Let’s give Pharrell some money. I found that he was, like, all over the soundtrack album to the movie Hidden Figures. So here you go.
7:00 Now Pharrell’s backlit in an alley. This is going nowhere very fast. Though that building with words on the side looks vaguely familiar. Is it something we’ve seen during this project or someplace I’ve been or a chain of some sort and I’ve seen it somewhere else? Or is it just one of those buildings?
7:04 A woman with a puppet is now in that alley, which is considerably better lit than it has been previously. It remains to be seen if that’s going to do us any good.
We come out onto the street and there’s a sign pointing to “Event Parking.”
A sign. Finally. It says “Twelve Street,” which is Google tells me is a women’s clothing store in downtown Los Angeles. Sorry. Which was a women’s clothing store in downtown Los Angeles.
Okay. We start out just off Pico Boulevard in between Grand and Hope. The plant from 6:56 is a tree. We walk up the alley that cuts through the middle of that block until we reach 12th Street. We come out on 12th Street and make a right, ending up at 12th and Grand. We make a left and cross Grand.
We follow Grand to Olympic and as we head southeast, it hits me that I don’t know exactly where the video to U2’s Where the Streets Have No Name was shot. Have we been there in this project? I don’t even know.
So I do some digging and find that they were at 7th and Main. We’ve been on 7th. We’ve been on Main. Have we been on that corner, specifically? I look at Google Street View and it doesn’t look familiar. But we were, in fact, there, from what I can tell, at 11:04 am.
Now I’m nervous. Was I right back when I did that entry? Crap. I’ve got to go back and check it out.
Well, I was less clear than ideal back in my 11:00 am post, but I do have the right place. The young man at 10:56 am dances right past the building where they shot the video.
7:16 Now I’m lost again. We’re probably still on Olympic but I’m just confused about the intersection. Let’s find out.
7:26 It looks likely that we’re on Olympic (we pass a sign saying Oneone77, which looks to be somewhere on Olympic) but you can’t prove it by me yet. There are, however, more Loading Zone signs, this time with cars parked in front of them.
I take it back. We’re on Olive. Let’s see . . . at 7:16, we’re on Olive and Olympic and we head northeast on Olive. OneOne77 used to be at 709 Olive, and that building is right where it should be. The corner of that building, at Olive and 7th, is the 7-11 that we pass just after the Loading Zone signs (which are there in Google Street View). Then we make a right onto 7th and another right onto Hill.
As we approach 8th Street, there’s another really beautiful building, the Garfield Building, which has, from what I can tell, sat empty for decades. It went up for sale in 2015 but there’s no indication that it’s been sold or that anyone is doing anything with the property. It looks like it’d be a steal at $15 million. Now if my dad would just win the lottery . . . .
We make a left onto 8th Street and then we cross and make a left onto Broadway (and we’ve been here before).
7:36 We may be somewhere else now. At least, I can’t see the clock in the background in Google Street View. I can see the word “Pants” across the street but cannot make out the word above it. “Silly”? “Family”?
I guess it is “Family.” “Family Pants” ought to be pretty unique. And “Family Pants” is pretty much across from where we were at 7:35:59, so we haven’t moved at all. I wonder what happened to that clock. It’s still there, it’s just harder to see from the Google Street View car’s perspective, I guess.
After crossing 3rd, we cross Broadway and keep going down 3rd.
7:56 We’re in a parking lot and I’m having deja vu. For some reason, this parking lot reminds me of something to do with Allie Brosh and someone sitting in a shopping cart. Why? Maybe it’s a movie I saw and that for some reason I was reminded of by one of Allie’s posts?
I recognize an H&R Block. Now we’re inside a supermarket and I have no idea what supermarket we’re in. Maybe it’s a Ralph’s? What are Ralph’s’s house brands? If I can identify a house brand I can find the supermarket. Huh. I didn’t know that Ralph’ses are Kroger’ses.
Are they sure this is a real supermarket? Everything looks like it’s brand-name, even the coffee filters and the freezer of paletas (which looks to be Helados Mexico (which doesn’t have an accent)).* Also, everything is zoned** perfectly, everyone in the store is wearing an “i am OTHER” t-shirt, and there are no employees in evidence.
Wait. I see a cashier and a customer in the background and there’s a bottle of bleach that isn’t Clorox or even Cloralex.
Do we ever leave this supermarket? There’s a person in a chicken suit at 8:48. We stay in this building until 8:55. When the 8:52 dancer leaves, you can see the number “2245” above the door and that’s all I needed. They were in a now-closed Super A supermarket located at 2245 Yosemite. The location is now a Sprouts. Yep. There’s the H&R Block.
That was fun. Now on to 8:56. There’s a church behind the dancer. Is it the same church we passed back when we were on Selma? It’s looking like a distinct possibility. The dancer passes a red metal fence with small plants around the base which looks like the fence at Selma & McCadden. It’s gotta be the same church. The building to the east of the church is identical.
Ack! Did the Super A/Sprouts increase the size of our polygon?
No. It didn’t. Pity.
*In Spanish, the accent goes on the last syllable unless (a) there’s an accent mark or (b) the word ends in a vowel, an “n,” or an “s.” If the word ends in a vowel, an “n,” or an “s,” unless there’s an accent mark, the accent goes on the next-to-last syllable. That means that in order to pronounce “Mexico” so that it sounds like “MEH-hee-co” in Spanish you have to put an accent on the “e.” Otherwise it’d sound like “meh-HEE-co.”
**Pulled to the front of the shelf