ECHO PARK—Common Grains, a natural food grocery story, will host a rice exhibition at Cookbook, featuring more than 50 kinds of rare and artisanal Japanese rice.

Guest can both taste and purchase the uncooked rice as well as pre-prepared rice dishes. The cooking demonstration will showcase recipes and techniques used in traditional Donabe rice pot cooking.

1549 Echo Park Ave., Sat., Feb. 4, 1 p.m.-3 p.m. Free.

SILVER LAKE

The book consists of 36 stories and illustrations by Gold.

Stories portray the experience of a young, Jewish, first generation American girl, growing up in old New York in the 1930s and 1940s.

Some of the work has already been exhibited in 2009 and 2010 through the Silver Lake Art Collective.

Gold said she is “thrilled” to finally have her book published and hopes to have a signing party in the near future.

Available at amazon.com and bn.com

LOS FELIZ

A vote was taken at the GGPNC’s Jan. 17^th board member  after hearing from the community about the value of practice of beekeeping.

Chelsea McFarland of HoneyLove, spoke about the benefits of raising bees and said their future lies with individual beekeepers.

“According to Simon Buxton as quoted in the new documentary, The Vanishing of the Bees, the future of beekeeping is not in one beekeeper with 60,000 hives, but rather 60,000 people with one hive,” Mcfarland said.

McFarland and husband Rob founded HoneyLove as a nonprofit conservation organization to protect the honeybees and inspire and educate new urban beekeepers. She informed the board that bees pollinate 80% of the world’s plants and one out of every three or four bites of food eaten is thanks to bees.

“The best science tells us that the future of the honeybee lie within the urban environment. Despite the irony, cities actually provide safer habitat than the farms and rural areas traditionally associated with beekeeping. Our home gardens are free of pesticides, and in cities like Los Angeles, there is year-round availability of pollen and nectar,” she said.

Atlanta, New York, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Spokane, Chicago, San Francisco, Toronto, Vancouver and most recently Santa Monica have all taken decisive action and legalized beekeeping.

GGPNC board member Barbara Ferris, who supported the measure said,

“The backyard beekeepers initiative is the most delightful issue I’ve ever heard presented to the GGPNC board.”

Franklin Hills resident Joe Andrews, who attended the meeting to show his support, has been raising bees for more than 20 years.

“I like watching them and they are calming to me for some reason. It is also a quality of life issue,” he said.

The bill enables businesses to buy parking credits instead of building underground lots to fulfill the city’s requirements for parking space. Many smaller businesses cannot afford to build underground parking, so the credits make it easier for small businesses to open and operate.

Atwater Village Chamber of Commerce member Luis Lopez has followed the ordinance since 2007, when it was a land use study for the local neighborhood council.

He said he is shocked the ordinance has taken so long to pass because the proposed system replicates parking programs in Eagle Rock and Pasadena.

According to Lopez, the Atwater Village Neighborhood Council did all the research necessary for the bill’s passage, worked with a legal team to draft a proposed ordinance and gave the materials to Garcetti.

The former Atwater Village Neighborhood councilmember blamed the delay on Garcetti’s office. He alleges they didn’t include a deadline for the City Attorney to return the bill, which consequently made it low-priority.

“Seems like CD13 didn’t know. They dropped the ball,” he said.

Garcetti’s office denies Lopez’s account.

“We sometimes ask [the City Attorney] to get us the bill in two days and it takes two months,” said Garcetti spokesperson Julie Wong.

Potential business owners looking to open shops in the village’s Glendale Boulevard pedestrian shopping district aren’t pleased.

Andy Hasroun said he wouldn’t have tried to open a gastro-pub next door to his wine shop, 55 Degrees, if he knew the bill would take this long to pass. Now he pays rent for a space he’s unable to use, along with interest on loans he took out to finance the restaurant.

“We can’t wait any longer. It’s as simple as that,” Hasroun said.

However, when the bill is passed remains to be seen.

“We’ve got to get this passed before we all go bankrupt,” said Hasroun.

LOS FELIZ

Marketing Chair Melissa Tornay said it is far more difficult to keep track of the data than many imagine.

“Sometimes we have an e-mail address for a store manager for a national company and they may have left and we have no way of knowing,” she said.

Chris Serrano, LFVBID president, said simply walking into the stores and collecting information is not always productive.

“Not every employee is anxious to provide… information, so we cannot always get the desired result from that method,” she said.

Additionally Tornay said she has created a new board calendar to organize events and activities in advance.

“This will give us a timeline of how to prepare for events like elections that need a lot of advance preparation,” she said.

Currently the board meets the second Wednesday of each month at 9:30 a.m. at the Citibank community room on Hillhurst Avenue. Vice President Ermanno Neiviller suggested the board consider a few evening meetings a year as well.

“The board also discussed a lack of cash flow, which has led to the its inability to have area trees trimmed.

“We have just a little over $11,000 currently in our account,” she said.

According to Serraro, assessments for all business owners should be mailed by April by the city. Serrano suggested the trees might be trimmed in stages until funding from the received assessments arrives.

LOS FELIZ—Marking 40 years of Soap Plant/Wacko—the famed sprawling store of pop culture design, books, toys and kitsch—owner Billy Shire laughingly credits “not being afraid of bad taste,” for much of his success.

A self-studied artist from Echo Park, Shire was 20 when he and his mother opened Soap Plant in 1971 near the hippy culture intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Sanborn Avenue. Their shop sold high-quality lotions and soaps— still supplied by a family from Berkeley—as gifts.

“We’ve always been visually oriented and pan cultural and I started getting into more ethnic type baskets which led into masks,” said Shire.

Back then, Shire picked up work as a leather and studs artist costuming rock bands. He also liked to travel to Mexico where he became fascinated with Dia De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) art.

By 1980, Shire set up shop on Melrose Avenue, an area cultivating creative retail and trendy eateries.

The Soap Plant thrived in the urban setting and Shire expanded next door with Wacko—a natural extension of Shire’s artistic interests—where he popularized ethno-graphic items such as Japanese toys, Godzilla and cultural folk arts. His clothing store, Zulu, opened soon after.

Finally, when his collection of Dia De Los Muertos art was brimming over in Wacko, Shire led the trend of showing and selling these artifacts as merchandise in La Luz De Jesus Art Gallery, which he created upstairs.

Twenty-five years later, La Luz de Jesus still rotates so-called low-brow art shows monthly, now in its current location at 4633 Hollywood Blvd. where Shire combined his stores in 1994. The site was a former U.S. Post Office.

“The gallery is based on Southern California pop culture. . . surfing, hot-rodding, skateboarding, pin-up art, tattooing,” said Shire.

“The store is the best of a lot of different categories—toys, soaps, skull stuff, lunchboxes,” said Shire.  “It’s all about my eyes, doing it fast and knowing what to order.”

Shire is admired by gift vendors for finding the next best thing, as he did with Tiki culture, prominently displayed at Wacko.

“I wouldn’t call it nostalgia, but I definitely cater to different generations,” said Shire pondering his philosophy to Soap Plant/Wacko.  “I’m mining my own history for things that really strike a chord with me and trying to show people their roots.”

SILVER LAKE

The receiving parties were The Wildwoods Foundation’s Full Circle Program; Hilltop Nursery School; and the Literacy, Arts, Culture, Education & Recreation (L.A.C.E.R.) after school program at Thomas Starr King Middle School.

The Wildwoods Foundation’s Full Circle program is a nature-based academic program dedicated to building community through a combination of outdoor activities for 5th grade classes, spanning eight weeks, once a week for an entire day, serving schools throughout the surrounding neighborhoods and across the city.

The Hilltop Nursury is a parent-participation cooperative preschool that was founded in 1951, which will put the money towards student scholarships.

The funds received by the L.A.C.E.R. will be applied to its drama program at Thomas Starr King Middle School.

Both Wildwoods and Hilltop’s initial grant applications were for $2,000, while L.A.C.E.R. requested $1,700. The SLNC’s grant funding guidelines state that no educational grant application may exceed $2,000 each. This was the first time this grant-funding protocol was put into practice.

Each program made a presentation at the SLNC governing board meeting on Jan. 4th, and then after hurried deliberation the council voted the on grants’ division.

Formerly, funding such grants would be decided one at a time, as they were proposed to the council, but with a budget that has been decreasing every year, the organizations that stepped forward earlier had an advantage.

Council member Sarah Dale, said she felt the division of funds could have been done more systematically.

“I don’t like the idea that we just divide things by three. What if there were five educational grants that came before us, would we have divided them by five?… I think it sets a bad precedent for anyone coming in asking for money.… If all we’re going to do is divide stuff by the number of people asking, then that’s not even a process.”

“Community Improvement Grants” will be award at the SLNC’s meeting on March 7th.

Officer Gina Chovan said the city had determined the building’s owner was deceased. Attempts to reach family have failed. Now Building and Safety Inspectors have been tasked with cleaning and boarding up the abandoned property.

“Whenever they do clean up we have someone there,” said Chovan. “At this point this is now a building and safety issue.”

Tania Pulver, a mother of a young child that lives in the neighborhood surrounding the house, felt unsafe because of the transients coming and going. Allegedly some homeless people that were living on the property had broken into another nearby house.

Pulver spoke at a community meeting on another subject because she said the police wouldn’t do anything and she didn’t know whom else to speak to.

“Police said as long as no crime is occurring in the home we can’t kick them off the property if they say they have the owner’s permission to be there,” she said.

Police are barred from evicting alleged squatters that claim the owner allows them to stay on the property or present a fake lease agreement. The latter was not the case in this scenario, according to police.

Squatting has become a growing problem in Los Angeles as the recession has deepened, leaving foreclosed and unoccupied houses easy targets for transients looking for steady shelter.

However, in her seven years of working in the Los Feliz area, Chovan said the abandoned house is only the second squatting incident she knows of.

“We don’t get a lot of that,” she said. “A lot of that has to do with the community.”

“It’s right there in lanes 1, 2, 3 and 4,” he said referring to the 5 Freeway, where the drive-in was torn down in order to build.

Los Feliz was home to a drive-in theater during the 1950s. Called simply the Los Feliz Drive-In, the Dept. of Transportation bought the property as part of the Interstate 5 Highway expansion project in 1957. The two-screen theater’s ad last ran in the Los Angeles Times on Oct. 2nd, 1956.

According to records, the independently owned theater was built in March of 1950 and opened with Nevedan and Pirates of Capri.

LaBonge said he remembers piling into the family station wagon to watch the Southern Pacific trains with his brothers, then heading to the Hyperion Bridge to peer over and sneak a showing of a Disney movie.

Resident of Kingsley Manor, a retirement home near Los Feliz, Suzanne Hollombe regrets not going to the theater in her younger days.

“People liked to go there, put earphones on and listen to movies,” Hollombe said.

She remembers it being popular place for the younger crowd to go on weekends.

“Lovers went there, in convertibles,” she said. “It was nothing out of line.”

The Los Feliz Drive-In entered the courtroom at least once during its six-year life, winning a case against the city.

According to an archived Los Angeles Times article, a judge ruled a nearby baseball field (which also was eventually demolished for freeway construction) had to turn off—or shield its lights—during night games to prevent interference with movie screenings.

The baseball field, owned by the Dept. of Recreation and Parks, was built before the drive-in, but the judge decided in favor of the drive-in.

Fate however, didn’t favor the theater for long. The theater sold its property to the Dept. of Transportation in 1956 for the 5 Freeway.

Hollombe remembers people were upset when the drive-in closed.

“It was a landmark in Los Feliz,” she said. “I used to drive by there,” she said. “I should’ve gone in hindsight.”

LOS FELIZ—The community is invited to attend “Future Directions for Los Feliz,” the first Los Feliz Improvement Association forum in 2012.

The roundtable discussion will be Monday, Feb. 13th at the Autry National Center in Griffith Park.  The event starts with a mixer at 6:30 p.m. with a light buffet. The formal program begins at 7:15 p.m.

The moderated panel of elected and appointed officials will include Los Angeles City Councilmember Tom LaBonge, California Assemblymember Mike Feuer, Congressman Adam Schiff, County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, Los Angeles Police Dept., Northeast Division Captain Bill Murphy and Dept. of Recreation and Parks General Manager Jon Kirk Mukri.

Topics to be explored will be posed by moderators and LFIA Past Presidents Donna Zenor and Terry Hughes.

With talk of another budget shortfall for the Los Angeles Unified School District in the amount of $543 million for the next academic year and possible remedies of increased taxes or a new parcel tax, we asked local educators and a spokeswoman with Los Angeles Unified School District boardmember Bennett Keyser’s for their thoughts.

Karen L. Sullivan Glenfeliz Elementary principal

Students won’t come home talking about their same teachers at Glenfeliz Boulevard Elementary if the Los Angeles United School District budget isn’t remedied. “They’ll notice if they aren’t here. They’ve been here forever,” she said. The budget shortfall will also force us to cut our intervention group, which helps out underperforming students as well as playground supervisors and the music program. The library may also lose its full-time librarian, who keeps the shelves organized and moderates book selection that would be a great loss to students. The librarian reinforces literacy, and also inspires learning by imparting an appreciation for reading through story time sessions. That’s the magic reading brings to a student. In the long run, the economy will be hurt indefinitely because the next generation of workers won’t have as strong an academic background due to the lesser quality in schooling.

Jumie Sugahara, Ivanhoe Elementary School principal

I think what we’re waiting for right now is how this will play out in Los Angeles Unified as far as what budget cuts will be. We don’t receive much as far as categorical funding. It’s not a title one school but there’s still a need to create programs for kids that need more support…. what would affect us is if they have to increase class size. I think right now. . . we’re holding tight to see what Superintendent Deasy does. . . We’re waiting to see what the budget cuts for art and music, and that we have been able to supplement. I think that it’s a big “what if” right now. And it’s a crazy time because right now I don’t know when the official last day of school is, we haven’t heard.

Kristen Murphy, Thomas Starr King Middle School principal

One of the first impacts of budget cuts is the reduction of office staff. I have to answer the phone sometimes. At this point, we really don’t know what the impact is going to be. King is fortunate in being a Title 1 school that we do receive federal Title 1 dollars. We get a per-pupil allocation for 85% of our students that does help us out, so we’ve still been able to purchase things like a full time nurse, a full time librarian and some additional counseling time, so we’ve been really fortunate. We’re also lucky in that our neighborhood councils have been really good to us: the Greater Griffith park Neighborhood Council; the Los Feliz Improvement Assoc., the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council and Los Angeles City Councilmember Tom LaBonge. I don’t want to say I’m not concerned about budget cuts because obviously it’s not a good situation, the state is in trouble, the district’s funds are being cut, but King is a pretty remarkable place… and our teachers have really rallied and our scores continue to go up despite the fact that we’re doing more with less. Budget cuts are never easy for anyone but I think we will weather the storm.

Susanna Furfari, Micheltorena Street School principal

I’ve heard rumors about how it will probably increase the class size. Every time we have these cuts somehow our school has managed to still maintain a lot of the core programs and initiatives that we think are essential. So I’m optimistic for next year. One of the newest ways that we’ve been working on keeping our core programs sustainable is through community partnership. For example [we have a] partnership with the Silver Lake Conservatory, it’s about bartering and trying to make due with what we have. We want to have a girth of services that we can provide to our students at a high quality, whether or not we have lots of money coming in… I think there are a lot of resources in Silver Lake and it’s just about getting to know people and reaching out to them and trying to find ways to work together.

Sarah Bradshaw, Chief of Staff for LAUSD Board Member Bennett Kayser (District 5)

It’s obscene, we have to sit here and wait for the state. We have to plan based on what they might do. Now part of the state’s planning this year is based on what the voters might do with the governor’s proposed ballot initiative. We have to budget for it passing, we have to budget for it not passing, and we have to live with the consequences regardless. It is criminal. We are 49th in the nation for per pupil funding… 42% of our kids are English language learners. 76% of our kids are in poverty. And then with our precious dollars we have to spend a ridiculous amount on testing and doing all back office or not really hands on productive learning stuff. So that’s kind of where it’s at. So much is being asked from the schools and the kids are so needy. The time to fight is now. But among options there are class size increases, shorter school year and more services cut to students.

This story was reported by Ledger reporters Colin Stuz and Tony Cella.

While the first pass of proposed Los Angeles City Council district boundary changes were released by the Los Angeles Redistricting Commission Jan. 25th, local activists continue to plead local neighborhoods stay in tact.

Local community leaders called for the commission to solidify Atwater Village into a single City Council district at a meeting earlier in January.

“We shouldn’t have two council districts when there’s one Neighborhood Council,” said Barbara Lass of the Atwater Village Residents’ Assoc.

Alex Ventura of the Atwater Village Neighborhood Council said the opinions of residents and business owners in North Atwater are neglected because they comprise a minute portion of Council District 4.

Los Angeles City councilmember Tom LaBonge, who represents some of the district, did not return requests for comment.

Eric Garcetti, candidate for mayor, represents the majority of Atwater Village, which lies in Council District 13.

His spokesperson, Julie Wong, said some residents expressed concern to Garcetti that if the two councilmembers don’t maintain a working relationship their community won’t be represented at the council, which could cut them off from potential services.

Garcetti has not taken a stance on whether Atwater Village should be unified, but encouraged residents to vocalize their opinions at public hearings.

Atwater Village City Council lines were split in 1992. The neighborhood was in a single district between 1986 and 1992, after being split for 14 years prior.

In Los Feliz, the Greater Griffith Park Neighborhood Council (GGPNC) has resolved the boundaries of the neighborhood council should remain intact and reside within a single City Council district.

“As the boundaries of Los Feliz and Griffith Park do not appear to be threatened or split—the GGPNC just wanted to be on record as stating its support for the our neighborhood council jurisdiction to remain intact within any reconfigured council district,” said GGPNC Treasurer Nelson Bae.

City Council boundaries are redrawn every 10 years due to population changes.

Public hearings on the proposed boundary changes continue throughout February. The commission hopes to adopt a final plan, for City Council approval, by March 1st. For information: www.redistricting2011.lacity.org

LaBonge’s District 4 is potentially one of the most affected districts. The current proposed new boundaries of District 4 run from Silver Lake to Bel-Air and north to Encino relocating Hancock Park, Windsor Square and the Larchmont area to Council District 5 (Paul Koretz).

SILVER LAKE—Major developments are on the way to Rowena Avenue, specifically the half-mile stretch between Hyperion Ave. and Glendale Blvd. Currently being planned is a new housing project of 45 townhouses to be built at 2916-2930 Rowena Ave., the former location of The Coffee Table cafe and restaurant. Developer Fifteen Group expects to begin construction in late spring or early summer.

Fifteen Group, a development agency originally from Miami, FL, purchased the site last July from another developer unable to complete the project due to finances.

The Dept. of City Planning had approved the site for a 64-unit condominium project in 2006, but in studying the property and neighborhood, Fifteen Group decided something smaller would be more appropriate, said Principal Justin Barth.

“The 64-unit complex was just kind of this big concrete building,” Barth said.

Now, after community and Silver Lake Neighborhood Council (SLNC) input—which in January approved a motion to support the development property modification—Barth said designs are underway and Fifteen Group is waiting for the Dept. of City Planning to approve its map modifications.

In debating whether to support downsizing the development, the SLNC  specifically discussed parking and the inclusion of a café.

Under the guidelines of the previously planned 64-unit condo project, a large underground parking structure was included but has now been replaced by attached garages in the new plan. The former plans also included a commercial cafe space, which the SLNC said it encouraged but could not demand with the downsize. In so doing, the SLNC supported a variance of parking that would not require Fifteen Group to provide at least five extra on-site parking spaces if it does decide to include a café on the property.

“It is a dead street without any commercial businesses,” said council member Elizabeth Bougart-Sharkov, who heads the Urban Design and Preservation Committee.

Barth said that market conditions, in the end, would dictate if plans would include a café.

Once construction begins, the project is expected take 16 to 18 months to complete. The developer predicts its one-block proximity to the high performing public Ivanhoe Elementary School, should be a major selling point for the townhouses.

“There are families that are priced out of the market and we feel like we can provide a townhouse for a more reasonable price than a single-family house for families wanting to send their kids to [Ivanhoe],” said Barth.

This could all dovetail nicely with the department of transportation consideration of a so-called “road diet” on this thoroughfare that would cut the traffic lanes down from two to one each way, adding bike lanes and street parking instead. The effort would be in coordination with the bike plan the city adopted last year to insert 1,600 miles of bikeways in 30 years.

At the city council’s request, the transportation department is now preparing an environmental identification report that measures the effect this change would have on the neighborhood.

According to Barth Fifteen Group has no stance on the subject but can see pros and cons: a “road diet” would slow traffic but might clog up residential streets with commuters looking for a shortcut around Rowena, he said.

The Los Feliz Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library is looking for volunteers to re-shelve books for one hour per week.

The Los Feliz Library is one of the smallest libraries in all of Los Angeles, but almost a quarter of a million books, DVDs and CDs are checked out annually by an average of 3,700 people visiting the library each week.

There will be an introductory meeting Sat. Feb. 18th at 11 a.m. at the library for interested volunteers.

Bob Herzog, Co-Chair of the Silver Lake History Collective, a committee of the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council, died on Nov. 14th, 2011 after a battle with cancer.  He was a Silver Lake native and had a great love for and strong devotion to the community.  He attended Hollywood High School and the Univ. of Southern California, where he earned a degree in Business

He began his professional career at the American Broadcasting Company and worked for various advertising agencies, beginning with J. Walter Thompson.

He lived and worked in Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Juan, Puerto Rico where he met his life partner, Jim Van Wheeldon. The couple moved to London Street in Silver Lake in 1976.

Tiring of the world of advertising, he took several years off to rest and travel.  For a time, he found himself working as a house painter with Van Wheeldon. After Wheeldon’s death from AIDS, he took over the painting business, where he spent 18 years as the owner of Herzog Painting.

Retiring from the painting business in 2005, Herzog became involved in community service.  At the time of his death, he was actively involved on the board for The Silver Lake Improvement Association and the Griffith Park Adult Community Center.  For the past three years he served as Co-Chair for the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council’s History Collective.

In an interview for the Silver Lake History Collective on July 8th, 2008, Herzog recollected his life in Silver Lake, “I love this community, and my home, where I have lived for the past 35 years. It is a great pleasure to work with my neighbors in preserving the culture and history of our neighborhood. We spend our lives working and raising families, then retirement comes and offers an opportunity to share our lives with others and flower into maturity,” he said.