Interactive Edutainment

I had never seen the new wing of the aquarium before today. The bottom floor of the new building is split between the hatchery/kitchen (the neon green stuff in the tubes is food)…

…and a place for the younger kids where they can interact with the exhibits and touch them with their own hands.

The kid’s part is the most fun. First of all, there is a water tunnel full of fish that you can climb into so that you are completely surrounded in a bubble of fish (my camera refused to take a good picture of it). There is also a giant bird sticking his beak into a mudflat tunnel that you can walk through.

The tunnel is made up of a silicone type plastic that feels so strange to the touch. When you walk through you get a inside view of the type of life that lives in a mudflat. Here is a picture of John inside of the tunnel.

There’s also a place where you can dress up like your favorite sea creature and act out little ocean scenes in front of the camera so you can see yourself on the TV.

Mayonnaise jars + Card Tables = 75 years and counting

I met John Olguin in the courtyard of the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium once he was finished for the day. I asked him to start at the beginning of the museum and here, under the hammerhead shark, he dropped some knowledge on me.

He told me about inheriting a card table and a collection of shells from Venice and how it grew to mayonnaise jars full of sea creatures and eventually the building that we all know and love. How he took enough classes to earn multiple degrees for no credit, just so he could tell the kids about the stuff he had on display. He told me the story about getting the museum built and how he went through a few architects until he finally settled on Frank Gehry. Mr. Gehry was the first one to get the kind of open feel that John had in mind. The museum was one of the first buildings to be designed in Gehry’s deconstructivist style. He went on to design famous world class buildings like the Guggenheim in Spain and the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

So I’m standing there, enthralled in this amazing story when it finally dawns on me that I had a video camera in my back pack and this would have been a perfect thing to record. UGH. It was an amazing story. When it was done he took me on a tour of the museum/aquarium. I reminded him that I spent a couple of summers in the docent program. There were a couple of changes, but I probably could’ve winged a tour if I tried really hard. We only had an hour for everything so we continued on to the brand new parts I had never seen.

SPBXB Retrospective Week: That one time I hung out with John Olguin

I promised you all some brand new stuff and here it is. I never told you all about the day I got a personal tour of the Cabrillo Marine Museum from Mr. San Pedro himself. I remember talking with him briefly at the opening of the 22nd St Park about my project and asked him if he would be a guest walker. He told me he would love to, gave me his card and told me to give him a call when I was near White Point. Awesome!

A few months passed and I realized I had no idea where White Point school was. By the time I figured it out, I was a couple of days away from walking the area and had misplaced his card. I think he had given me the card on three different occasions in the span of the last two years so its amazing that I misplaced them ALL. It wasn’t hard to find someone who had his number so I left a message. I walked his neighborhood thinking I would see his and Muriel’s famous outdoor bed, as if it was on a patio in the front yard or something. I didn’t, but I did guess that the peacock crossing signs were his.

A couple of weeks later, I think I was about a week’s worth of walks away from finishing it all, my sister asks me to do the crop walk with her. I posted about it on SPBXB that it was kind of ‘been there, done that’ for me, but I did it anyway. As luck would have it, John Olguin stopped briefly when we were walking down 19th to see if we were ok. I commented to my sister about needing to talk to him about our walk. When we got down to the Methodist church across from Leland School he was sitting there at the table next to the orange wedges. Hallelujah! He greeted everyone as they got refreshments and I took my chance to ask him about maybe walking the beach with me, since I passed his neighborhood. We made plans to meet a couple days later. It was just one of many stories of things coming together at the end of SPBXB.

SPBXB Retrospective Week: Fossils

People always want to know what my favorite neighborhoods were to walk. That’s a question as loaded as a wife asking her husband if her butt looks big in those jeans…except the wife is as big as San Pedro. I’m so not gonna go there. I will, however, share some of my favorite aspects of my time on the streets.

San Pedro is a great old town and it has a very long memory. One of the most exciting things for me, was to find things I liked to call ‘fossils’. I was a huge dinosaur nut as a kid and I always kind of looked at fossils as a wink from the past to the future (yes, wink). It made my day when I walked 9th Street and found these two.

This first fossil I found at the back of what was recently known as the Copper Room. It’s a small neon sign from the long-time San Pedro restaurant Olsen’s. I don’t know the status of the building but I hope whatever comes of it, that the sign can be preserved somehow.

This second fossil can be found a couple blocks west of the Olsens sign, behind Coover’s Pharmacy. A couple of people told me about the market that used to be next to Coovers and I found this sign to back their stories up. One of the things I want to cover on BEYOND THE BLOCK is the history of San Pedro’s markets, big and small.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

Happy Birthday SPBXB!

I honestly can’t believe it’s been a year already. I actually created SPBXB on the 26th but I consider the 28th the true beginning because it was the first day I touched those shiny white vans to the gritty cement. Funny thing is I started this journey of San Pedro discovery on the anniversary of San Pedro’s consolidation with the City of LA. (I wonder why we don’t celebrate that wonderful day every year?). That’s just one piece of fun San Pedro trivia that I learned in my travels. Last night I celebrated the birthday of Ms. Coco Chappelle, guest walker and one of the many friends I made on the way. The Friends & Facts I’ve gained over the last 365 days have enriched my life more than I can explain. I can never thank you all enough for reading and sharing your San Pedro experiences with me. My hope is that we continue the conversation in the year ahead of us and many years to come. That brings me to the future of SPBXB.

I know I’ve been kind of off my game this summer…what do you do when the road ends? I tried to start things up again, only to stall, stutter and conk out. So as the 1yr anniversary approached, I started thinking about the future. SPXB, as the walking blog, had a definite end and it was hard for me to see past it. I thought about starting a new blog with a new name and new address and just let SPBXB live in eternity as a reference, not to forget it or erase what I did, but to just to keep it separate so it didn’t get get buried. Don’t worry, that’s not gonna happen. We’re going to continue this journey , BEYOND THE BLOCK, right here at www.sanpedrobxb.com. As my Mom told me, “You’ll always be San Pedro Block by Block” (she doesn’t have to tell me, I still get introduced to people as ‘this is San Pedro Block by Block’). But I have figured out a way to separate the walking blog portion and it will have a special place of honor on the new set up- so you can reminisce all you want. Below the link to SPBXB-The Walk will be a link to my Point Vermin comic strip (launching at the end of September) and any other cool sites I decide to add. So there should always be something fun to look at. The site is going to change a lot in the coming weeks, but before it does, I’d like to spend the next week doing a restrospective of the last year. There’s a whole bunch of stuff I didn’t post, so it should be fun.

Thanks for reading & God Bless!

Romee

Nothing to see here…

Show&Tell Tuesday came and went yesterday. Partly because I had nothing to show you. I was hoping people would send in pictures this week since I’m almost out of my things. I just got a new video in the mail today so I have something to show you to make up for yesterday. It’s a screen cap from an ABC Movie of the Week called “The Old Man Who Cried Wolf” (1970). In the picture you can see Shanghai Red’s in the background.

If you aren’t on Facebook, I posted a bunch of screen caps from another made-for-tv movie called ‘Mongo’s Back in town”. The wonderful thing about the filming in town, is that it shows us a window into San Pedro of yester-year. Mongo’s Back in Town and The Old Man Who Cried Wolf are both good examples of that because they were mainly shot downtown in the Beacon Street Redevelopment Area before it was razed.

I’d really like to keep Show&Tell Tuesdays going, so if you have anything you’d like to share, photos or even just stories, please submit them at sanpedrobxb@gmail.com.

Breakfast

So it wouldn’t be a SPBXB Bite without a picture of the food I bought. I opted for a few Danishes that I shared with my Mom and my friend Blue. Can I say something about my cheese danish? I have been to my share of continental breakfasts at hotels and company meetings and I always see the cheese danish. Usually my sentiments are “uh-uh, no thank you” because it’s like eating a tub of cream cheese in a sugar bread tutu. But I am happy to report that my cheese danish from Amalfitano’s was super light and wonderful. So there you have it, my $3 worth of words on the new bakery in town (even though it’s not technincally in town, but we won’t hold it against them). Good Luck Amalfitano Bakery… you’ll be hearing from me about that birthday cake.

Cake Menu

If the Cake Menu was a Jeopardy question, my answer would be, “What is the definition of delicious?”

I love that their phone number is 833-BAKE. Was 831-MMMMMMMM taken? (Where’s my rimshot? I’m here all week).

The Goods

They were still filling the cases when I walked in, but there was still so much to choose from. Danishes…

Cookies!

There were some cakes in the case, but I was looking for their carrot cake cupcakes. I’m gonna have to check in later on. They were my FAVORITE growing up. But I also know where I’ll be buying my birthday cake in exactly one month from today (I’m talking to you strawberry whipcream).