Digging up Some L.A. History

We spent some time up in Los Angeles while the girls were visiting. Each of them had at least one L.A. item on the agenda. For Jen, it was the La Brea Tar Pits. For Doris it was some of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed L.A. homes.


No trip to L.A. would be complete without seeing the world famous La Brea Tar Pits. (02/18/06)

The tar pits were our first stop. It's a cluster of tar pits in the Miracle Mile district of L.A. (my old hood). It's here that natural tar seeps to the surface from petroleum deposits below the surface of the Los Angeles Basin. It's best known for the large number of ice-age mammal fossils that have been found there (due to animals getting stuck in the tar).


Doris and Tim and the pre-historic giant sloth get together for a picture. (02/18/06)

Doris found out first hand how easily it was for animals to get stuck in the tar when she was poking a stick into one of the smaller tar pits and ended up getting some on her hand! And it did not come off easily.


The front windows of Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House. (02/18/06)

We had also planned a driving tour of some of the L.A. homes that Frank Lloyd Wright designed, but we were running out of time, so we limited our trip to the closest one: The Hollyhock House, which Wright designed in 1917 as a residence for oil heiress Aline Barnsdall. We didn't get there early enough to catch a tour, but we at least got to check it out from the outside.