As remarkable as it may sound, to this day, I still feel like an exiled Angelino gone astray.
I grew up in West Hollywood, first in the back room of my father’s art gallery on La Cienega Boulevard near Melrose Avenue. When I was three or maybe four, we moved a few blocks north to a large Spanish Colonial Revival-style house on the southeast corner of Alfred Street and Willoughby Avenue.
The house was adjacent to the restaurant The Lobster Barrel owned and hosted by Alex Hale Jr’, the burly skipper from the TV show Gilligan’s Island. We frequently watched the show but never ate at the restaurant. However, my friends and I would often be chased out from Mr. Hale’s restaurant for grabbing fistfuls of red and white striped mints from the restaurant’s lounge.
Our house was just a few blocks south from the rowdy bar Barney’s Beanery and the famous concert venue called the Starwood was only a few blocks east on Santa Monica Blvd near Crescent Heights Boulevard.
A childhood friend of mine, whose name eludes me, lived in a high-rise on the legendary Sunset Strip. To get to his apartment, I’d walk past the La Cienega Lanes bowling alley, cross Holloway Drive where I went to Saint Victor’s elementary school for a few years, and then hike up the steepest part of La Cienega until it came to an end at Sunset Boulevard.
Once after school, he and I flew paper airplanes from his bedroom window and watched them land on the cars below.
During my earliest years, I spent several summers in an old wooden beach house along the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu.
My parents rented the bottom floor of the house and I still have hazy albeit idyllic memories from those years in the mid-1960s. Memories of tar stuck on my feet, from the salty scent of seaweed, of picking mussels from rocks exposed during low tide, from seeing my tanned father holding a tall fishing rod while sitting in a beach chair.
As faded as the few photos I have from that chapter of my early life are, I can still recall feeling happy playing on the beach with our dog Coco.
The magnetic, almost hypnotic draw Los Angeles continues to have on me, despite that I barely recognize myself when I visit these days, is extraordinary.
I think it’s a combination of nostalgia and L.A.’s incredible diversity that keeps drawing me back. Unlike anywhere else I’ve been in the US, Los Angeles is where every imaginable slice of American life can be found and experienced, from the ultra-wealthy and comfortable middle class to the newly arrived, endlessly hopeful fortune-seekers as well as the hopeless homeless.
The unmatched architectural variety, the notoriously sprawling urban landscape, the palm tree-lined boulevards, and, of course, those gorgeous, sun-drenched beaches – all of it still captivates me. And then, of course, there are the few old friends and family members who still call Los Angeles home
To license any of the images in this gallery, please get in touch with me: at joakim@raboff.com or WhatsApp: +46709404919
