START AT ICA-LA. END AT CATCH-ONE!
"Now, please, get ready to go into high gear riding down to 41st and Central Avenue way past the Fish Market and Greyhound Bus Depot to South Central Los Angeles, or as it’s now refered to as South LA, aka: Funkytown to the historic Dunbar Hotel which housed the famous Club Alabam which was the main focus of LA’s Jazz Corridor when my mother, Mary Magdelene Duplantier moved to Los Angeles during the great migration.
From there it’s up Vermont Avenue where you can drop by the Mini Skirt Lounge for a cheap cocktail, across the street was The Ugly Cafe, a soul food joint with the motto: Even Fugly People Gotta Eat. Next door to them is Nadine’s House of Feet where you can find inexpensive stylish footwear in large sizes.
When you get to Vermont and Adams please, please! go by The One Institute which is housed in an olde USC Fraternity House in the West Adams District. Going further west on Adams on Cimarron Street is The William Andrew Clark Memorial Library that is now part of UCLA but back in its heyday after World War One the surrounding estate would feature nude male concubines proudly engaging in sexual calisthenics on the grounds for the voyeuristic joy and delight of its owner. From there it’s an easy ride to Vermont and Pico Blvd where the Inner City Cultural Center use to be. This section of Pico in the 1970s was known as Revolution Row with the largest array of Communist bookstores and bookshops.
Down the street is Beautiful Berendo Middle School on Berendo and 12th Street where I attended along with MacArthur Grant/Genius Award recipient Luis Alfaro. Other well-known grads are Ray Bradbury, Academy Award Winning Actress Jane Wyman, the first wife of former Icky President Ronald “Trickle Down Fairy” Reagan, ventriloquist Edgar Bergen father of actress Candice Bergen and fifties blond bombshell Mamie van Doren. Going further west on Pico near Crenshaw is Black Lesbian owned niteclub compound Jewel’s Room and The Catch One Disco. In the early 1990s right next to Jewel´s Room in what use to be an auto repair shop where a grizzly black Dahlia style murder took place was my art daughter Michelle Carr’s infamous rock n ‘roll coffee house and art gallery Jabberjaw, that hosted early appearances of Goddess Bunny, Psychodrama featuring a young Lisa Suckdog, aka Lisa Carver, Nirvana and Jawbreaker, as well as my punk art band PME that performed with the notorious transgressive art schtar Father Larry Wessel."