The “What Women Want” Coffee Shop

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“If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard.”  So says Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.  I should have heeded her advice because for years I have been searching for the coffee shop from the 2000 comedy What Women Want and as it turns out the answer to my query has been in a box in my closet since before filming even took place.  Let me back up a bit and explain.

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A few nights after my parents and I moved to Pasadena in late February 2000, we grabbed dinner at the Il Fornaio restaurant in Old Town.  Upon arriving, my mom spotted a notice on the front door stating that the Italian eatery was going to be closed the following day for a film shoot.  We, of course, asked our server for further details and he explained that the shoot was for a Mel Gibson movie named What Women Want.  So bright and early the next morning, my mom and I headed back over to the restaurant in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the goings-on.  To our delight, we were allowed to sit on a bench right outside of Il Fornaio’s entrance (the very same bench the Grim Cheaper and I took our engagement photos on almost ten years later!) and observe pretty much everything.  It was my very first experience being on a working set and I couldn’t believe my luck that it was happening within 72 hours of moving to L.A.  The crew could not have been nicer to us, letting us hang out for hours.  One even gifted me with the day’s call sheet which I’ve kept in a memento box ever since.  Flash forward to last month.  While helping me unpack after our recent move, my mom noticed how many celebrity autographs I have and suggested I frame them and display them via a gallery wall in my new office.  (You can see the finished result here.)  So, I promptly began digging all of my autographs out of my plethora of memento boxes and, while doing so, was shocked to come across the What Women Want call sheet.  I had completely forgotten I had it!  I didn’t think much about it and didn’t even unfold it to take a closer look, in fact, until a lightbulb went off in my head a few minutes later.  Though a call sheet chronicles all of the information for a particular day of shooting (location details, call times, scheduling information, key phone numbers, parking maps, etc.), sometimes data for future filming is also noted.  Knowing the odds were incredibly slim but with fingers crossed, I opened up the paper to see if the coffee shop scenes happened to be listed and, lo and behold, they were – along with an address, spelled out in black and white!  The information I had been seeking for years had been right in my own backyard – or closet, in this case – the whole time!  As the call sheet informed me, the What Women Want coffee shop scenes were lensed at 400 South Main Street in downtown Los Angeles.  (Though the sheet notes the address as “400 Main St” with no north or south designation, being that there is no structure at 400 North Main, it was easy to discern that filming took place at 400 South.)

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I just about fell off my chair when I did a Google Street View search for the address and imagery of the San Fernando Building, a very popular filming location, came into focus on my screen.  Not only had I stalked the historic site before, but I’d covered it on two separate occasions in articles for other media outlets.  More on that in a bit.

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The Italian Renaissance Revival-style structure was commissioned by wealthy wheat farmer/landowner James B. Lankershim in 1907 and originally consisted of 6 floors.

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Considered the city’s grandest office building at the time of its inception, the luxe John F. Blee-designed property boasted a marble lobby with 22-foot ceilings, a Turkish bath, a café, a billiards room, and a penthouse which Lankershim called home.

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In 1911, two additional stories were added to the top of the building by architect R. B Young.

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Sadly, by the ‘90s, the property – and the neighborhood surrounding it – had fallen into disrepair.  Enter Tom Gilmore of Gilmore Associates.  In 1998, the visionary developer purchased the San Fernando, as well as three additional area buildings, and began rehabilitating them.  Killefer Flammang Architects was hired for the extensive transformation process, during which the San Fernando office units were converted into 70 modern loft rentals with concrete flooring, open floorplans, tile bathrooms, and high-end kitchens.

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The building, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a Historic-Cultural Monument, began leasing out units in August 2000 and by March of the following year was 93% occupied.

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The San Fernando’s ground floor also garnered new tenants, in the form of high-end restaurants, cafés, studios, and shops .  It is one of those spaces that was utilized in What Women Want.

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The site pops up a couple of times in the movie as the spot where cocky ad exec Nick Marshall (Gibson) grabs his daily cup of joe – and regularly hits on barista Lola (Marisa Tomei).

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Purported to be a Dietrich Coffee outpost in the flick (I am unsure of why the call sheet refers to it as a “Starbucks”), the coffee shop was not a real café at all, but a fabrication constructed inside of a vacant storefront for the shoot – a tidbit I learned years ago from the movie’s DVD commentary with director Nancy Meyers and production designer Jon Hutman.

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Yep, you read that right!  The What Women Want coffee shop was just a set, albeit an extensive one.

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As noted in the commentary, the entire coffee shop was a build-out, even the lobby seen in the background.  (Another interesting tidbit that I learned from Meyers’ commentary is that Frank Sinatra greatly influenced both the character of Nick and the movie as a whole.  Not only was Nick’s apartment based on Sinatra’s apartment in Come Blow Your Horn, but Hutman incorporated orange, Sinatra’s favorite color, as an accent hue in all of the sets.  One example is the directory sign visible below, which boasts an orange stripe across the top.)

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So, if the whole What Women Want coffee shop was just a set, one that was completely dismantled after shooting wrapped, why was I so fixated on identifying it?  I cannot really answer that question.  Though I was fully aware that no part of the locale would be recognizable from the flick, I was still obsessed with tracking it down – and spent years trying to do so.  I think possibly my intrigue was not in spite of the café being a set, but because of it.  Uncovering the reality of the space’s aesthetic as compared to the fantasy that was shown onscreen piqued my interest.  What can I say?  The magic of Hollywood captivates me.

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 Today, the storefront where the What Women Want coffee shop was set up houses a Spanish/Mediterranean eatery named Bäco Mercat.  (The space is denoted with a pink bracket below.)  Founded by Josef Centeno in 2011, the popular restaurant is named for the baco-style bread that is utilized in its sandwiches.

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Though Bäco Mercat occupies the entire southern half of the San Fernando Building’s ground level (as was the case with the What Women Want coffee shop), prior to that the space was divided into two separate units with a café named Banquette inhabiting the more northern storefront, as you’ll see in some screen captures to come.

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 The entrance doors Nick utilizes in the movie are situated on the northern side of Bäco Mercat.

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Ironically, while re-stalking the San Fernando Building recently, I was so excited to finally be seeing the What Women Want café site in person that I failed to snap photos of the buildings across the street (the Hellman Building and the Farmers and Merchants Bank), which were visible in one of the coffee shop scenes and are the only recognizable elements that still exists from the film.  Thank goodness for Google Street View!  As you can see in the collage below, while the windows of the Hellman Building have changed a bit, the column of the Farmers and Merchants Bank pictured behind Nick is easily identifiable.

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As is the decorative lip that runs across the top of the Hellman Building.  (You can check out a historic image of the Hellman which shows the street level windows in their original form and as they appeared in What Women Want – before they were altered to run all the way down to the sidewalk – here.)

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As I mentioned earlier, the San Fernando Building has a prolific film resume.  In the Season 1 episode of Police Story titled “Fingerprint,” which aired in 1974, Allen Rich (Tim Matheson) attempts to evade the police by ducking into the structure.

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The episode grants us a great glimpse of what the property’s interior looked like at the time.

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In 1977, the San Fernando Building popped up in the Season 2 episode of Starsky and Hutch titled “Huggy Bear and the Turkey” as the site of The Pits bar, where Foxy Baker (Emily Yancy) seeks out Huggy Bear (Antonio Fargas) and J.D. Turquet ‘Turkey’ (Dale Robinette) to help her find her missing husband.

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As I mentioned earlier, I’ve written about the San Fernando on two other occasions.  I briefly covered the site and its appearance in the 1983 “Beat It” music video in this Discover Los Angeles article about Michael Jackson’s L.A. that I penned in 2016.  While I originally thought that the video’s pool hall segments had been lensed at the Hard Rock Cafe where the bar scenes were shot, back in August 2013 set designer/builder Michael Scaglione, who worked on “Beat It,” was kind enough to give me copies of his original location sheets.  As they detailed, filming of the pool hall bits actually occurred at Brunswick Billiard Academy, formerly located in the basement of the San Fernando.  Though not much of the space can be seen in the video (which you can watch here) . . .

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  . . . you can catch some additional glimpses of it in this clip about the making of “Beat It” from Entertainment Tonight’s The Jacksons Exposed! special.

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Brunswick Billiard Academy is also where Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) plays pool in 1988’s Bull Durham.

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The movie provides us with much wider views of the pool hall than those featured in “Beat It.”

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In the 1992 comedy Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, Joe Bomowski (Sylvester Stallone) responds to a call about a jumper at the San Fernando, which is said to be located at 486 South Main Street.

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The building’s actual interior was also utilized in the scene.

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 Dick Harper (Jim Carrey), Jane Harper (Téa Leoni) and Frank Bascombe (Richard Jenkins) discuss how to rob Jack McCallister (Alex Baldwin) while sitting in front of Pete’s Cafe and Bar, which formerly occupied the northern half of the San Fernando Building’s lower level, in the 2005 comedy Fun with Dick and Jane.  Today that space houses PYT.

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Bob Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg) hides out – and almost gets arrested – in the San Fernando’s entrance while spying on Sarah Fenn’s (Kate Mara) meeting with Nick Memphis (Michael Pena) at the Barclay Hotel across the street in the 2007 action flick Shooter.

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In 2009’s (500) Days of Summer, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Zooey Deschanel) shop twice at Old Bank DVD, which was formerly located next to Banquette on the San Fernando’s lower level.

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You can just see the edge of Banquette in the second screen capture below.

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 In the Season 5 Rear-Window-inspired episode of Castle titled “The Lives of Others,” which aired in 2013, Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion) spies on his across-the-street neighbors in the San Fernando Building via a pair of binoculars while holed up in his apartment due to a skiing accident.

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A couple of scenes also took place on the sidewalk out of in front the building.  (Why an address number of 500 was posted on the San Fernando for the shoot, I am unsure.)

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That same year, Anton Zevlos (Jeff Griggs) dined with his family at Pete’s Cafe & Bar in the Season 5 episode of NCIS: Los Angeles titled “Iron Curtain Rising.”  You can check out a photo of the eatery’s interior that matches what is shown below here.

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As I detailed in this post for Los Angeles magazine, Kate King (Leslie Mann) calls her husband, Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), to remind him about a dinner engagement while standing in front of Bäco Mercat in the 2014 movie The Other Woman.

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 For more stalking fun, follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Los Angeles magazine and Discover Los Angeles.

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 Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: The coffee shop from What Women Want was created inside of a vacant storefront at the San Fernando Building, which is located at 400 South Main Street in downtown Los Angeles.  The storefront now houses the restaurant Bäco Mercat.  You can visit the eatery’s official website here.

The Cooper House from “Forever Young”

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Today’s locale is a bit of a long time coming.  In my early March post about the bungalow where Daniel McCormick (Mel Gibson) lived in Forever Young, I mentioned that I had stalked a different house from the 1992 movie – the one where Claire Cooper (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her son, Nat (Elijah Wood), lived – in my early stalking days.  I found the location thanks to Scott’s L.A. Audio Tour of Pasadena CD, but because this was long before I had a blog, had failed to write down the address.  Thankfully, the pad was rather easy to re-track down, though.  In fact, the address was mentioned explicitly in a scene.

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When Nat and his friend Felix (Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead’s Robery Hy Gorman) are playing around at a military facility, they discover Daniel’s cryogenically-frozen body inside of a suspended animation chamber.   Daniel immediately starts to thaw and grabs Nat’s jacket, freaking the boys out, who run away.  Daniel later looks inside the jacket and discovers Nat’s address written on the tag.  Though the city is listed as San Marcos, the rest of the address shown is the home’s real life address.  Claire and Nat’s house is located at 1724 Oxley Street in South Pasadena.  How cool is that?

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The residence was used extensively in Forever Young.

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It is where Daniel lives after waking up from being frozen for 53 years.

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In one of the movie’s more memorable scenes, Daniel fixes Claire’s roof and gives Nat some tips on women.

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Amazingly, aside from the paint color, virtually no part of the property has been changed since filming took place in 1992.

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In real life, the house, which was built in 1910, boasts 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, 1,115 square feet of living space and a 0.17-acre plot of land.

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The home’s real life backyard was used in the movie.  Sadly, though, Nat’s awesome tree house hangout was just a prop and is not there in real life.

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I could not find any photographs of the real life interior of the home, but am fairly certain it was also used in the filming.

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For more stalking fun, follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Los Angeles magazine and Discover Los Angeles.

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Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: The Cooper House from Forever Young is located at 1724 Oxley Street in South Pasadena.

Daniel McCormick’s House from “Forever Young”

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Back in my early stalking days, I purchased a Scott’s L.A. Audio Tour of Pasadena CD.  I loved every minute of it and learned about quite a few new locations while listening, one of which was the home where Claire Cooper (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her son, Nat (Elijah Wood), lived in the 1992 movie Forever Young.  This was long before I had a blog, though, so I never wrote down the address and actually completely forgot about it until last week while stalking in South Pasadena.  I did not have my Scott’s L.A. CD with me at the time, so used my trusty iPhone to do some Googling to see if I could find the place.  I wound up coming across this Facebook post which gave the location of a different residence used in the movie – the bungalow where Capt. Daniel McCormick (Mel Gibson) lived.  So I ran right on over to snap some pics.  (I ended up tracking down the Cooper house, too, but not until after I had already returned home to Palm Springs, so that will be a different post for a different day.)

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For those who have yet to see Forever Young (and if you haven’t, you really should, it’s a fabulous movie!), the story (which was written by none other than Lost creator J.J. Abrams) centers on Daniel, a test pilot living in 1939, whose girlfriend gets into a terrible accident that lands her in a coma.  Not bearing to see the love of his life dying, Daniel volunteers for the latest experiment that his best friend, scientist Harry Finley (George Wendt), is conducting –  cryogenic freezing.  Harry agrees to freeze Daniel for one full year, but things go terribly wrong and Daniel does not end up being removed from the suspended animation chamber until 1992 – 53 years after initially stepping inside.

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Daniel’s small Craftsman-style bungalow is only shown once in Forever Young, in the very beginning of the movie, prior to Daniel being frozen.

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Despite a change in paint color, the residence still looks much the same today as it did onscreen in 1992.

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According to Zillow, the tiny dwelling, which was built in 1915, boasts two bedrooms, one bath and 864 square feet of space.

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I was actually quite shocked to see that the home boasts such a scant square footage as it appears to be much larger from the street.

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I am fairly certain that the real life interior of the property was also used in the filming, but I could not find any photographs of the interior online with which to verify that hunch.

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For more stalking fun, follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Los Angeles magazine online.

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Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: Daniel McCormick’s house from Forever Young is located at 612 Meridian Avenue in South Pasadena.

The Emser Tile Building from “Lethal Weapon”

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Located just up the street from the original Barney’s Beanery restaurant in West Hollywood, which I blogged about last Friday, is the Emser Tile Building which appeared in a very memorable scene in the first Lethal Weapon movie.  And even though I have never actually seen any of the four Lethal Weapon flicks (I know, I know – that has to be tantamount to stalker sacrilege or something!), because I was right there stalking Barney’s, I figured I might as well head on over to the Emser Building to snap some quick pics.

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Surprisingly enough, even though the 7-story Emser building is quite unique and appears to be historical, I could find virtually no information about the structure online.  All that I was able to discover was that, as you can see in this 1928 picture from The Bruce Torrence Photograph Collection, the building originally belonged to the Bekins moving and storage company.   And thanks to the YouAreHere website, I also learned that it was constructed in 1925 by the architecture firm of Niebecker & Jeffers.  The property now serves as the corporate offices of Emser Tile, a company that supplies natural stone and tile to commercial builders and contractors.

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In one of the most famous scenes in 1987’s Lethal Weapon, Martin Riggs (aka Mel Gibson) is sent by his new partner, Roger Murtaugh (aka Danny Glover), to the top of the Emser Tile Building in order to talk down a potential jumper.

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Instead of talking him out of committing suicide, though, Riggs winds up handcuffing himself to the man and jumping off of the building with him, tandem-style, right into the safety of a police airbag.  Sadly, Dar Robinson, the stuntman who stood in for the suicidal man and performed the actual jump in the scene (and yes, he really did jump off of the 7-story Emser Building for the filming!), was tragically killed a few weeks after principal photography on Lethal Weapon had wrapped.  Dar, who was the holder of 21 different stunt records and was listed as the highest paid stuntman in the 1986 Guinness Book of World Records, had never so much as broken a bone in his 19-plus year career.  But on November 21, 1996, while performing a routine motorcycle stunt in Page, Arizona for the movie Million Dollar Mystery, he accidentally lost control of his bike and careened off of a cliff at the tender age of 39.  You can read a more detailed history of the legendary Dar, who was dubbed “King of the Stuntmen”, on the People Magazine website here.

And you can watch a short video in which Mel Gibson talks about Dar and the Emser Building jump by clicking above.

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After Riggs jumps off of the Emser Building, Murtaugh pulls him into a vacant storefront where he chastises him for his dangerous behavior and suicidal tendencies.  It is there that Murtaugh realizes that Riggs is not acting crazy in order to “draw a psycho pension”, but that he just simply is crazy.

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Ironically enough, that storefront was actually vacant when I stalked it back in July, just as it was portrayed to be in the movie.  Love it!

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: The Emser Tile Building from Lethal Weapon is located at 8431 Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood.  The storefront where Riggs and Murtaugh discuss the fact that Riggs might actually be crazy is located at 8441/8445 Santa Monica Boulevard.   The original Barney’s Beanery restaurant is located just half a block west of the Emser Tile Building at 8447 Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood.

The Old Plaza at El Pueblo de Los Angeles from “90210”

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Last week, after reading my post on the Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank in which I mentioned that I had actually stalked the iconic restaurant way back in November, fellow stalker Chas, from the It’sFilmedThere website, sent me a text asking, “If you did not stalk ever again, how many blogs could you write before you ran out?”  My response, “I don’t know . . . but A LOT!”  If I had to guess I would say there are at least 200 locales stored away in my stalking back log.  In fact, there are still quite a few spots from my trip to the Pacific Northwest last May that I have yet to post.  So not to worry – even if I were to never stalk again, I would still be cranking out posts for a very long time to come!  Smile Anyway, Chas’ text got me to thinking about all of the locations that I have pushed to the back burner in recent months – one of which was The Old Plaza at El Pueblo de Los Angeles, which appeared in the Season 3 episode of fave show 90210 titled “The Enchanted Donkey” and which I had dragged the Grim Cheaper out to stalk back in July.  Speaking of 90210, I would just like to state here, for the record, that I am NOT AT ALL happy about the latest developments in the “Lannie” saga.  But I digress.

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El Pueblo de Los Angeles, or the Los Angeles Plaza Historic District as it is also called, is the oldest surviving section of the city and serves as a monument to L.A.’s September 4th, 1781 founding.  On that day, at a site located along the L.A. River just northeast of the Plaza, eleven families, consisting of 22 adults and 22 children, arrived from the Gulf of Mexico and established a small pueblo with mud huts and a village square.  In 1815, a flood washed away that original settlement and it was later rebuilt in 1825 at its current location, which sits on higher ground.  The Plaza immediately became the social, commercial, and cultural center of Los Angeles and remained that way throughout most of the 19th Century.  By the 1920s, the area had sadly fallen into serious disrepair and was set to be largely demolished to make way for a railway station.  Thankfully, a woman named Christine Sterling came along in 1926 and, with help from Harry Chandler and several local businesses, transformed the site into a bustling marketplace and popular tourist attraction.  Today, the 44-acre property, which is considered to be the “birthplace of Los Angeles” and is a State Historic Monument and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, consists of five separate museums, a church dating back to 1861, the Mexican marketplace known as Olvera Street, 27 historic buildings, including L.A.’s oldest firehouse, and a central plaza, aka The Old Plaza.

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In “The Enchanted Donkey” episode of 90210, The Old Plaza stood in for the supposed-Cabo-San-Lucas-area marketplace that Annie Wilson (aka Shenae Grimes) and Liam Court (aka my love, Matt Lanter – sigh!  Winking smile) visited while in Mexico during Spring Break.  It is there that Annie gets bitten by a rabid monkey which lands her in the hospital.  Because the BEST Mexican restaurants in all of Southern California can be found there, the GC and I have visited El Pueblo de Los Angeles countless times over the years.  So when The Old Plaza popped up on 90210, I recognized the place immediately.

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In “The Enchanted Donkey” episode, the rock that the monkey is sitting on is located in the northern-most section of The Old Plaza, under one of the site’s four historic Moreton Bay Fig trees.  Ironically enough, as you can see above, that rock bears a plaque which reads “Los Angeles Plaza”, which, being that the scene was supposed to have taken place in Mexico, explains why it was covered over with a blanket for the filming, .  Ah, the magic of Hollywood!

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While watching the scene, I also immediately recognized the leather clip that Annie was wearing in her hair as being from Murillo Leather, a store that is located about twenty feet from the Old Plaza and that I mentioned in my post about Olvera Street way back in May of 2009.  I have visited the shop, which is owned and operated by Armando Murillo, who made all of the purses and belts worn by Jessica Simpson in the movie The Dukes of Hazzard, countless times over the years and even have a belt that was made by the second-generation leather craftsman.

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So while we were there I just had to stop by to ask Armando if my hunch about Annie’s barrette had been correct.  He confirmed for me that not only did his hand-crafted hair clip appear in the episode, but that Shenae Grimes herself had come into his shop to pick it out.  I was literally drooling hearing Armando talk about meeting Shenae and how incredibly sweet she was.  (This was before I was fortunate enough to meet the actress myself this past August.)  And while I SO wanted to buy a Shenae-style hair clip while we were there, the GC immediately ixnayed the idea, noting that my hair was far too short to ever be able to get any use out of it.  Hmph!

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As I mentioned in my post about Olvera Street back in May 2009, The Old Plaza was also featured in Lethal Weapon 3 as the spot where Martin Riggs (aka Mel Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (aka Danny Glover) were assigned to work patrol after being demoted for blowing up a building.  It is there that Riggs and Murtaugh threaten to shoot a man for jaywalking and also witness an armored-car robbery.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

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Stalk It: The Old Plaza at El Pueblo de Los Angeles, from “The Enchanted Donkey” episode of 90210, is located at 1 Olvera Street, across from Union Station, in Los Angeles.  In the episode, Annie and Liam stood in front of the large rock located under the huge Moreton bay fig tree in the northern-most section of The Old Plaza, in the area depicted with a pink arrow in the above aerial view.  Murillo Leather, where Annie’s hair clip was made, is located just up the street from The Old Plaza at 6 Olvera Street in Los Angeles.

The Original Pantry Cafe

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Well, it is shaping up to be restaurant week at iamnotastalker.com because for the third day in a row now here I am with yet another eatery to blog about – this time Downtown Los Angeles’ historic Original Pantry Café which first opened almost nine decades ago in 1924.  While I had actually known about the landmark restaurant for many years due to the fact that it has long been one of the Grim Cheaper’s boss’ favorite breakfast joints, it wasn’t until fellow stalker Lavonna recently informed me that my girl, Miss Marilyn Monroe, had once dined there that I realized the place was also a stalking location.  Just a few of the other luminaries who have patronized the legendary restaurant over the years include Humphrey Bogart, Sammy Davis, Jr., former President Bill Clinton, former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and Martin Luther King, Jr.  So a couple of weeks ago, while out doing some stalking in Downtown Los Angeles, the GC and I decided to hit the place up for lunch.

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The Original Pantry Café first opened for business in 1924 in a storefront located one block west of where it stands today.  The tiny eatery consisted of one counter with seating for fifteen, a hot plate, a grill, and a sink.  The place became extremely popular from the get-go thanks to its hearty servings and reasonable prices and hungry patrons formed lines that wound around the block out in front of the eatery on an almost daily basis.  The Pantry flourished even during the Depression years and, in 1934, expanded its sitting area by adding a dining room.  In 1950, the State of California took over the space where the Pantry was located in order to build a freeway onramp and the restaurant was forced to move to its current location at the corner of 9th and Figueroa Streets, where it has remained to this day. 

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On the day of the move, breakfast was served at the Pantry’s original location in the morning and then dinner was subsequently served at the new locale at night, so the restaurant, which is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, actually has the distinction of being able to say that it has never closed and has never been without a customer since its first day of business back in 1924.  And to prove it, as you can see in the above photograph, the restaurant’s front doors are sans locks.  In 1980, the Original Pantry Café was faced with demolition once again, but Richard Riordan, the future mayor of the City of Los Angeles, stepped in and purchased the property and some neighboring storefronts for $3.5 million.  Thankfully, he left the exterior of the property, as well as the restaurant’s menu, exactly as they had been since the new location first opened in 1950.  The interior has, sadly, been remodeled quite a bit in recent years, though.  On October 5, 1982, the restaurant was declared Los Angeles’ Historic-Cultural Monument Number 255.  Today the pantry, which can seat 84 patrons, still has customers lining up around the block on a daily basis, with some guests waiting up to two hours before being served. 

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When we showed up to stalk the place, though, there was no line and we were seated immediately – which should have been a clue.  I am sad to say that our meal was not very good, which was highly disappointing as the place serves up mostly comfort food – my favorite .  But from what I have since learned from the GC’s boss, the Original Pantry Café is definitely a breakfast place, so it looks like we just picked the wrong time to stalk it.  Apparently the Pantry’s breakfasts are out of this world, which is why the place usually has large lines during the morning hours.  And while our lunch left quite a bit to be desired, I have to say that the Pantry was definitely a cool place to hang out.

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The Original Pantry Café is also a filming location.  In the 2000 movie The Million Dollar Hotel, the Pantry was where Detective Skinner (aka Mel Gibson) got into a fist fight with Tom Tom (aka Jeremy Davies).  The movie was filmed before the recent remodel, though, so the restaurant is largely unrecognizable from it.  

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In 2007’s Knocked Up, the Pantry was where Ben Stone (aka Seth Rogan) told his father, who was played by actor Harold Ramis, that he had gotten a girl pregnant.

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Big THANK YOU to fellow stalker Lavonna for telling me about this location!  Smile

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: The Original Pantry Café is located at 877 South Figueroa Street in Downtown Los Angeles.  You can visit the restaurant’s official website here.  The Pantry is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

The Ransom Apartment

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This past December while in New York I dragged my boyfriend out to stalk Mel Gibson and Rene Russo’s Upper East Side apartment building from the 1996 movie Ransom. I found this location in fave stalking book New York: The Movie Lover’s Guide. The apartment building is very beautiful in person, with ornate stone balconies, large windows overlooking Central Park, and a green slate roof. The building just screams “wealthy”, so it is easy to see why producers chose to use it as the residence of Mel’s mega-millionaire character in the movie. I actually haven’t seen Ransom in quite a few years and I can’t remember exactly what his building looked like in the film, so I can’t say if it looks the same now as it did twelve years ago when filming took place.

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The Ransom building was built in 1917 by C.P.H. Gilbert, an extremely popular New York architect during the early 1900’s. The boutique apartment building, designed in the Francois I style, was only the second upscale apartment building to ever be constructed on Fifth Avenue . The building, although huge, consists of only 12 different apartments, one on each of the building’s twelve floors. One is currently for sale at the bargain price of $12,950,000. 🙂 You can sneak a peek inside of the building at the apartment’s real estate website. I’ve never considered myself at all voyeuristic, but I seriously can’t get enough of stuff like this. Open houses, real estate websites, vacation rental sites, etc. LOVE THEM! 🙂

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: The Ransom apartment is located at 1067 Fifth Avenue on New York’s Upper East Side. It is situated almost directly next door to the Frank Lloyd Wright architectural masterpiece the Guggenheim Museum, which is located at 1071 Fifth Avenue.