Culture, Community, and the Holiday Bowl
Cindy Olnick 0:00
Today on Save As, we catch up with one of the first graduates of USC’s Heritage Conservation program, who since then has driven every single street in Los Angeles. Find out why.
Trudi Sandmeier 0:21
Hello, and welcome to Save As. I’m Trudi Sandmeier.
Cindy Olnick 0:26
I am Cindy Olnick.
Trudi Sandmeier 0:28
We’re happy today to take a little trip down memory lane with a Where Are They Now? episode
Cindy Olnick 0:33
Where are they now, now, now.
Trudi Sandmeier 0:35
Wow, I gotta say the sound effects on this podcast are remarkable.
Cindy Olnick 0:41
You’re welcome.
Trudi Sandmeier 0:42
So, Katie is an early grad of our program. She’s done all these really interesting things over the course of her career. And it’s fun to go back and take a look at where it all started, how she got started in the field of heritage conservation.
Cindy Olnick 0:54
Yeah, she’s even teaching here.
Trudi Sandmeier 0:56
Yeah, she’s kind of come full circle from student t o faculty member.
Cindy Olnick 1:01
But she does a few other things in all her spare time. And we are very lucky that she shared some of that time with us, because we need to hear about the Holiday Bowl in Crenshaw, which was the topic of her thesis and a really interesting case study. And actually one of the first preservation issues I learned about when I moved to Los Angeles in 2000. I remember talking about a lot with Mr. John English. Hi, John.
Trudi Sandmeier 1:27
Hi, John.
Cindy Olnick 1:28
John! John rocks. He makes great ice cream too. But anyway, we talked a lot about that, he was very involved in that effort. And you know, I gotta say, honestly, it’s a little bittersweet. Revisiting but, you know, it’s a story we got to hear, we got to remember and we got to, you know, take the lessons that we’ve learned and move forward. So let’s take a listen to Trudi talking with Katie Horak.
Trudi Sandmeier 2:00
Hi, Katie, and welcome to Save As. It’s delightful to have you here with us today.
Katie Horak 2:06
I’m delighted to be here. Thank you for having me.
Trudi Sandmeier 2:09
This is a special sort of Where Are They Now? episode of Save As where we’re talking to some of our alumni from the early years of our program, to sort of see what’s happened since they have gone out in the world and become practitioners in the field and done some really amazing things a nd Katie is one of those folks. So we’ll start, of course, with the beginning, and that is your thesis work to finish your degree here at USC and kind of kick things off.
Katie Horak 2:41
So, I wrote my thesis about a place called the Holiday Bowl, which is in the Crenshaw district of South Los Angeles. And the title of the thesis was “Holiday Bowl and the Problem of Intangible Cultural Significance: A Historic Preservation Case Study.” And it really was a look at the advocacy effort to save the Holiday Bowl which had been sold by its owners and was slated for demolition. Ultimately, the bowling alley itself was demolished. But the coffee shop portion, which is this really sweet, Googie building that faces Crenshaw, was saved. And if you think about the Holiday Bowl as a community center, a place really significant things happened in the community, the preservation of ju st this portion of the building was not enough. And so in some ways, the thesis was a post mortem on the preservation effort.
Trudi Sandmeier 3:37
Tell us a little bit about the Holiday Bowl.
Katie Horak 3:39
Until the 1950s, Crenshaw was exclusively white. And as the restrictive covenants were overturned, and people of color start to move into the neighborhood, it became this incredible mosaic of different people white, Japanese American and Black. At the time, in the mid 1950s, Crenshaw had the biggest Japanese American population in Los Angeles. It was a really important area of resettlement after internment when the community sort of dispersed from Little Tokyo into other parts of the city. And there is this little pocket of undeveloped land in the 1950s, just north of Leimert Park, that the Japanese American community was able to develop with residential properties, other commercial properties, institutional properties. It became this really vibrant Japanese American community in the 1950s, 1960s.
The Holiday Bowl was a bowling alley that was developed by, owned by and operated by the Japanese American community in the Crenshaw neighborhood. It opened around 1958, 1959, sort of the tail end of when Japanese American bowlers, Black bowlers couldn’t bowl in typical bowling leagues because they’re always excluded to the white community only. So, I think that the Holiday Bowl really reflected, it was this little cross section of the community, right. It had white leagues, it had Black leagues, it had Japanese American leagues, everyone was bowling together. When people would write about the Holiday Bowl or talk about the Holiday Bowl, people who had been there in the 1950s and the 1960s, they always talk about, you know, the lasting friendships that were made across race lines, the fact that was open 24 hours, because it was a place where a lot of people had these industrial jobs where they were wanting to be able to bowl when they got off work at 4 am. You know, it just it had this really important place in its community and was an incredible cross section of the community at that time.
Trudi Sandmeier 5:36
So the threat to this place, and its eventual loss was about much more than the building, for sure.
Katie Horak 5:44
Losing the place where these things happen is the real loss. And the buildings are these sort of receptacles of memory and interaction, and community. But it’s really more about what happens within the walls of those buildings than the buildings themselves. When the bowling alley closed, the community really mourned the loss of this place, which had been truly the community center of the neighborhood for so long. You know, people went there every single day, and they ate in the coffee shop, they bowled, they saw their friends, they went there after a long night of being out on the town, they would come back, eat at the diner
Trudi Sandmeier 6:22
So, the community really fought to save this site, not only the Japanese American community, but the African American community and the residents of the area, just understanding its role in that place. But ultimately, that fight was unsuccessful, and the building was lost, or at least most of it. What’s the story with the coffee shop?
Katie Horak 6:44
Once the building closed, it was clear that its demolition was eminent. And it wasn’t protected. This community member that put forward HCM application, which was very much about the significance of this place to the community, and the coalition, local residents, it was people who patronized the Holiday Bowl. It was the Japanese community, it was the Black community, it was the white community. There was the Modern Committee of Los Angeles Conservancy who were really fighting to preserve the space as well, and they were recognizing all aspects of importance, not just the community benefit of this place, but also the the Googie architecture. It’s a great building. And it’s a beautiful Googie building. It has a pedigree. It’s Armet & Davis, and Helen Liu Fong. It’s a very sweet Googie coffee shop. But the bowling alley portion, which was the vast majority of the building was a box, right, because that’s what a bowling alley is, a big box. The coffee shop is sort of appended to the front. Once there was a project for the site, which was a big strip mall development, there was an environmental firm hired to do a historic technical report, where they analyzed the significance of the building and the impact of the project on the building. And that report focused entirely on architectural significance. It did not really focus on the cultural history, the social history of this place. And so when you’re only looking at architectural significance, you’re focusing on architectural features. And all those features were on the coffee shop, they weren’t on the bowling alley, the bowling alley is a box. The technical report stated that the impact could be mitigated because they were preserving the coffee shop in accordance with the Secretary of Interior Standards. But, at the end of the day, it was just kind of amazing, they lost you know 80% of the building and it was still no impact under CEQA because it was so focused on the architectural detail of the coffee shop. So the coffee shop is still there, you can go it’s a Starbucks you can go and get your coffee there and enjoy the beautiful Googie features. They left the interior pretty intact. They did do a good job in preserving the coffee shop but there’s no bowling alley. It’s a Walgreens, I think, where the bowling alley once stood. And, you know, the places gone, the place is gone.
Trudi Sandmeier 9:02
Does the community still use the coffee shop?
Katie Horak 9:04
They do. You know, it’s it’s so funny how these things come full circle because, you know about probably 10 years after I graduated, I was back in Los Angeles working on the SurveyLA project. We were doing the Leimert Park survey for SurveyLA. And, you know, one of the greatest things when you’re doing a survey is finding a coffee shop where you can get your coffee to caffeinate in the middle of the day, and use a clean restroom and the Holiday Bowl coffee shop, that Starbucks became our daily stop. It was interesting to me how, you know, you go to a million different Starbucks in your life but this one felt special, it really did. Like it just felt, it just had this regular patronage and everybody was talking to each other and knew each other, and it was it felt good there. It took me a while to come around to that, but it did.
Trudi Sandmeier 9:54
I’m sure. There are places myself that I have a hard time visiting now or engaging with because I have such a checkered memory of what used to be there or the fight that went into that place. And so I can imagine that was a bit of a challenge for you.
Katie Horak 10:12
Yeah, so true.
Trudi Sandmeier 10:13
I often say to our students, that heritage conservation often revolves around politics and money, and you can be a building hugger as much as you want. But if you don’t have at least one of those two other elements in your corner, it’s going to be a really hard path. So, this was a case with the Holiday Bowl, where it was a constellation of amazing histories and stories that coalesced into this one place. And, it still wasn’t enough.
Katie Horak 10:46
I think that that’s something that I keep thinking about and that really surprised me in rereading my thesis was all the pieces were there for a really successful advocacy effort. But at the end, the councilman didn’t want it, and other council members aren’t going to go against the council person within whose district the building sits. It’s just a harsh reality of development in a place like Los Angeles, where development is kind of king. I mean, I can’t tell you every time I get a call from a developer who’s looking at a building to buy, the first thing they say is, I’m sure it’s nothing, it’s an ugly old building. And I’m like, we can’t be so sure is nothing.
Trudi Sandmeier 11:28
I’m sure it’s nothing, it’s an ugly old building. We should put that on a T-shirt with a circle slash through it, and sell them to make money for scholarships for our students.
Katie Horak 11:37
Yep.
Trudi Sandmeier 11:38
You raised a lot of questions in your thesis about how to save places like this that are not architecturally significant, but have this profound community significance, and particularly that are related to communities of color, where their visibility on national registers and local registers and things like that is just almost nothing. When you looked back at your thesis and the questions you raised, were there revelations about things that we’ve actually kind of started to fix? Or, are we still in the same place as we were in 2006?
Katie Horak 12:22
It’s a really interesting question. And in some ways, I think we’re in both places. It was very interesting to go back and read about the conversation around diversity and preservation that’s been going on almost since the beginning. In the 1960s, there’s almost immediately this conversation around, okay, how do we preserve intangible cultural heritage, but most of it was centered around indigenous groups, and indigenous heritage. I think one of the most amazing things of the past year is how much this conversation is dominating the heritage conservation field , which is amazing. There’s symposia, and workshops, and studies, and people are really trying to find ways to change policy. Because enough is enough, you know, we have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of designated buildings that represent white history. And just a small handful that don’t. The people who actually have the power to designate places are really recognizing the deficiency of their programs. And, you know, thinking of the City of Los Angeles, they have historic context statements for a lot of major ethnic groups in the city, which provide the framework for identifying places with significance for their association with people of color, and also with African American initiative that the Getty is supporting, you know, to bring someone on staff at the city level to manage this program. And hopefully, we’ll see a big influx of designated buildings significant for their association with people of color. In a place of like Los Angeles, it’s crazy that we don’t have more.
Trudi Sandmeier 14:08
I agree that I think a lot of the policy changes that we need to make, to sort of undo some of the systemic racism that’s baked in to preservation practice is starting to happen. But for every one step forward, I have to say we kind of are taking some steps back as well.
Katie Horak 14:27
I think the thing that really struck me about the thesis when I reread it was what it sounds like when someone writes about a place that they’re not a part of.
Trudi Sandmeier 14:35
Hmm, interesting.
Katie Horak 14:37
There’s so many things I would do different about this thesis if I were to do it now. You know, when I wrote that thesis, I had never spent any time in Leimert Park. I’d never spent any time on Crenshaw. I went there to visit the building, which at the time was boarded up. Everything I knew about that neighborhood was things that I had read and mostly secondary source information. It was mainly newspaper articles, and some oral histories in that there’s this amazing oral history project for the Holiday Bowl by Sharon Sekhon, in which, she is the one who introduced me to Holiday Bowl and kind of blew my head open. But it was really interesting to read the part where I describe the Holiday Bowl, and I described the Crenshaw neighborhood coming from the voice of a white woman who grew up in suburban Southern California. That’s the part that made me cringe; it was really hard to read. I think that that really goes to show how important it is for communities to tell the stories of their own places, and not for some white practitioner to come in and tell these stories. And maybe that’s, maybe there’s a coalition and there’s a collaboration there. You know, I think that the reason why we do any any good as practitioners is because we understand the processes, and we understand the framework, because we’ve been trained to do this. We bring this knowledge and we can get things through the system. But it really just shouldn’t be our voices telling the stories of these places and I was really struck by that when I read my thesis and how important it is that you bring in voices from the community.
Trudi Sandmeier 16:13
It’s a really different feeling, you know, an understanding of a place that has more depth and resonance in meaning when it is a place of significance to the person who is doing the talking.
Katie Horak 16:27
You know, I really thought about this, listening to Rita Cofield talk about Watts on Save As, this beautiful moment where she was talking about when politicians talk about Watts, they don’t talk about beautiful buildings. But to the community it’s full of these beautiful places. That really resonated with me.
Trudi Sandmeier 16:43
After you graduated, Katie, what happened next? Where did you end up?
Katie Horak 16:47
I think that when I started the program, I knew I loved historic places. I didn’t know what I wanted to do or where I wanted to end up. And so, I had all these different internships while I was a student to try and see what the right path was for me; did I like local government, did I like advocacy, did I like consulting. And where did I want to be? So after I graduated, I moved to New York City to work with the Landmarks Preservation Commission, on a survey team. And as a lifelong Southern Californian, I really was pretty excited at the opportunity to move to New York. At the time, there was a lot of criticism of that landmarks program in New York as being very Manhattan-centric, and also sort of Brooklyn-centric, and they were very under landmarks in boroughs like Staten Island, the Bronx, and Queens. And so a lot of what our role was to find landmarks in these other boroughs. So it was a really amazing way to get to know the city in places that I wouldn’t have normally seen, going out and, and serving these neighborhoods, writing landmarks, nominations, reports for, you know, New York City places. And I was there for a year and a half, and then I decided to come back to California. It was a quick little sojourn to New York to work for a little while, but a very highly impactful job on the rest of my career.
Trudi Sandmeier 18:11
How so?
Katie Horak 18:12
Working in New York was impactful, because I did get a totally different perspective on historic preservation. Even though we work under federal guidelines, everybody does it a little differently, depending on the community. And New York is one of these places, they’ve had a program for a long time. So many of us come to this profession, because we will obviously love historic places, we are influenced by our environments, I stayed in one place my whole childhood. I’ve always been in Southern California, I feel like I can read the built environment to Southern California in a sort of intuitive way. And it was really fun to go somewhere where I couldn’t do that. I felt like I was reading a book and a different language. Because you know, in California, I can kind of date things just by my understanding of the place and being here for so long. You know, there are people there who can date rowhouses within a few years, just based on the type of cornice it has, or the type of window surround. And that was all totally new to me. And so I immersed myself in this crash course of New York history because I think we have a responsibility of understanding the history of a place. It was a fun challenge to come into that job as a Californian, and really immerse myself in it and just experience a completely new vernacular and a completely new built environment.
Trudi Sandmeier 19:38
So you came back to Los Angeles in 2008, during the recession, and started working for Architectural Resources Group, which is a local historic preservation consulting firm.
Katie Horak 19:48
They’ve been around in San Francisco since 1980. But they had this big project in Pasadena at Pasadena City Hall, doing the seismic retrofit of that building that required having a local office. You know, they’re full of full service architecture firm, so they do design, in addition to consulting and planning, which I found really appealing. So I was part of a really small staff, there are just three of us in the office, two architects and me. And it was a really incredible opportunity to build the practice with my colleagues in the way that we wanted to. So SurveyLA was one of the first things I worked on. When I started working with ARG, the fact that so little of LA had ever been surveyed before, it was a really exciting challenge to survey a place as unwieldy and complex and enormous as Los Angeles. Little did I know, it would occupy much of the next 10 years of my professional life, in one form or another, and probably will remain sort of a career defining role for me. It required the collaboration of so many different consultants in the city, we had this just incredible flow of interns coming into our office to work on it, many of whom got permanent jobs at ARG and continue to work with us to this day. So it was a way to build the practice, it was a way to get to know the city in a way that I could never even have imagined. Any preconceived ideas you had about Los Angeles neighborhoods were completely transformed by this experience of driving every single street and looking at every single building. Looking back, I’m so grateful that I just happened to come back at that time, and was able to get in to this project right at the beginning. And then have the opportunity to keep working on it for a number of years consistently with this really great team at the city, Janet Hansen, who just did this incredible job managing this completely unwieldy project. I’ve been at ARG for 13 years. So the first, you know, first 10 years, a lot of what we were doing was SurveyLA. And of course, we worked on a lot of other great projects, it was not like all we were doing was that project, but it was it was definitely a incredible opportunity to get to work on a project like that. And we’ve taken so much of what we learned from that project to other surveys and other cities.
Trudi Sandmeier 22:03
I know that modernism has always been an interest of yours, and that you have recently gotten more involved in efforts to save modern architecture. So what is Docomomo?
Katie Horak 22:16
Docomomo stands for documentation and conservation of building sites and neighborhoods of the modern movement. Quite a mouthful, so goes by Docomomo. It’s an international organization that was founded in the 80s because there was a real need at that time for advocates for the preservation of modern architecture, post-war modern architecture, which at the time was very young. And there were challenges in preserving these seminal works of modernism worldwide. Docomomo has chapters across the world, and there is a US organization DocomomoUS. And then there are state chapters as well, or local chapters. My involvement with Docomomo started, actually, when I was working in New York, and an internship while I was a student. There was an international conference for Docomomo in New York City in 2004. I went to that conference, and I was really perplexed why there wasn’t a Docomomo chapter in Southern California, which has this incredible modern tradition, of course, known around the world. So a group of colleagues and I formed a Southern California Chapter back in 2013, with the hope of providing that advocacy voice in places in Southern California where it may not otherwise exists.
Trudi Sandmeier 23:33
And you now sit on the national Docomomo board.
Katie Horak 23:38
I do. So about two years ago, I started to serve on the board of directors of DocomomUS, and I currently am the secretary for DocomomoUS.
Trudi Sandmeier 23:49
A few years ago, Katie, you were recruited to come and teach in the program from which you graduated. So talk a little bit about what you’ve been doing as a faculty member.
Katie Horak 24:03
So I teach two classes in the heritage conservation program. I teach Intro to Historic Site Documentation every fall, which is a required course. For the degree, I also teach an advanced documentation class for historic resources survey. Having been a student in those seats, and now having been a practitioner for a number of years, I’m very conscious of what sort of tools I think would be good to have, or good to learn when you’re a student in this program. Teaching in the program gives me so much hope for the future of preservation because the students are incredible. And many of them have gone on to do just incredible things in the field. It’s always a relatively small group between seven and 15 students, so you really get to know them. They always have this great dynamic with one another. And it’s always different. I welcome the cyclical change that teaching brings, the excitement of being on campus in the fall for that first day of class and the sort of nervousness and the relief at the end of the semester. And the pride that I always feel and the work that’s been done by the students. It’s an extremely fulfilling, and wonderful thing. And I’m grateful that I was recruited.
Trudi Sandmeier 25:25
In your survey course, you typically pick a topic for the students to work on that is a neighborhood in Los Angeles that has been identified in some way, either by yourself or through another evaluation like SurveyLA, that it’s an area that needs more study.
Katie Horak 25:44
I always try to find a neighborhood that has obviously not been designated, where there is a need. And I always like for there to be a sort of community effort underway, because I think it’s very important for the students to interact with the community as part of their coursework, and to have a client like we do in the field. The first neighborhood that I chose was a neighborhood called View Park. My team at ARG had been contacted by a couple of community members, Ben Kahle and Andre Gaines. They said there’s this neighborhood we live in, the buildings are beautiful, they date from the 1920s to the 1960s. It’s really intact. It hasn’t been altered. It sits in this incredible geographic location in the city with his view of downtown Los Angeles. It’s south of the 10 Freeway. It’s in unincorporated Los Angeles County, there’s no way to designate it as a City of Los Angeles Historic Preservation Overlay Zone. What can we do? What can we do to protect this amazing place? So, at that time, there was no LA county ordinance yet, there is now but that at that time, there wasn’t. And so I said, you know, you really should consider National Register listing, that really is your only option. And the neighborhood is huge. It’s about 1600 buildings. It’s a big district for listing in the National Register. And at that point, they hadn’t raised very much money. And it’s very expensive to hire a consultant to do a survey of that size. So I said to Ben and Andre, you know, I teach this class at USC, this is my first semester teaching it, I think that View Park would be the perfect case study for this class, would you be game for doing this with me? And they were really enthusiastic, they came and spoke to the students. And you know, their enthusiasm for the place was really infectious, it got the students really excited about going and doing the work. We did a couple field days with Ben and Andre, they walked us around. And the students embarked on this research journey learning more about View Park.
There’s so much more to that neighborhood than than meets the eye. When you walk around the neighborhood, you are really taken by the beautiful architecture, people who love historic upsets, it’s full of beautiful historic houses. But when you start to peel back the layers of the onion, it has this just incredible story. You know, starting with the fact that the Los Angeles investment company who had developed the neighborhood had baked these racist covenants into the deeds of the houses. The work that the students uncovered, you know, they found articles in the Los Angeles Sentinel, which is the African American newspaper in Los Angeles, that if you wanted to buy a house in View Park, and you’re a Black homeowner, even though restrictive covenants had been overturned years before, real estate agents wouldn’t show you a house in View Park. If they did, you had to pay for the house all cash. And if you had the cash, all of a sudden the price of the house was double. So there are all these tactics to keep people of color out of white neighborhoods like View Park and we had these firsthand accounts of this happening in this place through newspaper articles. The first Black homeowners to purchase in View Park were these two sisters, they bought a house up in the neighborhood, and people were burning crosses on their lawn and throwing bricks through their windows. And these two middle-aged sisters who just wanted to buy a house in this beautiful neighborhood were met with incredible violence and intimidation. And then as happens, this is the pattern that we all have read about. You know, as soon as a couple of black and the families moved into the neighborhood, there was white flight, the white residents left by the mid 1970s. It was an entirely black neighborhood. But not just a black neighborhood but a neighborhood of incredible black wealth and investment. I didn’t know any of this about the neighborhood. This is all through the research that the students uncovered. And so we realized although this is a place of beautiful architecture, to be sure, View Park is really more important because of the the story that it tells us about restrictive housing practices in a place like Los Angeles, which are very similar to restrictive housing practices across the country. So the students prepared the documentation needed for National Register nomination. The neighborhood is so big, they couldn’t document every single building as is needed for that type of nomination. But they did a really incredible amount of work. We made a presentation to the community at the end of class; we must have had 100, 150 community members come to this meeting. And the students gave their presentation. And they did an incredible job presenting the findings of the work and just telling the history of the place and why it’s significant and why it meets National Register criteria. And, you know, there really wasn’t a dry eye in the house, people were crying, it was just an incredible experience. So you know, that set a pretty high bar for the survey class.
Ultimately, View Park was listed in the National Register. One of my students from that class, Sandy Shannon, came to work with ARG to help us finish the work needed to meet the documentation requirements for listing in the National Register. And ultimately, a couple years, I think after my class started, it was successfully listed and I think is the largest historic district in California, listed for its association with the Black community. So a really, a great story of how something started as it a class project and I think we all had expectations that were just blown out of the water based on what the students found.
Trudi Sandmeier 31:35
Let’s talk about a few of the neighborhoods that you’ve explored with the students through this course.
Katie Horak 31:41
So in the years since then, we did a project in the San Fernando Valley is the opposite end of the city, the Living-Conditioned homes by Palmer and Krisel, so a postwar neighborhood of modernist homes. We did a survey of Vermont Knolls, which is a neighborhood also developed by Walter Leimert. We did Leimert Park. So again, just kind of full circle. It is interesting to me how the throughline in my life of my thesis has kind of stayed with me through our work in Leimert Park, on the SurveyLA survey there where I learned so much more about the neighborhood than I did when I was doing my thesis. The throughline continues, you know, six years ago, then I bought a house in the neighborhood. I never would have dreamed in a million years and I wrote that thesis that I would have the opportunity to buy a house and live in this neighborhood. It’s incredible to live in this neighborhood that I’ve studied for so long. And now as a resident, it’s yeah, it’s even better than I could have imagined.
Trudi Sandmeier 32:42
So it seems like all roads lead back to the Holiday Bowl for you.
Katie Horak 32:46
They do, they do.
Trudi Sandmeier 32:49
Well, thank you, Katie for coming to join us on Save As and for taking a look back at your journey from your student days to today, and some of the interesting stops along the way. It’s been fun to have a conversation with a colleague and a friend about their heritage conservation path.
Katie Horak 33:08
Thank you so much for having me, Trudi, it’s been so much fun.
Cindy Olnick 33:15
That was definitely a walk down memory lane. And it’s just, you know, so impressive to hear just some of the many, many things that Katie is up to, and how she’s really leading the field in many ways.
Trudi Sandmeier 33:28
It really was a fun conversation. And it’s really great that she’s using all these things that she does as a practitioner and bringing that into the classroom. We’re so lucky to have her as part of our faculty.
Cindy Olnick 33:40
Yeah, well, that’s why a lot of people love coming here because a lot of the faculty are, you know, doing the work every day. So actually, you and I have something in common with Katie, which is a connection to this nonprofit called Friends of Residential Treasures Los Angeles, or Fort LA. You are an advisor, Miss Trudi. I am a proud trailblazer, meaning I curated a self-guided tour called Lost and Found, no self promotion there. And Katie did a trail recently on View Park. So, I just want to give a shout out to Fort LA and congratulate them on not one but two preservation awards this year from the Los Angeles Conservancy and the California Preservation Foundation. So we will link to them in the show notes if you want to learn more.
Trudi Sandmeier 34:31
Speaking of shownotes if you want to learn more about today’s episode about the Holiday Bowl, visit our show notes page at saveas.place.
Cindy Olnick 34:40
If you love Save As and I think that you do, the best way you can show your heartfelt appreciation is to spread that love. Tell a friend, tell a colleague and if you’ve ever missed an episode of Save As we won’t tell anyone, but hurry up and subscribe so it never happens again. All right, next time on Save As we hear two stories that embody heritage advocacy and activism from someone who seriously talks the talk and walks the walk.
Rosalind Sagara 35:13
My father is a Nisei second generation Japanese American from Southern California. And so I am a descendant of camp survivors. And that’s very much part of, you know, my identity, very much inspires me to stand up for social justice and respect for history and kind of learning from our past.
Trudi Sandmeier 35:50
This episode was produced by Willa Seidenberg with an assist from me, yours truly, Trudi Sandmeier. Our original theme music is by Steven Conley. Save As is a production of the Heritage Conservation program in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California.
