Terrorism according to Kerry Morrison: This is acceptable (and very, very good for business).We have written many a post about Kerry Morrison’s weirdly obsessive hatred of the street characters at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue and how she uses the power of her BID to attack them at every turn. Her surreality-based antipathy has at various times inspired her co-conspirators at the LAPD to crack down heavily on these performers, even to the point where Carol Sobel had to sue the cops in Federal Court to stop the neurotic vendetta.
She’s spent at least a decade railing against these characters and working with the City Attorney, the City Council, private attorneys, everyone in sight, without notable success, to ban their activities, to stop them wearing masks, to require them to wear identity badges, to conflate them with terrorists, and so on. Well, we’ve been looking into the matter a little more deeply, and today we’re here to tell you a story about street characters, the KKK, domestic terrorism, anti-mask laws, and property values in Hancock Park.1 First let’s take a little trip through 7 years worth of the minutes of the Board of Directors of the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance, concentrating on the street characters of Hollywood and Kerry Morrison’s efforts to thwart them by any means necessary: Terrorism according to Kerry Morrison: This is unacceptable.
June 2006—Morrison and Deputy City Attorney Bill Kysella have drafted a resolution for consideration by Council President Eric Garcetti that the City Attorney’s office work with the Hollywood Entertainment District and the Hollywood Division of the LAPD to evaluate potential solutions to document the identity of the street characters and performers, regulate their activities, and ban the use of masks in the interests of protecting public safety on the public right-of-way within the Hollywood Enterainment District.
Standard Plating Company at 826 E. 62nd Street, Los Angeles. Like the Hollywood Gower Plaza, this property has been in Alyssa Van Breene’s family for four generations. She’s not bragging about it on the internet, though, possibly because, rather than being associated with glamor and glitz, it’s associated with poisons saturating the land and the groundwater.When first we met Ms. Alyssa Van Breene, round about the middle of 2015, she was out in Boyle Heights, shooting off her privileged mouth about street vending and how it must be forbidden because she and her strange BIDfellows “…work very hard to keep the sidewalks clean, safe, and hospitable for all pedestrians: tourists, workers, residents, and students.” Make a note of that “clean” bit. It’s going to come up again later.
When next we met Ms. Alyssa Van Breene she was boasting in her Board bio that her family had owned the northeast corner of Hollywood and Gower for four freaking generations, as if this were some kind of accomplishment to be proud of, predicated as it was and is on the white supremacist real estate policies that made Hollywood what it is today. The human face of white supremacy, hypocrisy, and wanton saturation of the earth and water of South Los Angeles with poisons.
And when last we met Ms. Alyssa Van Breene, she was sitting in a room watching, not protesting, a gang of her white supremacist BID buddies laughing it up with Cowboy Cory Palka of the LAPD’s Hollywood Division about how fucked up South Los Angeles is. And really, this is how we meet her every month, as the HPOA plots to turn its BID Patrol into a tool for the LAPD to avoid civilian oversight, as they arrange the destruction of their own records to avoid criticism, as the BID Patrol continues to arrest the homeless merely to harass them, as they plot and plan to keep arresting street vendors, not to mention illegally destroying their wares, and so on. Her silence, obviously, equals her consent. The famous four-generation Dulgarian/Van Breene strip mall at Hollywood and Gower is the non-toxic side of the holdings of Alyssa Van Breene’s people.
But we had assumed, without evidence or even much thought, that her destructive activities were confined to Hollywood, that yes, she was willing to oppress non-zillionaires by arresting them, mocking them, and chasing them out of Hollywood, but that that was the extent of the damage.
So what a surprise it was when the almighty Google turned us on to the fact that her mom, Dickie Van Breene (née Dulgarian) and her uncle Duke Dulgarian (and a bunch of other Dulgarians, but they don’t concern us here) were sued every which way but loose in 2013 in Federal Court by Kamala Harris and the California Department of Justice for illegally dumping a bunch of poisonous shit at a nickel-chrome plating factory in on East 62nd Street in South L.A. that they all inherited down the generations along with the Hollywood and Gower property, the economic benefits of which inure to Alyssa Van Breene just as surely as do those of the famous strip mall. You can read the initial complaint here, and it has some interesting history in it: Continue reading Hollywood Property Owners Alliance Board Member Alyssa Van Breene: Financial Beneficiary of a Century of Poison-Saturated Environmental Racism in South Los Angeles→
Cory Palka, new boss of the Hollywood Division, speaks to an organized gang of exceptionally jolly white supremacists on St. Patrick’s day.Watch and listen to LAPD Captain Cory Palka speaking at the most recent meeting of the Board of Directors of the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance. Captain Cory recently replaced the now transferred Peter Zarcone as Hollywood honcho, and evidently a good-will-drop-in mission to the local zillionaire’s club is de rigueur in that situation.
You can read a transcript of the ongoings after the break, as always, but today we’re focusing just on a little bit of unplanned, unscripted joking around, for in such situations, according to Sigmund Freud (as our friends at Wikipedia put it), we can discern “…forbidden thoughts and feelings that the conscious mind usually suppresse[s] in deference to society.” Har-de-fooking-har-har-har!
The fun began when Kerry Morrison, her inimitably sycophantic affect in full flower, told Cpt. Cory that she had a surprise for him! (This bit starts here).
KM: I have one fun thing to show you. When you were here, I remember you said “Ooooh! I really want one of those star placques!” So I made this up for you for 2013–2014 and then I kept texting, like I want to go down and tour 77th Division.
And Cowboy Cory Palka has a little joke about this: CP: You don’t want to go to 77th…
Now, it’s hard to see what’s funny about that, right? We mean, really, what’s funny? But the HPOA thinks it’s fookin’ hilarious. Just watch.
White people in Hollywood laughing it up about 77th Street Division.So really, what’s so funny? There’s no clue in Cpt. Cory’s follow-up remarks, either, although we do get the sense that he almost talked about, just barely refrained from mentioning, the dreaded “those people”:
Totally different environment. My first year in 77th Street I had fifty murders and then last year I had thirty three. And I remember, I was telling my daughter we were doing some great things down there, and she was like “Great things? Man, pretty dangerous down there.” And I had ten when I left this year, so, Pete still has ten, I haven’t had any, I’ve been here, this is my second week, so, it’s just a different community and with a whole different set of challenges. Um, that’s a whole different discussion, so…
Well, getting records out of the Downtown Center BID is like pulling teeth from a fricking hippopotamus,1 but after almost four months and one exceedingly detailed complaint to the Los Angeles City Clerk about their general bloody-minded uncooperative stonewalling, they have released a bunch of records relating to their public relations firm, Macy + Associates.2 You can find this material here on the Archive. Note that they’re, as usual, mercilessly and certainly illegally redacted. I’m working on this, but I don’t expect any results quickly.
Also, the big prize, obtained yesterday, is 2007 arrest reports and daily activity logs from the Andrews International BID Patrol. These are also on the Archive:
Kerry Morrison, late of the California Association of REALTORS®, formerly known as the California Real Estate Association, an immensely influential Twentieth Century California white supremacist group, sitting extraordinarily close to some guy whose name we don’t know.While poking around in the bowels and hidden bits of the HPOA’s website recently, we happened to notice, in friend Kerry Morrison’s bio, the following intriguing statement: “Prior to coming to Hollywood, she spent 14 years in public policy and senior management roles at the California Association of REALTORS in Los Angeles.” Maybe it was the ALL-CAPS that caught our eye, so weirdly dystypographical and yet so clearly intentional,1 or maybe something else. In any case, we resolved to discover just for whom it was that Kerry had spent 14 years working for prior to the BID and why it seemed so important to her to include this in her biosnippet. Note, by the way, that the California Association of REALTORS® was formerly known as the California Real Estate Association.2 California real estate agents have done far, far more to shape this state for evil and for good than is commonly acknowledged in popular discourse.
Kerry, as the first and sole director of the HPOA since 1996, has clearly formed and molded that organization in her own image. Thus, we thought, it might be illuminating to understand the professional crucible in which that image was forged. So we sent our faithful correspondent out onto the wild uncharted moors of scholarlandia through the portals of Google scholar, JSTOR, and UCLA. Our minds were well and truly blown by what he discovered, and perhaps yours will be too. There’s far too much material to cover in one post, so we’re going to lay it on you in increments, starting today with some background and a shocking episode from the long hot summer of 1948. Continue reading HPOA Precursor Organization and Former Employer of Kerry Morrison California Real Estate Association Sought to Warp, Pervert, and Destroy U.S. Constitution in 1948 to Prevent “The Threat of Occupancy by Negroes”→
A member of the Hollywood Protective Association and spiritual forebear of the modern BID Board member, with the backing of the 1920s edition of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, announces to the world that she’s a moron. Note sign in window stating “Member Hollywood Protective Association.”Long-time readers of this blog will recall that, last month, we broke the story of Hollywood Chamber of Commerce biggity-wig Marty Shelton’s bizarre distaste for black, brown, and poor people visiting Hollywood. Inspired by that, we recently wrote on the white supremacist roots of our beloved Hollywood sign and the inwrought caucasians-only policies of the real-estate development it once promoted. This line of inquiry got us interested in the jim crow history of Hollywood, which turns out to be quite rich.
For instance, a brief discussion in Scott Kurashige’s interesting book The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles1 led us to read up in old LA Times articles on anti-Japanese hysteria in Hollywood in the early 1920s. It seems that in April 1923, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce gave some advice to a bunch of angry white people. The article is here, but the short version is that some Japanese people bought eight lots in Hollywood, four near Bronson and Sunset and four on Tamarind and Gordon, and had the nerve to wish to build some apartment buildings and a church. Jess E. Stephens, City Attorney of Los Angeles in April 1923 when pitchfork-waving torch-bearing howling Hollywood lynch mobs came whining to him about how Japanese people were being meanies and building a church in Hollywood. His response doesn’t seem to be available in the historical record.
The white people got all in a tizzy, you can see one in the image above, and went to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce screaming for help. The Chamber, as opposed to the presence of non-white people in Hollywood as they are today, directed the howling mob to the City Attorney to seek a restraining order and they also started circulating petitions “urging the residents to agree to restrict the use of land to those of the Caucasian race.”2 They were even inspired to poetry! See after the break for an especially creepy example.
Ad for Hollywoodland development from the L.A. Times, September 7, 1924, page D2, fearmongering about minorities in Hollywood, just like now, 90 years later.While flipping about in old issues of the L.A. Times, we came upon the enlightening 1924 advert you see to the right, luring buyers for the famous Hollywoodland development, from which we inherited not only the iconic sign but the famous racist attitudes, it seems. See what it says?
…to the “Old Timer” of Los Angeles! You…..who have seen the fine residential districts of Los Angeles despoiled by metropolitan development—must realize now that Los Angeles is destined soon to be a city of millons.
Protect your family by procuring at today’s prices a home place in the Hills of Hollywoodland—secured by fixed and natural restrictions against the inroads of metropolitanism and yet within twenty-five minutes of Seventh & Broadway.
Today is Your best opportunity. Are you going to sit idly by and let the March of Progress pass unheeded?
Rabid but honest racist son-of-a-bitch Lee Atwater. As he famously said about the renowned Southern Strategy, ‘[y]ou start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you.’ And what should we do we do about that in Hollywood in 2015, Lee?The late Lee Atwater, erstwhile bought-and-souled Robert Johnson of the Republican party, in a rare moment of lucidity, once explained how white politicians enforced and maintained white supremacy in the United States in the last half of the Twentieth Century:
You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. Everybody uses this same picture of Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the first Ku Klux Klan, looking like he just finished eating the body of a lynched ex-slave but he’s still hungry for more, so we thought we’d use it too.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’1
From 1865 through nineteen-fifty-something, politicians and demagogues, e.g. Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the first incarnation of white businessman’s social group the Ku Klux Klan and Woodrow Wilson, erstwhile president of white supremacist organization Harvard University, could just use the magical incantation of “nigger, nigger, nigger,” and their will would be done. Woodrow Wilson, vocal admirer of D. W. Griffith’s seminal work of cinematic white supremacy. Why do white people have such thin lips?
But, as Lee points out, things started to get more complicated. Instead of saying “nigger,” white supremacists had to talk about states’ rights, and, later taxation. This was the essence of Richard Nixon’s so-called Southern Strategy, which got him elected in 1968 using those precise codewords which his audience heard as “nigger, nigger, nigger,” the same Southern Strategy that a star-struck Lee Atwater is glorifying to the heavens as he breathlessly describes its genius.
By now, though, we’re well into the 21st Century and by now, as the incomparable Steven Johnson has so convincingly argued, everyone is way, way smarter than they used to be.2 These days, even talking too vigorously about taxation will expose one as a revanchist white supremacist. Lee Atwater died unlamented by sane people in 1991, so he didn’t get to see the present state of the progression he so enviously described above. A new vocabulary was needed to maintain white supremacy and, as humans are so very adaptive, a new vocabulary was developed. And wouldn’t Lee have been proud? Continue reading Nathan Bedford Forrest, Woodrow Wilson, Bull Connor, Richard Nixon, Lee Atwater, and the Vicious Crypto-White-Supremacism of the Hollywood Area BIDs→
![Rabid but honest racist son-of-a-bitch Lee Atwater. As he famously said about the renowned Southern Strategy, '[y]ou start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you.'](https://michaelkohlhaas.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Lee_Atwater_1989.jpg)
