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Bodie State Historic Park, California, September 18, 1999.

More from the California archives 🙂 . Bodie State Historic Park is the remnants of a once thriving mining town northeast of Yosemite near the Nevada border. Having been in the California park system some 40 years, it has a slightly sanitized feel to it, though to be fair it seems like more sensible heads have prevailed and one certainly can’t accuse it of being Disney-fied. (For starters, the road there from the Interstate is one of the rougher roads I’ve driven on in the States.)

Naoko and I made the trek here during a weekend trip to Yosemite in September of 1999, a trip I still look fondly back on, even if 5 years hence the photo remnants are a bit hard to get excited about.

Hollyhock House (Frank Lloyd Wright), Los Angeles, November, 1999.

Cleaning out the hard drive, came across some scans of a roll or two I shot at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House in Los Angeles, back in 1999. Naoko and I were ostensibly visiting my brother, but for the most part it was an architectural tour of various famed L.A. homes and buildings. In addtion to Hollyhock, we also saw Wright’s Ennis-Brown, Storer, and Freeman homes (of these, only the Ennis-Brown is open to the public). We also visited other famous architectural landmarks like Schindler’s Studio-Residence, the Bradbury Building, as well as seeing from afar some of the Case Study Houses like the Eames House. Thinking back on it, quite a strange trip, lots of driving in and out of the various Los Angeles hills, book and map in hand. Naoko must’ve thought I was pretty messed up (and of course, she’d be right!).

Anyway, ironically enough, much of the Hollyhock’s construction was left to Wright’s son and Schindler to manage, as the elder Wright was occupied with the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.

Click on the above photo for a small gallery. Be forewarned, the photos are fairly pedestrian.