[Encore] Fictional History: Recognizing Film and TV Locations
Cindy Olnick 0:00
Hello, Save As friends. This week we’re bringing you something different; an encore presentation of a an episode from a previous season that was selected by our wonderful Save As intern Emily Kwok. We’re calling it an “Emily’s Pick.” So we’re lucky to have Emily with us today. Emily, thank you so much for joining us today. And for all of your help this semester as an intern. Please just say hi to our Save As listeners.
Emily Kwok 0:29
Hi, everyone. My name is Emily and I’m a second year communications major at USC Annenberg. Thanks for having me. I had such a fun time interning with the Save As team. And even though I’m sad it’s coming to an end, I’m really excited that I got to help out with this last part of the job.
Cindy Olnick 0:49
Thank you so much, you have been a huge help. And you are now part of the Save As family. So tell us why you picked this particular episode.
Emily Kwok 1:01
Yes, so, I really loved the fictional history, like recognizing film and TV locations episode, because storytelling is just every thing to me. Ever since I could pick up a book I’ve been fascinated by what it means to be transported to another world with just the flip of a page. And I think my love of reading really transcended into my love for film. And the magic behind cinema and set design and location are crucial parts to the setting of where any story takes place, which is why the preservation of historic film locations d eserve to be recognized.
Cindy Olnick 1:38
Awesome. So we’re bringing you my interview from last year with Jonathan Kaplan, and alum who now works for the city of LA on fictional history. So enjoy and thank you again, Emily. Thank you.
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Cindy Olnick 1:57
OK people, the episode that blew my mind.
Trudi Sandmeier 2:11
Hello, everyone, welcome to Save As.
Cindy Olnick 2:14
Welcome.
Trudi Sandmeier 2:16
We’re back with another episode. I’m Trudi Sandmeier.
Cindy Olnick 2:20
And I am Cindy Olnick.
Trudi Sandmeier 2:23
And we are your hosts.
Cindy Olnick 2:24
Yes, we are.
Trudi Sandmeier 2:25
So Cindy.
Cindy Olnick 2:27
Yes Trudi.
Trudi Sandmeier 2:28
Who did you talk to this week?
Cindy Olnick 2:32
This week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Jonathan Kaplan, who graduated from the USC Heritage Conservation program a few years ago. So, it’s sort of a “where are they now” episode. He’s been doing great work after he graduated, and he did great work before. He does great stuff. And he has a bit of an entertainment biz background. So we’re talking about the dream factory in Los Angeles, we’re talking about fiction and reality. We’re talking about recognizing and designating sites of fictional history, which I mean, is it just me I mean, I just, I just think it’s so bizarre that we treat fictional and real places the same or we can treat them.
Trudi Sandmeier 3:26
I think the idea of blurring the lines between fiction and reality is especially important in a place like Los Angeles, where so much of our built environment is associated not only with the actual history that happened there, but with the fictional history that because it was in a movie or on a TV show, or, you know, every time you watch TV or watch a film, you’re seeing parts of LA up there on the screen. And it becomes this alternative identity for these places. It’s a really fascinating, weird juxtaposition of time and place.
Cindy Olnick 4:02
I know. And I just, I guess I’d never thought about it before. I mean, apparently, it’s not even new, you know, that this happens, but I had just never seen it, like, articulated this way before. And it just, it kind of threw me for a loop. I gotta say.
Trudi Sandmeier 4:19
When Jonathan and I were talking about his thesis early on, I just thought it was so fascinating that there were all of these sites out there that had been designated that were associated with really important books in history. And he identified this gap in that storyline. Why haven’t we talked about sites associated with films and television? So let’s listen to you guys talk about those issues.
Cindy Olnick 4:48
Okay. Are you ready for it, though?
Trudi Sandmeier 4:51
I’m ready. I’m ready to have my mind blown. Bring it on.
Cindy Olnick 4:57
Welcome, Jonathan, to Save As.
Jonathan Kaplan 5:01
Why thank you.
Cindy Olnick 5:02
Please introduce yourself to the Save As universe.
Jonathan Kaplan 5:05
I am Jonathan Kaplan. I graduated from the Heritage Conservation program a couple years ago, and I work at the City of Los Angeles in the Office of Historic Resources in the Planning Department in the HPOZ unit.
Cindy Olnick 5:17
And for our listeners outside of Los Angeles, HPOZ is our term for historic districts, or Historic Preservation Overlay Zones, because Save As has a worldwide audience.
Jonathan Kaplan 5:29
Do we?
Cindy Olnick 5:29
Yes, we do. And it’s growing by the day thanks to super guests like you. And you know, Jonathan, you and I have known each other for years since our Los Angeles Conservancy days.
Jonathan Kaplan 4:49
It has been a while.
Cindy Olnick 5:50
Yeah, we both volunteered and then I joined the staff. I don’t know if you remember this, but I remember us sitting at that French bistro on Broadway one summer day talking about your career. And look at you now.
Jonathan Kaplan 5:55
Oh, yeah. Well, actually, you had a little bit of a part in that because I remember sitting in the office of the Conservancy, and you suggested that it might not be a bad idea to, you know, I don’t know if you actually said go back to school, but to kind of learn more about the advocacy side of things, and maybe come in that way.
Cindy Olnick 6:12
How about that!
Jonathan Kaplan 6:13
And that was, that was one of the things that sent me back to school at the age of 40 something.
Cindy Olnick 6:17
Yes, it’s never too late to change your life.
Jonathan Kaplan 6:19
That is true.
Cindy Olnick 6:21
And so you did go back to school, and you got your master of heritage conservation degree from USC in 2018. And I love your thesis because it’s well written, it’s a good read, it deals with public perception, which is sort of my thing, and it blew my mind, I have to say. It’s called from Ramona to the Brady Bunch: Assessing the Historical Significance of Sites Used in Movies and Television Shows. So why did you choose that topic? What inspired you?
Jonathan Kaplan 6:52
The short answer is I grew up as a film buff. And that’s actually what brought me out to L.A. I came out to work in show business, which I did for a bit, but always been interested in history and historic sites. And when I moved out here, I spent all my time just kind of going around, and it was so exciting being in the place where, where so much happened. And a lot of the things I was excited about were entertainment things and just, you know, driving down Ventura Boulevard, like in the song and you know, driving around where I lived in Burbank and recognizing the streets from, you know, the Kurt Russell movies when I was growing up and seeing the Brady Bunch house and things like that.
And as I was wondering what to do as a thesis, I was noticing that none of these kind of film and movie or TV related sites were designated. And I just thought that was really odd. I never really saw a distinction between so-called fictional sites and regular historic sites. So the basic premise of the thesis is that the significance of a historic resource comes from its value as a physical remnant of a past cultural experience. You know, it preserves shared memory, and movies and TV shows also create cultural experiences. So if they can be as deeply ingrained in our shared memory as real events, then shouldn’t the films’ physical remnants also be considered historically significant?
Cindy Olnick 8:25
So what is a fictional historic site?
Jonathan Kaplan 8:28
Well, it’s basically a place where instead of real history having happened, it was it was used in a work of fiction, which can be literature, like, say The House of Seven Gables was based on, or a TV show like, the Brady Bunch, again or Happy Days, or movie location. If you go to Queens and go to the house that appeared in the credits of All in the Family, you know, Edith and Archie Bunker were never there. They’re not real people. They don’t exist. And Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton, who played them, were never there. So nothing actually really happened there. But we associate these places with the entertainment, the fiction that happened there.
Cindy Olnick 9:12
I don’t know if you remember this, but back in 2008, the L.A. Conservancy did an L.A. Noir-chitecture tour in conjunction with the Big Read.
Jonathan Kaplan 9:21
Oh, yeah, I think I went on that.
Cindy Olnick 9:23
Right. And it featured sites of fictional history. The Formosa Cafe is very historic for many reasons, but it was also featured in LA Confidential. The Glendale train station that was in Double Indemnity, Philip Marlowe’s office on Raymond Chandler Square. You do use literature as a precedent. And there’s some great examples in your thesis.
Jonathan Kaplan 9:49
But I kept finding, and this this ended up being kind of the lion’s share of what the thesis covered, is that while there, there don’t seem to be any media sites, you know, film and TV sites that have been designated, there are a whole lot of literature sites, both outside of the country and in the country. And so I ended up looking at a lot of those and seeing how they were evaluated by the National Register, what criteria were used for their significance, and then turning around and seeing if I could apply the same criteria to movie and TV sites. And I mentioned already The House of Seven Gables, the book by Nathaniel Hawthorne. What’s interesting about that place is the nomination has nothing to do with Nathaniel Hawthorne, it’s all about the piece of literature, there’s no evidence that he’d ever been to the house. He never said the book was based on the house. In fact, there are several other likely candidates. And so it has that in common with some of these other TV houses I was talking about. What’s also interesting about it, is that the house was altered decades after the book was published in order to fit in with the book. Rooms were changed to match passages in the book. It actually didn’t have seven gables, they actually had to add gables to it like I think in the 1890s.
Cindy Olnick 11:15
So for some reason, this book had just become associated with that particular house, right, just popular culture.
Jonathan Kaplan 11:23
Yeah, and what’s interesting is the nomination language acknowledges this. They don’t they don’t make any claims. It’s not like I said, it’s not for Nathaniel Hawthorne. It’s not for the architecture. It’s because of the effect that the book had on the public and the public deemed this to be the house that this was based on.
Cindy Olnick 11:44
And so it must be open for tours and stuff so people can go in and that’s why they altered it.
Jonathan Kaplan 11:49
Yeah, it must be now. It was like one of the major tourist attractions in the country back 100 years ago. It was just it was a really big deal.
Cindy Olnick 11:57
Okay, so they actually changed the house to look like it did in the book. And that reminds me of another house.
Jonathan Kaplan 12:09
Is it a house where there were three very lovely daughters? With hair of gold. Yes, The Brady Bunch House.
[Music – theme from The Brady Bunch]
Cindy Olnick 12:35
HGTV bought it a few years ago, and then reverse engineered it, added another story, etc. I mean, down to the little horse sculpture.
Jonathan Kaplan 12:48
And in doing so took it further from actual integrity and closer to fictional integrity, because it brought us closer to the imaginary house that the Bradys lived in and further away from this house was built in 1959.
[Music – theme from The Brady Bunch]
Jonathan Kaplan 13:14
There’s another case in the book Moby Dick, the church that the whalers would go to, Melville describe it as having a pulpit that looked like the bow of a ship. Well, it didn’t have one when he wrote it, but it sure did later! And that also is on the National Register. And then also, more recently, in Cleveland, somebody bought the Christmas Story house, and changed the inside to make it look like what was actually a soundstage for the movie. And that is actually like the third most popular tourist attraction in Cleveland now. It’s like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, some museum, and then that.
Cindy Olnick 13:50
You know, what’s fascinating to me about all this is the blurring of fiction and reality, that it’s not clearly necessarily distinguished, you know, from, quote, unquote, real history.
Jonathan Kaplan 14:05
And, I think sometimes it is blurred, because I think sometimes, you know, something can be kind of pulling double or triple duty. Like, for example, there’s a site in Venice, close to us, where there’s a street corner where Charlie Chaplin filmed his first appearance ever as the Little Tramp. And so it’s not designated. But its importance is, number one, as a piece of history of the film industry, because that’s an important historical real world cinematic moment. Number two, it chronicles history because it was an auto race, which was something that was very popular in early Los Angeles, and it’s probably one of the best documented races. But then number three, it also is a fictional site, because it brings us into the world of the Little Tramp, because you get to see him kind of doing his thing. And so sometimes, rather than blurring I would say, provides multiple functions at the same time.
Cindy Olnick 15:03
Another example that I found, there’s like a bazillion examples in your thesis. We can’t get to all of them, unfortunately, but one that I find particularly fascinating is Mel’s Diner, which was used in American Graffiti, because it started as a real diner. And by the time they filmed the movie, it was sort of past its prime, let’s say, and so they sort of freshened it up for the film. And then they demolished it after the film, and then, you know, years later, they start opening Mel’s Diners, in reality, real Mel’s Diners, and they actually are opening them in historic places that need new uses. And it’s just the whole thing is just too much for me to take.
Jonathan Kaplan 15:52
Yeah, it’s interesting, because you know, that’s another thing that I find these fictional sites can do is, if a place like Mel’s Diner is used in a film, well, there are diners all over the country, but it ends up becoming kind of the archetypal diner because millions of people see it and experience it. It’s like they go there in the movie. And another example of that is Los Angeles has steps going up hills connecting streets that were built in the early days. And the one that we all know is the one that was used in the Laurel and Hardy film The Music Box, because it is used in a movie that kind of comes to represent all the different steps.
Cindy Olnick 16:37
Right, right. Do you think any of this has to do with the fact that Los Angeles is the dream factory?
Jonathan Kaplan 16:44
Yeah, I think most movie and TV sites are going to be found in Los Angeles because that is where the where the dreams are made, such as being called the dream factory because the idea of a lot of these sites is to transport you from the real world, which presents kind of a challenge when you’re looking at issues of integrity. Because if you’re looking at, say, The Addams Family house…
[Music – theme from The Addams Family]
Jonathan Kaplan 17:26
You’re not looking at a Victorian mansion that was built in 1883 that’s going to represent, you know, Victorian mansions built in 1883. You’re looking at something that’s going to be creepy and kooky and all that. The integrity is based on, is it associated with this fantasy world that’s been created?
Cindy Olnick 17:45
Because it was actually matte painted, right? The actual house that was used for the exterior doesn’t look like it does on TV, because they painted it to add all the mansard roofs and stuff. Is that what you mean?
Jonathan Kaplan 17:57
Yeah, exactly. Which actually adds a challenge to, to our kind of conventional ideas of integrity. Does something that is only half real and half a matte painting, what does that do to the integrity of workmanship?
Cindy Olnick 18:12
Right, and if you designated that house, and somebody wanted to change it, you know, what would that look like? What would you have to review? Right?
Jonathan Kaplan 18:21
That seems like a change away from its physical authenticity, like adding these mansard roofs and all the funky stuff that was in the Addams Family would actually be changing it towards its fictional authenticity.
Cindy Olnick 18:32
You know, the whole idea of integrity is being questioned in a lot of different realms. And it seems like, does it really matter? Right? Are you designating an idea?
Jonathan Kaplan 18:41
I still think integrity is important. It’s just with a fictional site, the integrity is going to be does it make you feel like you’re experiencing this world of fiction.
Cindy Olnick 18:50
Which would be the point, integrity of feeling, setting, etc, etc. SurveyLA, which is the citywide historic resources survey, the context statement actually has eligibility criteria for film and TV locations. So they have eligibility standards – it has to be the filming location of a significant motion picture or television production. Now, who decides? Can’t be part of a studio, which I think is super interesting. And then it’s got character defining features. And then it’s got integrity considerations, you know, even though the use may have changed, it’s based on the period, and then you’ve got this period of significance issue, right. So the period during which the film or TV show associated was exhibited, or aired for the first time. And, they use your thesis as a source for this!
Jonathan Kaplan 19:49
Oh, yeah, I noticed that.
Cindy Olnick 19:52
So yay you!
Jonathan Kaplan 19:53
Yeah, I thought it was interesting was that SurveyLA suggested using Criterion A, for these sites, which is the same thing that the literature sites was using, you know, associated with events that have made a significant contribution, the broad patterns of our history, as opposed again, to famous people or architecture. I don’t know that any sites have been designated at this point. But they do mention The Music Box steps, and The Brady Bunch house as being eligible.
Cindy Olnick 20:24
So they’re in SurveyLA.
Jonathan Kaplan 20:25
In SurveyLA, yeah.
Cindy Olnick 20:28
So isn’t heritage conservation supposed to be about authenticity? But I guess if it, if you define it as fictional authenticity …
Jonathan Kaplan 20:38
Let’s call it fictional authenticity.
Cindy Olnick 20:41
Oh, my God. That’s like alternative facts. So dude, we’re living in this post-fact society. So what are we to make of all this?
Jonathan Kaplan 20:48
I think it’s pretty clear that, you know, if you’re looking at kind of a domed structure in the Tunisian desert, you’re not actually on the planet of Tattooine. I think that it’s not hard to kind of interpret sites as being fictional, rather than real history.
Cindy Olnick 21:05
You don’t? Even if you’ve never seen Star Wars or The Addams Family, you don’t you don’t think fictional site should have some sort of like, asterisk or distinction or something?
Jonathan Kaplan 21:19
Yeah, I suppose it could do that. But it seems like it’s even less challenging to interpret a fictional location than it is to interpret some non-fictional locations. Like how do you interpret Colonial Williamsburg, where it’s questionable how authentic, how historically authentic the buildings are? how do you interpret southern plantations? How do you interpret the experience of the enslaved people who lived there? So I feel like there’s challenges everywhere.
Cindy Olnick 21:48
Yeah. Well, there’s a lot of work going on in that realm, which is good to tell those stories. But those are things that actually happened. I don’t know, I guess, you know, are we in the Matrix? Is anything real? What’s real? Does it matter?
Jonathan Kaplan 22:03
Well, I think it matters. But I think, I actually think matters more than ever right now. But like I said, I feel like if it’s clear that you’re trying to tell the story of a story. And you have to remember that if these sites are worthy of designation, chances are, a lot of the public is going to be familiar with the work of fiction. It’s probably not going to be your more obscure films and TV shows that everybody has forgotten.
Cindy Olnick 22:36
And that is one of these eligibility standards, is that it’s a significant motion picture or television show. So who decides?
Jonathan Kaplan 21:45
That’s a challenge too, and I think in my thesis, I went into that a little bit, there are already some systems in place to decide what is popular. There’s certainly for TV, there’s Emmy Awards for quality, and there’s Nielsen ratings for popularity. And you have the same pairing with movies where you have the Oscars for quality, and you have box office receipts for popularity. And AFI has their list of 100 best films, and I think the Library of Congress has their best films. And so it seems like there’s already a lot of mechanisms in place that could be used to determine what is significant.
Cindy Olnick 22:27
Wow. So if you could wave your magic wand and designate one site right this minute, what would it be?
Jonathan Kaplan 22:37
Oh, man. I would say The Brady Bunch house, but I’m also looking at what might be threatened. And that certainly isn’t. I think an interesting one is Tom’s Restaurant in Manhattan, where where the Seinfeld group used to meet and eat. Another interesting aspect of integrity with movie and TV sites, is point of view, because in the real world, you’re looking at the totality of a structure, whereas with a fictional site, you’re only looking at what the camera sees, and the the area of significance really ends where the border of the camera ends. And that kind of became clear to me when I was looking at Tom’s Restaurant, which is located in a like a 1902 Beaux Art ten-story building in New York. Well, you would never know watching Seinfeld anything about that building. You would never know how many stories it was, what style architecture it was. Really only thing that is that would concern you is the sign and the storefront. So if you were to designate that as an historic site, what would you be designating? It wouldn’t be the whole building. It would have to be more than the sign. It would literally be just that corner and nothing outside of it.
Cindy Olnick 24:54
Can you do that?
Jonathan Kaplan 24:55
I don’t know.
Cindy Olnick 24:59
Our listeners in New York, let us know. I find it troubling, but also okay, that so many people consider fictional history as, or maybe even more important than quote unquote, real history.
Jonathan Kaplan 25:17
I think it’s always been that way. I think I start out my thesis with some author from the 16 or 1700s, who made a pilgrimage to the tavern where the pilgrims from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and that tavern’s got a blue plaque on it. So I think I think there’s something that’s always been with us.
Cindy Olnick 25:37
You’re right. And, you know, scientists are discovering that in our brains, reality and imagination are closer than we think. And they’re realizing that there’s not as much distinction as we would believe. And they’re also talking about how we, how we actually construct reality. That’s what makes me think we’re in the Matrix. And does it matter, because the reason we preserve places is because of the meanings that they imbue, right.
Jonathan Kaplan 26:10
Because of how they make us feel.
Cindy Olnick 26:12
Right, exactly. So if the meaning is real, what does it matter where that meaning comes from?
Jonathan Kaplan 26:20
I was thinking about a couple of times that really stand out for me when a historic site has really kind of affected me. And the two things I thought about were, a bunch of years ago, I was driving across the country, and I was going past Dallas, and I decided, you know, I’ve never seen Dealey Plaza before. You know, this is before smartphones. So I got off the road, I just started looking around and I was like Dallas can’t be that big, I’m from L.A., you know. And I’m driving along and as I’m making this left hand turn, I’m looking to the right out of my car, and I’m like that building looks familiar. And I look to the left and I just see green. And I realized – that is the Book Depository. I look straight ahead, there’s a grassy knoll, and I’m driving over an X painted in the street.
Cindy Olnick 27:05
Oh my god.
Jonathan Kaplan 27:06
I just, I like I got the chills because it was just this unreality. It was like I was being transported, you know, like everyone else. I’ve seen the film clip, however many times, and it’s like I was being transported into this different world all of a sudden, I was there. And the other thing I thought about is, a few years later, I had a meeting on NYPD Blue, the TV show, and I went, and I figured we were meeting in an office. And they brought me in through this door, and we were in a locker room. I thought this is strange – and it looked familiar. And then we went through another door. And next thing, I realized I was in the middle of the squad room, it’s a real room from NYPD Blue, and there’s Sipowicz reading a script at a desk.
[dialogue from NYPD Blue]
Jonathan Kaplan 28:02
And I had the same feeling as when I was in Dallas, where just this unreality kind of washed over me. I got kind of dizzy for a second. And it was the same feeling. And it’s interesting that one of those was something where something happened. And the other one was where fiction happened. But it was the same feeling in both places. I think there’s a difference between how you emotionally perceive things and how you intellectually perceive things. I mean, I realize that an actual person was murdered at the first site and actors were working at the second site, but it affected me the same way. And if these sites affect you the same way, I feel like they should enjoy the same recognition.
Cindy Olnick 28:44
And protection, although what that protection looks like will vary. But it should anyway, depending on its significance.
Jonathan Kaplan 28:52
Yeah. And the National Register has language about rare sites as well. I believe integrity standards are perhaps not quite as high if something is rare. And with film locations, I think just because we haven’t been designating them. And because a lot of film and TV is done in sound stages, so they’re rare to start with, and because they’re places that are just random and all over the place, like some of our most classic films don’t have any locations left. And some might have one or two. If you look at It’s A Wonderful Life, we have a house where the Martinis moved into in that scene, and we have a swimming pool at Beverly Hills High School.
Cindy Olnick 29:34
The dance floor that opens up?
Jonathan Kaplan 29:35
Exactly. Those are the two sites that remain from that movie. And from Gone with the Wind, we have a little mill house that was seen over the credits at the beginning.
Cindy Olnick 29:45
So it wasn’t even in the movie, it was just in the credits.
Jonathan Kaplan 29:47
It was just in the credits. But that’s all we have. We also have Laskey’s Mesa, which is kind of a movie ranch, I think somewhere between here and Ventura, in the scene where she said “I will never go hungry again” was shot. It was just this kind of barren place with nothing there. And its use in Gone with the Wind showed, you know, a woman who had nothing left. And so it kind of enhances the feeling of Laskey’s Mesa and I feel like it’s the same with The Exorcist steps. The fact that they were using The Exorcist and it enhances the feeling, the kind of the sinister feeling of those of those steps.
Cindy Olnick 30:27
Creepy and were those steps that the priest falls down or something at the end. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. But …
Jonathan Kaplan 30:35
Well, I’ll go ahead and spoil it for you. But he actually jumps out a window and tumbles down.
Cindy Olnick 30:39
Oh, right. Spoiler alert!
Jonathan Kaplan 30:43
Actually, I feel bad. I actually probably shouldn’t have blown the end like that. There might be someone who hasn’t seen The Exorcist.
Cindy Olnick 30:49
We’ll fix it in post.
Jonathan Kaplan 30:50
There you go.
Cindy Olnick 30:52
You’ve been in the biz. You know. So speaking of your previous life in the biz, you wrote screenplays? Is that correct?
Jonathan Kaplan 31:00
I wrote teleplays.
Cindy Olnick 31:02
Teleplays, correct.
Jonathan Kaplan 31:03
Which are shorter than screenplays and don’t don’t pay quite as much and are easier.
Cindy Olnick 31:06
Not like the big bucks in preservation. So you’ve been in preservation in one way or another for many years, starting with architectural tours and advocacy in Venice, right?
Jonathan Kaplan 31:18
Yes, that’s how I kind of got into everything. I was kind of in a period where I wasn’t working too much so I had some time on my hands, and they were closing the 1939 Venice library. And so I got involved in the effort to kind of save that and I’d been volunteering at the Conservancy for a few years up to that point. But that’s what kind of got me on the preservation train.
Cindy Olnick 31:37
Well, I’m glad you got on that train. You know, it’s a one way ticket.
Jonathan Kaplan 31:40
Yeah, there’s no way back.
Cindy Olnick 31:42
No, no, no. And you don’t have time to do tours of Venice anymore because you are working with the City. So what are you up to these days?
Jonathan Kaplan 31:50
I am working in the Office of Historic Resources. I’m in the HPOZ unit. HPOZ is our historic districts and I am assigned to five districts, the three Carthays — Carthay Circle, Carthay Square, and South Carthay, and Lincoln Heights and El Sereno, which gives me a nice variety of different kinds of neighborhoods.
Cindy Olnick 32:13
And what do you do?
Jonathan Kaplan 32:15
Basically, anybody in the districts who need to make any alterations to anything on the exterior, I work with them. And there’s an HPOZ board for each of the districts to make sure that the alterations fall within the guidelines of the preservation plans.
Cindy Olnick 32:30
So you work with the residents of these districts to sort of manage the changes to the places and help them figure out solutions.
Jonathan Kaplan 32:40
Yeah, so I’m out there working with the community.
Cindy Olnick 32:42
Cool.
Jonathan Kaplan 32:43
And I don’t know how many students are listening from USC or elsewhere, but one of the best opportunities I got from USC was the opportunity to do internships. And I would recommend that it’s never too early to start doing that, because I think I went into USC not really knowing where I wanted to end up or what I wanted to end up doing. And it was by working in a variety of places that I realized that working for a city was what was right for me.
Cindy Olnick 33:12
That’s great.
Jonathan Kaplan 33:13
I did an internship with the City of West Hollywood, and with a couple of consulting firms, and they were all really valuable experiences. And it was nice kind of seeing the system from from all these different angles.
Cindy Olnick 33:26
Because you have to know what you don’t want to do, too.
Jonathan Kaplan 33:28
Yeah, exactly.
Cindy Olnick 33:31
I’m so glad that you could join us here on Save As, Jonathan!
Jonathan Kaplan 33:35
Well, it was my pleasure as well. It was nice diving back into this. I think I’m gonna start getting in my car and going out and exploring more again.
Cindy Olnick 33:43
Thank you for doing that incredible work. And thanks so much for your time and insight today. And for all you do for the historic places of L.A. and the people who love them.
