com), former Nickelodeon president Geraldine Laybourne (whose Oxygen Media is built around a Web site), superstar manager Brad Grey (a backer of the entertainment site Z.com) and former Universal CEO Frank Biondi (who formed a venture capital fund). In less than a year, Disney lost the heads of its movie studio and cable operations as well as two top theme-park designers to dot-com start-ups. What lured Hollywood to the Net a second time was simple envy. The huge run-ups in Web stock prices created enough millionaires that Industry execs accustomed customed to making obscene amounts of money looked on longingly as Internet entrepreneurs set new standards for obscenity. One January morning in 1999, a collective gasp went up in Tinseltown when news that a scrappy little Marina del Rey Web start-up called GeoCities had just sold out to Yahoo! for a reported $3.56 billion (mostly stock, but still ...). "What the Web did in Los Angeles is something no industry has ever managed to do in this town: It made entertainment executives feel out of touch and uncool," says Sean Suhl, a 25-year-old Web whiz kid who began his career designing sites for studios and TV shows. "They all wanted in." Meanwhile, another wave of marketing and corporate players began rushing in from the rapidly consolidating music industry. "We all looked around for something with the same sense of excitement as the music business in its nascent period," says producer Bob Ezrin, who quit the recording industry after producing such acts as Pink Floyd and KISS to launch a site called Enigma Digital. "We were drawn in by the allure of the pioneering spirit, the informality, the constant drip of adrenaline," Ezrin adds. "And, of course, the possibility of getting very rich very quick." Mostly, these entertainment-industry refugees were not disappointed. Jeff Pollack and Benny Medina, creators of the sitcom Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, are still awed by their experience shopping around the idea for Thirsty.com, a Web site that delivers youth-oriented news on fashion, music and celebrities with the speed and seriousness of a Wall Street stock report. "Everywhere we went, we had unbridled enthusiasm across the board," says Pollack. "We would walk into a room, and the desire to say yes was palpable." He remembers one meeting with a Web company called Boundary that had previously expressed guarded interest in investing: "We walked into this meeting with a bunch of guys just grinning from ear to ear. They were particularly happy because Boundary had made $800 million that day." Along with the fatter paychecks came oversize attitudes. Hollywood's high-tech insta-moguls emerged as altogether different creatures from the socially stunted brainiacs who rule Silicon Valley. "A lot of the new-media guys are basically geeks who couldn't get dates in high school--and they get a tremendous thrill from being courted by these entertainment guys," says Jeff Haber, an actor and screenwriter who launched the Web start-up Point-Click-Purchase. "And then you've got the entertainment guys who just want the money that the geek guys have. So everyone's one's wearing black, and everyone desperately wants to be a star." This high-school-with-money model became the norm at Web shops like LOADtv, cofounded by a 29-year-old junk-mail mogul named Morgan Warstler. Flush with venture capital, Warstler rented an old bank building on the Sunset Strip and filled it with staff from his native Canton, Ohio. Former and current employees say they logged 75-hour workweeks producing Web programming targeted at what current CEO Jack Kennedy calls "low-hanging fruit" -- Gen Y computer nerds and skate punks. Employees, say sources at the company, were regaled with plans to topple the Hollywood studio system; one former staffer and a job applicant were told the black and white tiles in front of the building had been arranged in a pattern that resembled digital code. The secret message: FUCK YOU. (LOADtv cofounder Matt McFee says he's "never heard that one" and that employees were under no obligation to work such long hours. Warstler did not return calls for comment.) Such hubris was not only tolerated but practically celebrated in a marketplace suddenly awash in venture capital. In 1999, $2.5 billion was funneled into Internet ventures in L.A. and Orange Counties, 200 percent more than in 1998, according to the PriceWaterhouseCoopers Money Tree Survey. One start-up that embraced the windfall was StreamSearch.com, a St. Louis-based search engine for broadband content that hosted a party at the Playboy Mansion in April featuring dinner for 500, tours of the grounds led by Playboy Bunnies and a concert by the Brian Setzer Orchestra. StreamSearch CEO Robert Shambro says he took some heat for the event, especially coming the week of the first trembles of the Nasdaq. "It wasn't like we just went and burned a million bucks," Shambro says. "It was a chance to bring together major investors and major talent. I would do it again in a second." At the height of the boom, even the lowliest worker bees developed a hearty sense of entitlement. Luttrell, one of the first employees of the Digital Entertainment Network, remembers the stone-faced salary demands of staffers hired to proofread text: "I kept telling them, `Dude, you're copy editors--copy editors don't make $78,000 a year.'" An executive at an L.A.-based Web start-up recalls interviewing freelance programmers. "They wanted catered lunches, stock options, overtime pay after six o'clock--or else they'd walk," she says. "I'd look at these guys right out of college and want to tell them, `Look, that's just not how business works.' But what could I say? That's the way it did work." ••• MOST OF WHAT Hollywood has done wrong in its rush to go digital is summed up in the story of the Digital Entertainment Network. The smoking crater of this once white-hot Santa Monica start-up has become an instant object lesson in the L.A. dot-com community. DEN was established in late 1998 by a 40-year-old technologist named Marc Collins-Rector, who convinced investors, including onetime senatorial candidate Michael Huffington, that DEN would rival network television in programming for the Gen Y set. Collins-Rector's cofounders were a 24-year-old computer enthusiast from Michigan named Chad Shackley and a 17-year-old child actor named Brock Pierce. The three lived together in a hilltop estate in Encino rumored to have been owned by hip-hop kingpin Suge Knight. Within a year, the company had raised more than $33 million and amassed a staff that would number more than 250. The founders threw lavish parties and lured top executives from Disney and Capitol Records with salaries topping $1 million. Luttrell says DEN management wanted nothing less than to reinvent the Web. "They came into this like, `We've arrived -- the Web can start now,'" he says. "The thing was that they hired these people who knew a great deal about the Internet, and then never listened to any of them." Programming kicked off with an amateurish serial called Chad's World, which revolved around a teen runaway from Michigan who shacks up with a gay couple in a California estate. The show failed to gain a following, setting an example for such programs as the T&A bonanza Frat Ratz and the pandering Latino drama Tales from the Eastside. None of these omens stopped DEN's founders from filing a $75 million IPO and chartering a 747 to New York to celebrate the occasion. Afshin David Youssefyeh, who worked as DEN's director of on-line marketing, remembers the IPO party as a tony affair at the SoHo Grand Hotel, where employees shared an open bar with the likes of Michael Stipe and Leonardo DiCaprio. As it turned out, DEN's founders never got their stock windfall. Two days before the IPO party in New York, a lawsuit was filed in New Jersey accusing Collins-Rector of sexual misconduct with a 13-year-old former employee. Collins-Rector denied the charges but settled the suit a month later. The lawsuit was a public embarrassment, dashing the company's hopes of a public offering and forcing all three of a DEN's founders to resign. New management headed by former Disney executive David Neuman tried to salvage the company, to no avail. The end finally came in May as the remaining 200 employees were issued curt apologies and pink slips. To those who worked there, the failure of DEN had less to do with the legal troubles of the founder than with the mind-set of Hollywood newcomers. "For a start-up to succeed, you need to work your ass off," says Youssefyeh, who fled Hollywood for a job in Silicon Valley after DEN's demise. "These Hollywood guys just don't want to get their hands dirty. It's against everything they're about." Journalist Matt Welch, who was hired to develop a news division for the network, says the collapse will go down as a monument to mammoth egos. "DEN was the poster child of Internet excess," he says. "In terms of grossly overpaying executives who don't know anything about the Internet, this was the ultimate." ••• DEN DID NOT GO DOWN ALONE. Its collapse came on the heels of a widespread retreat from the local Internet arena. Investment in Los Angeles- and Orange County-based Web businesses plummeted from $850 million in the last three months of 1999 to $421 million between January and April 2000. Hardest hit were e-tailers, but the tide had also turned against those sites that focus on creating content. In the heyday of DEN, the catchphrase was "Content is king." Post-DEN, content is barely royalty. The tune has definitely changed at LOADtv, the would-be digital update of an old Hollywood studio, producing and delivering programs on the Internet via its own branded video player. Initial programming included cooking shows, movie-clip packages and a comedy starring NewsRadio ham Andy Dick. But when capital ran low in April, cofounder Warstler stepped aside, and Kennedy, the new CEO, promptly laid off nearly half of the 97 employees and scrapped all original programming. "Big changes had to be made," says Kennedy. "We had to concentrate on delivery, not the programming itself -- these are two entirely different animals." In appeals to investors, Kennedy has done everything possible to shake the glitzy rep that had become the hallmark of DEN. "We're no sexier than FedEx," he says proudly. "Our goal is to be as invisible as possible. That runs counter to the culture of this industry, but if we're going to make it, we've got to stay focused on our core business." Other wanna-be Web programmers have become champions of even more humdrum "revenue streams." Webstation.com was founded by a pair of entrepreneurs with no previous Web experience: actress Soleil Moon Frye, who starred in the '80s sitcom Punky Brewster, and securities trader Steve Fischer. When DEN was at its peak, the pair filed for an IPO totaling $36 million, planning a Web network that would broadcast concerts, fashion shows and extreme sporting events. But with DEN in ashes, Webstation was drastically restructured. "Once that deal was killed, so was ours," says Fischer. "We saw the writing on the wall." Today, Fischer and Frye run an on-line marketplace for discount DVDs. "I guess it's about crawling before you walk," says a humbled Frye. ••• THE CHEST-THUMPING ARROGANCE common among Internet execs six months ago has been replaced with a levelheadedness that borders on gloom. When cash was flowing, Webheads talked about the Internet as an uncharted world of vast possibilities. Now it's all about "multitiered revenue models" and "traditional valuation metrics." The new mantra is "Monetize it!" -- a bottom-line call to arms that's Greek to most Industry dealmakers, says Jose Royo, a former instructor at Harvard who is now chief technical officer of the Santa Monica Web site Broadband Sports. "You just can't run an Internet company the same way you run a Hollywood studio," Royo says. "The more extravagant Hollywood attitudes, all the chauffeurs and parties--that really doesn't work in this space." Many Internet executives claim to revel in the new thriftiness. Wertheimer, a former executive at Oracle and NeXT, says he never gave in to the indulgences that sank other Hollywood start-ups. His entertainment site WireBreak.com operates with a small staff and few frills; visitors to his Venice studio, seated in the lobby on a bench ripped out of the back of a company van, got the message immediately. "That's what our company is all about," Wertheimer says. "It's about how to do more with less." According to Wertheimer, all the recent shakeout did was cull the weak and deluded, who were in the game for the wrong reasons. "It weeded out the people who thought they could add a dot-com to the name of their production company and start printing money," he says. "The shakeout pressed the RESET button. People have to start working for a living again, which is a good thing." The work ethic has been taken up most ardently by the suits financing the industry who until recently seemed to base decisions more on hunches than on due diligence. Randall Kaplan formed the Brentwood-based JUMP Investors after ditching a career as a corporate lawyer. Kaplan says high-tech venture capitalists have become obsessed with the fine print. "I know investors who saw their portfolio values fall as much as 80 percent this year," he notes. "That's a big hit. Now they're carefully going through the methodology to determine if these start-ups are ever going to turn a profit." In this new climate, the kinds of on-line start-ups hatched in Hollywood are having a tough time justifying their existence. "You can't name any successful entertainment Internet companies, because they don't exist," says Kaplan. Others maintain that the conventional wisdom will soon swing back in favor of on-line entertainment. Steve Stanford, a former ICM agent and now CEO of Icebox, says the name of the game is longevity. Start-ups that hang on to see capital swarm back toward content -- which Stanford says is inevitable once DSL and other broadband connections become common -- will be richly rewarded. "The Internet today is radically different from what it will be in three years," he says. "Anybody who takes a too narrow view will miss the boat." And as long as Web sites are hosted in Hollywood, the local Internet industry will never be completely overrun by pennypinchers or techies. Kevin Wendle, a former Fox vice president who runs the site iFilm, says that Internet execs who reject Hollywood turn their backs on tremendous talent -- and potential financiers. "Right now a lot of Internet companies are trying to take a wrecking ball to Hollywood," he says. "That's a mistake -- you've got some of the smartest and most creative people in the world here. We should embrace this town." Still, no self-respecting Hollywood dealmaker would miss the chance to become the Louis B. Mayer of a whole new medium. And if Hollywood is good at anything, it's forgetting the past. So expect another round of wretched excess as the Industry and the Internet -- seemingly the most inevitable yet diffident of bedfellows -- pursue their balky pas de deux. "Hollywood is always going to produce elements of Babylon," says DEN's Welch. "There're always going to be great parties in mansions with prostitutes and tons of cocaine--and thank God for that."

Cool Millions

Now that the Eastside is the font of all things hip, a new breed of entrepreneur is cashing in on the buzz. But success is a funny thing in a community that disdains the sorts of vulgar displays common on the other side of town. September, 1999 Chaim Magnum is having a fantastic year. As a partner in Dragon Talent, a Los Feliz modeling agency specializing in what he calls "hip alternative talent," Magnum has placed more than 250 punks, drag queens and other denizens of L.A.'s Eastside into television and prim ads. Suddenly, corporate giants like IBM, Pepsi and the Gap can't seem to sell anything without the help of a scruffy Eastsider. Not long ago, Magnum spotted a willowy young guy pumping cappuccino on La Brea; two months later, Sam Stefanski had cleared more than $30,000 appearing in ads for Arco, Lexus and Max Factor. These days, when Magnum turns on the television, it seems like his clients are in every other ad. Magnum has earned enough from the agency to afford his dream car, a tricked-out green and gold Mercedes. The car means a lot to him, but he isn't enjoying it, really. Driving to and from work, Magnum says he can't help imagining all the kids in their geezer-chic getups and vintage clunkers glaring at the sleek-young-agent-type rolling in a Benz, muttering to themselves the worst insult imaginable: How Westside. Success is a funny thing on the Eastside of Los Angeles. And suddenly, a lot of people are laughing. All around the hood, from the heights of Silver Lake to the flats of East Hollywood, the spoils of the go-go '90s are financing the construction of Alternative Nation's de facto capital. The Los Angeles city clerk's office reports that the number of new business licenses issued in the area has doubled in the past four years, from 405 to 814. On Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake, long-shuttered shops now sell Heywood-Wakefield school chairs, vintage clothing and other essential signifiers of L.A.'s cooler-than-thou crowd, while on Hillhurst Avenue, no fewer than nine new restaurants have opened in the past year, offering everything from organic pappardelle at Purans to--gasp--corporate lattes at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. Meanwhile, houses in the Franklin Hills and Los Feliz are selling as fast as the signs are posted. Behind this latter-day gold rush is a new class of hipster with a head for business. Playing up their independence and street cred (and playing down their paydays when their ships come in), these alterna-entrepreneurs ;are establishing fiefdoms that put them in league with any pell-mell Westside capitalist. All the while, their casual-chic restaurants, po-mo fashions and indie-rock nightclubs and record labels are profoundly bending the pop-cultural bandwidth, extending the neighborhood's cachet far beyond the city limits. Ladies and gentlemen of greater Los Angeles--and the world--meet the Eastside moguls. ••• IT'S LATE THURSDAY NIGHT AND THE BOOTHS ARE PACKED at Vida, the unmarked Los Feliz restaurant that, more than any other establishment, has set the tone for the Eastside's self-conscious commercialism. Cruising club sharks sip $9.50 margaritas while a Hollywood Hills crowd in the dining room, their faces dim in the spare spot lighting, picks over domes of puffed bread and architectural towers of charred tuna. The menu features cute little dishes like "Mo Larry Cheese" (smoked pork loin) and "Suzanne's Goin' on a Picnic" (salad with Roquefort and French pears). From the drinks to the decor, everything is drenched in 'tude. That attitude flows directly from Fred Eric, a 36-year-old former pastry chef who started Vida five years ago. No one has done more to package and profit from the Eastside than Eric, an antsy guy whose baggy Adidas tracksuits and moppish haircut make him look more like an art school dropout than a ragingly successful lifestyle entrepreneur. After partnering with Sean MacPherson and Jon Sidel on the seminal '80s eatery Olive, Eric opened Vida in an area whose biggest claim to culinary fame was a taco stand frequented by former New York Times food critic Ruth Reichl. But with unusual cuisine and canny promotion--his "Punk Rock Karaoke Nights" spawned a nightclub act currently touring the United States--Eric created something every restaurateur strives for: a destination. On any night, maybe a third of the patrons are local. The rest journey from far outside the normal nightlife orbit to immerse themselves in Eric's fastidiously conjured Eastside cool. "The people here are mostly 310s and 818s," Eric says. "They have to drive to get here, but once they do, there's a completely different vibe." The same dynamic is in full force at Eric's latest venture, Fred 62, a tractor-green diner that's been packing them in for two years with self-consciously eclectic fare like baked meatloaf and soba noodles. With its faux '50s leather booths and piercings-intensive waitstaff, Fred 62 is shunned by most locals. "It's so goddamned contrived," seethes Jo Michelle, a thrift-shop wholesaler who supplies vintage-clothing shops in Los Feliz. "It's for all the kids who saw Swingers and want to don some hair grease and a clipon nose ring for the afternoon." But while locals grouse, Eric says he is averaging about 3,000 customers a week. He won't talk money--just about no one in the Eastside entrepreneurial class deigns to--but even at a modest $15 per head, his weekly gross at Fred 62 comes to $45,000, or roughly $2 million annually. With that kind of cash flow, Eric can afford to indulge fantasies like his two-tone '57 Chevy and goldflake '69 Buick Electra, each customized to reflect the themes of his restaurants. And make no mistake: Not everyone is put off by the Westside interlopers--or the money--that his restaurants have drawn into the neighborhood. One morning, Eric was approached by Lily Tomlin, who lived in nearby Laughlin Park. "I want to thank you personally," she told him, "for raising the value of my property." (Indeed, in July, Tomlin sold her house for nearly $3 million.) As most Eastside entrepreneurs discovered early on, coolness is a commodity. And no one understands that dictum better than Robin Harrington, who runs Dragon Talent with partner Magnum. "Corporations need coolness to sell products," declares Harrington. "And we've got more of it here than anyone else." Harrington, a severely stylish 31-year-old who favors chunky oval eyeglasses and leather pants, did this cultural calculation five years ago while promoting underground Eastside clubs like Shaft, Glue and Minitruck. Figuring that the fashion extravagance of certain clubgoing friends was wasted on fellow clubgoers, the former Long Beach High cheerleader cleared out a room in her Los Feliz home and started working the phones. What began as a talent agency strictly for drag queens quickly grew to include a stable of punks with piercings, photogenic fetishists and the scruffy Gen X kids too short or big-nosed to get signed by the agencies in Beverly Hills. Most of Dragon Talent's clients come right off the street--Harrington and Magnum keep a close eye out their office window in Los Feliz, where the foot traffic on Vermont Avenue around the Dresden cocktail lounge and a vintage shop called Squaresville is intense. One morning, Harrington spotted a woman sporting "a cute pink tank top, wild hair, hip huggers--really exotic, definitely mixed ethnicity." "`Oh my God, that girl is so fierce,'" Magnum recalls yelling. "`Whoever's got the lowest platforms has got to go down and grab her!'" Harrington says she has no qualms about lending corporate giants the legitimizing cloak of Eastside cool. "Advertisers want hipness, and they're going to get it one way or another," she says. "The kids from around here are the ones who came up with these great styles. They deserve the money and recognition." And Harrington, who is rapidly ditching the thrift-store rags in her closet in favor of designer duds, sees no contradiction in living large while selling street cool to clueless corporations. "If I want to carry a Gucci bag and drive a new Volvo station wagon," she says, "people better just get used to it." It can be argued that the real reason Eastsiders like Fred Eric and Dragon Talent have done so well has nothing to do with the Eastside itself. In a good economy, all boats rise--even a few steered by captains with white-boy dreadlocks. Just look at Brett Gurewitz. The former guitarist for Bad Religion established the wildly successful Silver Lake label Epitaph Records and signed such indie stalwarts as Rancid, NOFX and Agnostic Front. After another of his label's bands, the Offspring, sold 8 million copies of their record Smash, Gurewitz inked a deal with Sony for the worldwide rights for the next album for a cool $6 million. And for every punk tycoon like Gurewitz, there are a hundred young hopefuls drawn east to start a career and family while staying true to. fuzzy Gen X ideals of authenticity. "Houses in the Franklin Hills and north of Los Feliz are selling very, very quickly," says Arnon Raphael, a broker for Fred Sands who has watched the value of most Eastside properties rise by 20 to 30 percent in less than five years. "You're seeing a lot of younger couples and Industry people moving in, buying houses that belonged to people who waited years for the market to get better." At the beginning of July, there were 14 homes in escrow in Los Feliz alone, ranging from $450,000 to $950,000, most of them with turnarounds of less than a week. One rundown Mediterranean in a leafy Los Feliz culde-sac was put on the market by a widower in his eighties--the 3,300-square-foot home was quickly snapped up for $785,000. In the Franklin Hills, a 1,500-square-foot Spanish two-bedroom sold for $479,000 within a week of being listed. Itty-bitty fixer-uppers north of Hollywood Boulevard are going for more than $500,000, while prices in the foothills easily surpass $1 million. Helping fuel the Eastside real estate boom is the spiking celebrity quotient. Leonardo DiCaprio, Geena Davis, Beck and the Red Hot Chili Peppers all own homes in the area, and the Beastie Boys headquarter their Grand Royal Records in Atwater Village. Then there's the residency of a certain Kabbalah-following pop star. "Madonna moving here validated everything," says Andrew Dibben, a clothing designer who relocated to Silver Lake from London six years ago. "Before, nobody in London or Paris knew that there even was an Eastside of L.A. Now we're on the map." The buzz can make an enormous difference in a fickle business like fashion. Dibben considered setting up shop on the Westside but decided to open his boutique, where he manufactures and sells his high-end "postgender" clothing, in Silver Lake. "There's a lot of money in these hills," Dibben says. "People just aren't so conspicuous. The people earning over here might look like punks, but most of them are computer designers and music executives and those who can afford to buy nice things. And they don't like going west to shop." Scott Mangan proved that principle five years ago with Rubbish. Starting with $2,000 and a hunch that midcentury furnishings were about to get hot, the former wardrobe assistant has since opened a second store in Pasadena and a decorating service; he did celebrity photographer Herb Ritts's Santa Monica studio. But Mangan points out that doing business in Silver Lake also means doing without basic city services taken for granted on the Westside, forcing local moguls to literally get down and dirty. "I clean the street and trim the trees," he says. "Running a business over here, you're really on your own." Nevertheless, for successful Eastside entrepreneurs, even the appearance of self-sufficiency is coveted. That's because when they hit pay dirt, they tend to cover their tracks. No self-respecting Eastsider would be caught dead bragging about his stock options or even his bar receipts. While this modesty may be rooted in basic decency, it also makes a twisted kind of business sense. "If something grows to the point that business is big enough, people think it belongs on the Westside," says Reno Goodale, co-owner of the Back Door bakery, a neighborhood hangout that is prospering less than a mile away from a struggling new Starbucks. "You keep your success to yourself." That could explain why truly grand houses tucked away from view, like the former Chaplin estate in Laughlin Park or Madonna's Vermont Canyon hacienda, are popular with Eastside moguls who want to stay in the neighborhood but not flaunt their fortunes. And why the busiest restaurants, like Cafe Stella, have remained wedged behind pet groomers. And why some of the richest entrepreneurs often look like Cafe Tropical owner Jeff Bey, a compact and balding Afghan-Sicilian who wouldn't look out of place cheering his kids at a neighborhood soccer match. Bey lives in Los Feliz's exclusive Oaks district and says he doesn't feel tremendous allegiance with other Eastside entrepreneurs. "Remember, this is only the Eastside to white people," he points out. "To Latinos, everything west of downtown is the Westside." The Eastside boom owes much to Bey, who three years ago sank $3 million into a fading East Hollywood establishment. The business was Hollywood Billiards, and the 30,000-square-foot pool hall and restaurant went on to revitalize a particularly dodgy patch of Hollywood Boulevard. The warehouse-size room is a favorite Industry party spot, hosting an Ally McBeal wrap party and events for Sony, Disney and EMI. Such glitzy goings-on would have been unthinkable when Bey decided 10 years ago to ditch his job as a corporate attorney and seek his fortune instead in a dank basement that smelled of cigar smoke and cat pee. "It had everything wrong with it," Bey says. "It was on the worst corner in Hollywood, in the worst condition imaginable. The cashier was in a cage, for Christ's sake. My family thought I was nuts." After closing due to earthquake damage and being rebuilt a few blocks east--this time complete with a trattoria and Mediterranean-style courtyard--Hollywood Billiards began attracting a finer breed of shark. Bey now owns a second pool hall in San Francisco, and he says that banks have estimated the total worth of the businesses to be as high as $7 million. Of all the success stories on the Eastside, some of the biggest belong to the barkeeps. "People like to drink over here," Eric points out. "And the people who count the receipts are making a killing." Like Steve Edelson, a 37-year-old from Chicago who moved here 10 years ago after working in construction. Starting with a bar in central Hollywood, Edelson built a nightlife dynasty that now includes the Silver Lake rock dive the Garage, Home in Los Feliz, Dragonfly and Hells Gate in Hollywood, the Joint and Martini Lounge on Melrose and a just-opened Santa Monica club called Lush that "packages the Eastside environment for a mass audience," as he puts it. Edelson won't quote specific dollar figures but says his businesses grossed in the millions last year alone, allowing him to plop down $700,000 cash for a 12,000-square-foot English Tudor compound north of Los Feliz Boulevard that used to belong to Basil Rathbone. Edelson says he owes his success to understanding the financial peculiarities of the typical Eastside club rat. "A guy in Santa Monica with $20 in his pocket will stop at Blockbuster and Koo Koo Roo, and that's his night," he says. "A guy over here will stop and buy two 99-cent tacos, get heartburn and spend the rest of his money seeing a band at a bar. That's my kind of guy." Edelson's eminence notwithstanding, the nightclub that really put the Eastside on the map is Spaceland. Founder Mitchell Frank shrewdly booked early gigs by influential Eastside acts like Beck, the Geraldine Fibbers and the Negro Problem. Soon mainstream tastemakers descended, capped by a Los Angeles Times feature with a photograph of a Spaceland crowd and the much-chuckled-over headline SILVER LAKE IS ON FIRE! Frank did just fine during the ensuing feeding frenzy, establishing a record label, Nickelbag, with hot Eastside producers the Dust Brothers (Beck, David Bowie). With Disney-owned Mammoth Records in negotiations to buy the label, the 38-year-old club owner has purchased a midcentury modern in the Los Feliz hills, complete with a Jacuzzi, pool and perfect view of the Griffith Park Observatory. Frank, somewhat disingenuously, frets that successes like his encourage bigger, blander businesses to move in. "When I started Spaceland, I was wildcatting out here," he says. "Once you hit money, the corporations come in and co-opt everything. It's already happening. It's only a matter of time before the whole area gets gobbled up." Indeed, the nightmare for self-respecting Eastsiders--at least when speaking for the record--is an invasion of TGI Fridays and California Pizza Kitchens. "Leave us alone!" cries Patti Peck, owner of the Sunset Boulevard diner Millie's, which serves as a kind of job placement program for punk rock performers. "Right now, we're walking a fine line between having a thriving community and getting taken over by the big boys." Eventually, the big boys will win. They always do, says Monah Li, a designer of punk couture who pulled in $600,000 last year at her shop on Vermont Avenue. "All of a sudden, it's like the new Beverly Hills," she says. The influx of capital will undoubtedly alter the neighborhood--proof is as far away as SoHo or as near as Melrose Avenue--but Li, candidly enough, says she doesn't mind. "It'll be a few years before it's ruined," she says. "That always happens. But in the meantime, there's some good money floating around." And by then, most of those who made it on the Eastside will have moved on. But where ? Fred Eric offers a preview. "I'll tell you where the coolest place is," he declares. "Eagle Rock. If you want to know the truth, that's the coolest place in the city."

Bowled Over

Movement to save Holiday Bowl as Los Angeles architectural landmark The Holiday Bowl has survived two riots, five major earthquakes, and even the advent of automatic scoring. But 42 years after the Crenshaw Boulevard bowling alley was built in the space-age Googie style, the Holiday may be over, thanks to a fed-up property owner and a city councilman who'd gladly swing the wrecking ball himself. When the Holiday closed in May, owner Marshal Siskin claimed there weren't enough bowlers in the area to support the spacious 36-lane alley. Siskin sold the building and its surrounding four acres for a reported $4 million to developers planning to replace the alley with a minimall. A band of regulars, neighbors, and preservationists enlisted the Los Angeles Conservancy to help nominate the Holiday as a historic cultural monument. The official designation, bitterly opposed by the neighborhood's city councilman, Nate Holden, would prevent demolition for at least a year. The fight is the latest in a long list of squabbles over L.A. car washes, coffee shops, and other architectural ephemera. But architects Armet & Davis's Googie design for the Holiday, with its zigzagging roof and startling orange-and-white facade, is an afterthought to many of those lobbying to stop the bulldozers. "The structure isn't important at all," insists Jacqueline Sowell, a former waitress. "It's what's inside that counts." And what happened inside the Holiday was by all accounts remarkable, a rare and wonderful confluence in a city too often divided by racial boundaries. Built in 1958 by a group of Japanese American businessmen who migrated to the area after the war, the Holiday quickly became the de facto town square for one of L.A.'s most diverse neighborhoods. Black bowlers played on Japanese-league teams, Latino teenagers slurped udon, and Japanese grandmothers huddled over bowls of steaming grits. "It was cross-generational, it was cross-racial," says City Councilwoman Rita Walters, who frequented the bowling alley's sushi bar. "It's a reminder that we don't have to live in a segregated city." When riots ripped through the area in 1992, a group of regulars stood guard in the parking lot, and the Holiday was spared. "All around us buildings burned to the ground, and we didn't sustain as much as a broken window," says Sowell. But where some see a landmark of diversity, others see a money pit. Elizabeth Watson, a lawyer representing Siskin, told the city council that the alley hadn't turned a profit in 15 years. Mark Ranftle, an associate broker for NAI Capital real estate, a company hired by the new developers to find tenants, says big bowling center operators were scared away by the estimated $750,000 needed for repairs. "If someone would give it half a chance, it would succeed like crazy," counters John English, an expert in Googie architecture who helped save the original McDonald's in Downey and the Bob's Big Boy in Burbank. Holden, who has fought hard against protecting potential landmarks in his district, including the Ambassador Hotel and the McKinley Building, demurs. "Times have changed," he told the council in September. "When I arrived in L.A., they were hunting rabbits there. We'd like to see bowling start again, but it's just not happening." While the council continues to mull over the historic designation, activists are lobbying likely investors, such as basketball hero turned entrepreneur Magic Johnson, to ride in and save the day. "We're not trying to stop development," says English. "We're just saying new development shouldn't come at the expense of the Holiday. Because once it's gone, something very special and very rare goes with it."

But Is It Garbage?

To the tax man, Grandma Prisbrey's masterpiece is just a landfill waiting to happen December 1997 One mountain range and a world or two away from Los Angeles, Simi Valley is known for its sprawl of tract housing, its hilltop shrine to Ronald Reagan and the exoneration of four of LAPD's finest for the clubbing of wayward motorist Rodney King. What Simi Valley is not generally known for is fine art. And the locals would like to keep it that way, thank you very much. Simi Valley does, however, possess an artistic masterpiece of sorts on the east side of town, a still vaguely rural area where the mission-style minimalls are recent arrivals and front lawns are used for parking as often as gardening. In a narrow lot surrounded by bent chain link is the crumbling roadside attraction known as Bottle Village. Cobbled together over three decades by a former citrus-plant worker named Tressa "Grandma" Prisbrey, the village is a cluster of shacks, fountains and pathways made from stuff she hauled from the dump in the back of a Studebaker: kitchen utensils, doll parts, busted headlights, license plates, marbles and bottles in every conceivable shape and color. There's a whiskey-bottle fountain, a wishing well made out of milk of magnesia bottles and a mobile constructed from 100 tiny medicine vials. Local lore has it Prisbrey started building with the beer bottles that her second husband, a construction worker, chucked in the motor home they shared on the outskirts of town. She began the project, she once told a visitor, to shame her husband about his drinking. Over time, she created more than a dozen buildings, from a sunken roundhouse complete with decorative fireplace to a playroom lined with old drapes and shower curtains from the '50s. She was motivated as much by a desire to create, believes Daniel Paul, a 25-year-old art historian and waiter who has become the de facto spokesman for the village, as by a desire to work through a difficult life. Prisbrey's husband died in a car accident, and six of her seven children died in her lifetime. She died in 1988 at the age of 92. Admirers think of Bottle Village as nothing less than sacred, a folk art environment of international importance. Many locals, however, see little more than a pile of junk that should have stayed in the landfill where it was dumped a generation ago. Their caustic critique has never made a dent in the edifice of refuse, but now Bottle Village faces a much more formidable enemy: the tax man. According to the Ventura County tax collector, the preservationist group that now owns Bottle Village has not paid taxes in seven of the last nine years. County officials could eventually put the property up for auction, says Cynthia Simmons, manager of the public-service division in the tax collector's office. For a group that enlists the help of a local Brownie troop just to maintain the property, a $9,800 tax bill is tantamount to eviction. The only thing that would keep the tax collector away so far is a brass plaque out front marking the property as a county and state historic landmark. "This place is a sanctuary," says Paul. "I feel a real reverence when I wander through it." Most locals seem dumbfounded by the fuss surrounding a run-down neighborhood curiosity. Jean Dewey, a 26-year resident, advises parents to keep kids away from Bottle Village. "It's just gruesome to me," she says. "I can't believe the nonsense these people say about this place. They claim to be artists, but they're all a bunch of phonies." Dewey says she became particularly rankled when supporters won a grant worth half a million dollars from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to repair damage done during the Northridge earthquake. Calling it "a big pile of junk that should have been bulldozed years ago," city councilwoman Sandi Webb launched a petition to block the FEMA funds. She was soon joined by Congressman Elton Gallegly, a firebrand conservative and former Simi Valley mayor who called it "appalling" that FEMA would pay to restore Bottle Village when many of its neighbors couldn't get federal assistance to repair their trailer parks. Under pressure from Gallegly, FEMA caved in like one of Prisbrey's shacks and rescinded the award. "We were basically chased out of town," says Paul. "It was like the Red Scare." The flap over Bottle Village is ironic, he says, given the modest aspirations of its creator. "Anyone can do anything with a million dollars -- look at Disney," Prisbrey once told a visitor. "But it takes more than money to make something out of nothing, and look at the fun I have doing it." While many residents in the surrounding neighborhood would like the whole place dumped in a curbside recycling bin, defenders say they haven't given up on hopes to raise the money to pay the tax bill. Paul says he is currently on a lecture tour to drum up support for what he sees as "the ultimate family-values art piece." "This isn't Piss Christ," says Paul. "This little old lady built this place with her bare hands. It's funny, it's deep, it's whimsical, and it gives you an idea what to do with all the bottles left over from the NBA finals.”