Burning ManJames Ferry
Vendome Street, being staggered, cut through Silver Lake and Echo Park at different points, two “ends” of the same road. Why city planners hadn’t simply named one end Vendome and the other something else was anybody’s guess. People got disoriented. Adobe homes, most of them occupied to the hilt, abutted one another, all of them in flux with encroaching gentrification, rent control now a thing of the past. The National Film Registry, stalwart as they were, had managed to retain the Music Box Steps, the very spot where Laurel and Hardy shot their famous short in 1932. They say it was a remake of sorts: a follow-up to Hats Off, which they’d shot five years earlier, only instead of lugging a piano up the steps, they lugged a washing machine. That film mysteriously vanis
