Most people wouldn't give a Macy's department store a second glance—but I'm not most people.
Besides, even though it happened long before I arrived in California, I know how Macy's took over some of the historic Robinson's department stores (like in Woodland Hills and Newport Beach).
I can only assume there are more historic treasures hiding behind a Macy's logo elsewhere in SoCal.
Which brings me to the Macy's on Lake Avenue in Pasadena, California.
Every time I'd drive past it, I'd marvel at what I assumed—but didn't really know—to be a landmark shopping destination. It dominates Lake Avenue, with its wide, low profile—and its Streamline Moderne elements on the north wing catching the eyes of passerby drivers like me.
I'd always wondered what it was like inside, but I'd always be on my way to something else—and wouldn't make time to stop and go in.
That changed when Pasadena Heritage recently offered a tour of Macy's Lake Avenue—which turns out to be the former Pasadena location of Bullock's department store.
If Hollywood has a skyline, the mid-century Capitol Records tower at Hollywood and Vine is pretty much it.
Designed by Welton Becket, it was the first circular office building in the world—and at 13 stories high (the height limit at the time so as not to be taller than City Hall), it was Hollywood's first high-rise office building to be air-conditioned.
Which is something.
I've been wanting to get into the Capitol Records building ever since I first saw it on a business trip to LA, when I myself was working at a different record label on the other coast.
But, like many office buildings, unless you've got a meeting there, you're hard-pressed to find a way in.
Then again, as I always say, there's always a way in.
My access today came by way of the 60th anniversary of Capitol Studios...
...and, as part of the celebration, a small group of 10 of us got to spend about two hours exploring the hallowed (and probably haunted) halls of this legendary factory of hit records.
I remember working in the classical department of Atlantic Records during the label's 60th anniversary. It was a really big deal. We all got our photos taken with Ahmet at a big celebration. I was doing a job that my dad could understand—and at a company he actually recognized.
In Studios A and B, I got up close and personal with Nat King Cole's Steinway piano...
...and Billy Preston's Hammond B3 organ that he used to play with The Beatles.
I sat on a stool that had been made to Frank Sinatra's specifications...
...face to face with one of his microphones.
I got to listen to isolated tracks from Tom Petty's "American Girl" and (completely unintentionally) Sam Smith's "Stay With Me," which sounded amazing.
Sam Smith recorded his album here in Hollywood, and took advantage not only of Capitol's vintage Neve 8068 sound board (signed by Rupert Neve himself), but also some of the studio's eight subterranean "echo chambers."
Constructed out of reinforced concrete in a trapezoidal shape (and original to the building), the echo chambers are a surprisingly analog approach to creating reverb in a digitally-equipped age. The music is piped into them, and the echo of it is piped right back out and recorded in the studio above it.
Then again, all three of the recording studios at Capitol are analog. As one engineer said, it's easier to physically grab onto something to make a change rather than have to pull it up on a computer.
They even still use the tape machines sometimes.
A lot of this equipment has created a lot of high-quality sound recordings that have stood the test of time...
...and sound just as pristine—and relevant—now as they did back then.
I've never heard The Who's "Pinball Wizard" or Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" better than I did today in Studio C's surround sound.
Maybe it's because our engineer, Charlie, told us to crank it up as high as we wanted.
Music types always like their music loud.
Capitol's studios aren't just about recordingthe songs—but also finishing them off, adding effects, and sending masters off to be manufactured—so we got to visit a couple of mastering suites as well.
And here's where my mind was really blown, because we got to watch the process of lacquer mastering for vinyl (also known as "vinyl cutting"), as demonstrated by legendary vinyl mastering engineer Ron McMaster.
He's been cutting records for Capitol since the 1980s; but when vinyl sales went into a slump and interest in LPs waned, he switched to mastering CDs.
Now that interest in vinyl is resurging, Ron is back in the phonograph business—with two vintage Neumann disc-cutting lathes that he practically had to rescue from being scrapped when it seemed like they'd become obsolete. And it's a good thing, too, since nobody makes those machines anymore (and when Ron needs a spare part, he's got to search the internet for it).
I'll be honest: I didn't really understand what I was watching when Ron used the machine to cut a 45 RPM (a.k.a. a 7-inch) of "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" from The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds (which just turned 50 years old this month). The song was playing, and the grooves seemed to appear on the 10-inch vinyl disc as if by magic.
It was the perfect ending to a tour inside a building that itself looks like a stack of vinyl records.
Of course, I'm not done with that building yet. The rooftop observation deck still beckons me, its red blinking beacon spelling out H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D in Morse code.
Unfortunately, it closed to the public after 9/11. Fortunately, I'm not your average "public" citizen.
Here's a great little video on the construction of the tower, initially dubbed "Project X":
There are very few places to stay overnight when visiting Death Valley, if you're not going to camp. There are four places in the park itself - including the Panamint Springs Resort where I spent two haunted nights four years ago - and then there are a variety of small towns around the periphery of the park, all at least a half hour's drive from the park boundary.
After spending one uneventful night in the popular stopover town Beatty, NV, I spent the last night of my Death Valley weekend in a far more remote location: Death Valley Junction, a ghost town whose only remaining business is the Amargosa Opera House & Hotel.
Designated a National Historic Landmark, the Amargosa was originally built in the 1920s as a borax company town for local workers. It had residences, a coffee shop, a hospital, a rec hall, a store, and a garage across the street.
In the 1960s, actress/dancer Marta Becket moved from New York City to Death Valley Junction and rented out the original hall to turn it into an opera house, where she performed dances and mimes for over 40 years, until her retirement a few weeks ago.
I never got to see her perform, and now the opera house is officially closed.
But after a bit of begging, despite my late check-in, I managed to get myself a tour.
The walls of the opera house are covered in Marta's paintings...
...illuminated by lights hand-crafted out of coffee cans.
Many of Marta's personal possessions - including old costume pieces - still linger backstage, access to which is forbidden.
Apparently Marta, now in her late 80s, still lives onsite - somewhere - in an undisclosed location.
You can almost feel her watching, as her paintings stare out at you from the walls of the hotel hallways.
And you can still see her dance, on the TV screen in the lobby, which shows old VHS tapes of her performances.
I started driving past the Century Plaza Hotel, along Century City's Avenue of the Stars, pretty regularly sometime in the year 2020, during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
circa Dec. 2021
It was on my way home from the Santa Monica College swimming pool—but it wasn't the most convenient way home.
[Last updated 7/22/26 8:33 PM PT—The Cinerama Dome and adjacent Arclight multiplex closed during Covid shutdowns and never reopened. Thanks in large part to a one-man campaign known as Save the Cinerama Dome, the family that operates the complex has leased it to Sony Pictures Entertainment's subsidiary Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, which will reopen it in 2028.]
The first time I went to the Cinerama Dome, it wasn't to see a movie (despite the fact that it is, by virtue of its name, a cinema).
[Last updated 6/2/26 12:30 PM PT—The Beverly Hilton has demolished its pool as part of the One Beverly Hills development. It plans to rebuild it in approximately the same location (but not exactly) and raise it up to the second story. I recently got a view of the construction site from above while visiting the rooftop restaurant, Circa 55 (scroll for pic). Other parts of the hotel are also under construction, and the self-parking structure has been demolished.]
I've long been fascinated with the Beverly Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills, California—for reasons having nothing to do with the Golden Globe Awards, whose ceremony has taken place there every year since 1961.
View from the Waldorf-Astoria, where Trader Vic's once stood, circa 2017
It really doesn't have anything to do with its architecture, either—though the Welton Becket-designed hotel (in a lovely shade of "marshmallow white") is a nice slice of Mid-Century Modernism circa 1955.
The hotel—which was opened by Conrad Hilton and retained the family name despite being bought by TV game show impresario Merv Griffin in 1987—held my fascination on nearly every business trip I took to LA because of the Trader Vic's it once housed.
I'd been desperate to visit it—but had a hard time determining my own schedule when I was in town working.
And I couldn't convince any of my colleagues, coworkers, or contacts to meet me there.
Then in 2007, Trader Vic's lost its proper location—a wing of the Beverly Hilton that was ultimately demolished—and was relegated to a new poolside location until 2017, when it closed for good.
Although I did visit the reduced Trader Vic's bar a couple of times during those 10 years...
circa 2009 (Google Street View)
...the ghostly shadow of the demolished wing haunted me while it sat there vacant for way too long (until the Waldorf-Astoria was built in its place, finally opening the same year Trader Vic's closed for good).
Fast forward to last week, when I was somewhat inspired by my recent "tikication" at Caliente Tropics Resort in Palm Springs...
...and decided to spend a day of the recent heatwave working poolside at the Beverly Hilton's Aqua Star Pool [Update 2026: now demolished].
At 93 by 36 feet, it's supposedly the largest heated hotel pool in Beverly Hills—which meant swimming laps in between typing on my laptop and sipping on mojitos.
The pool is fraught with celebrity lore—starting perhaps with its inauguration, when it was christened by "Million Dollar Mermaid" Esther Williams swimming through a cascade of floating gardenias. [Update 2026—That curved area on the upper level of the building is where I was standing to look down from above at the construction site.]
And then there was that time Angelina Jolie jumped in fully dressed in her Golden Globes gown after winning her award for Gia in 1999.
[Update 2026] And now it's gone.
Of course, the hotel itself has drawn its fair share of famous and infamous clientele, too—even outside of awards season.
They ranged from the Rat Pack, Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, and Whitney Houston (who drowned in her hotel room bathtub in 2012).
...to international heads of state, including JFK who nicknamed the hotel the "Western White House."
All of those celebrities and more loved the old Trader Vic's restaurant just as much as they loved the hotel itself and its pool...
Trader Vic's Lounge circa 2010 (Photo: Neeta Lind via Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
...but I can't imagine any Hollywood elite enjoyed happy hour at the poolside "lounge" version of Trader Vic's.
circa 2010
The first time I went to the lounge—the only Trader Vic's at the Beverly Hilton I ever got to experience—I ordered a drink called the "Parrot Pot." According to my Facebook post at the time, I got to keep the parrot.
Only now, 10 years later, I have no clue what happened to that parrot. And it's freaking killing me.
When the bell finally tolled for Trader Vic's Lounge, I didn't know until it was too late. One night, I showed up after an event elsewhere in the hotel, and I couldn't find any trace of it left.
It was heartbreaking—because even a disappointing Trader Vic's is better than no Trader Vic's at all.
Likewise, the one at L.A. Live in Downtown Los Angeles by the Staples Center—which the Eater blog called "a mall version," and rightly so—had only lasted five years, closing in 2014. At least I managed to get a souvenir mug from the that one (even though it was after the fact).
I tell myself that there's absolutely nothing I can do about having missed out on Trader Vic's proper location at the Beverly Hilton. It's never coming back.
And while I was hoping to get some closure by visiting its gravesite, I think my poolside day only made my regret worse—and made me feel more forlorn about the whole thing.
The lounge is a grab-and-go snack bar now. It's completely unrecognizable.
My only recourse, I think, is to try to keep this type of thing from happening again.
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