My first year (well, my first two semesters) of grad school is over, and I'm still recuperating. Here lies Westward Ho, who blames Cedd Moses for her early demise, particularly these past few nights.
Thursday ended at Seven Grand, Moses' great new whiskey bar. I love its small size and its quiet, private feel. It's on the second floor with an open-air deck out back that faces an eerie-looking vacant office building. The DJ right on the floor reminded me of bars back home in NYC, where DJs are much more part of the nightlife even in spite of New York's weird cabaret laws. I danced, sloppily, to the sloppy country & western cover of Dylan's "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" that this guy was spinning.
Seven Grand is sited where one of the original Clifton's locations used to stand, but that's not all, according to one blogdowntown commenter:
The beautiful building Seven Grand is in was originally built as the corporate headquarters, manufacturing center and flagship store of Brock Jewelry which at the time was the nations largest jeweler. Celebrity customers included Mary Pickford. Brock Jewelry company seems to have gone under sometime during the Great Depression. Sure, Clifford Clinton came along later, basterdised the architecture, and thew a cafeteria on the first floor, Clifton's offices on the third, bakery on the fourth, and a "Soupeasy" in the basement. Clinton traveled the world as a missionary and the soup easy which sat just three floor below his feet was not going to be spared of his true love Jesus Christ. Alas the "Soupeasy" featured a life sized diorama which took up an entire room and included a very large effigy of Christ himself. If they wanted to eat the homeless were apparently forced to hit a button at which point in time a speaker in the Jesus effigy would play and a recording of Cliford Clinton pretending to be Jesus Christ demanding the individual to pray with the bizzare effigy before they were allowed to proceed to the free soup and bread. My point in all this? I think we should refere to the building as the Brock Jewelry Building rather than the "old Clifton's Silver Spoon building" as everyone does.
After Friday's big banquet at the San Antonio Winery (more on that in a bit), a bunch of us carpooled over to Cedd Moses Watering Hole #2, the Golden Gopher. I drank Maker's Mark Manhattans and played Galaga (badly) and Ms. Pac-Man (excellently). Then we stumbled through the downtown night and danced to the Punky Reggae Party at La Cita.
I don't have much to say on the San Antonio Winery itself -- it was nice enough, although for our banquet they only provided Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon, my two least-favorite kinds of wine. It is in a pretty inaccessible location, way down an obscure street called Lamar off N. Main, in that gnarly industrial/Cornfields/L.A. River part of the city between Chinatown and Lincoln Heights. I tried to walk there from Union Station and got lost, because I kept going up Spring instead of Main, and had to step over lots of broken glass and outrun a couple of guard dogs (in high heels). I did get to walk past Nick's, which was closed.
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