The Past, Present and Future of Santa Barbara’s Local Currencies
David Petry
Santa Barbara — March 20, 2010
The 1/2 Hour Bill.
Santa Barbara has had its very own currency two times. The first from 1900 to around 1929 was simply an extension of the federal currency, the dollar, and was a convenience for the banking system. The [...]
Plan Santa Barbara Comes Alive with Street-Level View
By David Petry
How do you plan Santa Barbara? How do you shape the future of a town as complex and historic and beloved as this one?
This city has been planning their future through a General Plan originally adopted in 1964, amended many times since, and now in the [...]
Big Step in Replacing The Spirit of the Ocean Fountain
by David Petry
The two sandstone figures, a nude male and female divided by a fish, who keep watch out in front of the Santa Barbara Courthouse, lead troubled lives. One might think, given the detailed body scans they were receiving Monday and [...]
“I’m a collector,” Jeff Richman, historian at the famous Green-Wood Cemetery of Brooklyn, says. “I was into stereo-opticons. I would go to these sales and auctions to buy the images, and they would have these pictures of Green-Wood Cemetery. And I would think, ‘That looks like a nice place.’
“Then one day in 1986, I saw [...]
Summerland’s defunct Big Yellow House went into foreclosure last Spring and was taken over by mortgage holder First Regional Bank of Los Angeles in October. The bank plans to list the property in the next 30 days. This blog offers a detailed history of the property and its influence in Summerland [...]
“We knew we were going to have to replace it.” Robert Ooley is both the sole Santa Barbara County architect, responsible for any modifications for nearly 600 structures in the county, and a founding trustee of the Courthouse Legacy Foundation, an organization charged with overseeing and funding the preservation and restoration of the numerous architectural [...]
“…turn me out and I’ll wander, stumblin’ in the neon groves…” — The Doors, Soul Kitchen
Blue Skies detail (David Petry)
As Santa Barbara’s neon lights flicker out, one after the next, it’s time to visit the handful of remaining classics. So this Saturday, call up a couple friends, slide some Tom Waits or [...]
Driving south from Santa Barbara through the neon playground of Ventura, I went to visit to Vogue Signs in Oxnard earlier this week. As you leave the freeway, of course, you pass the classic and abandoned old Wagon Wheel Inn sign, with neon horses and stagecoach, the whole place moldering and vandalized beneath it.
Around the [...]
“I don’t know where the neon collectors are,” Ramón Cervantes of Dave’s Signs in Ventura says. “They bring the signs to us.”
Collecting neon is something of an art form in itself. Easy enough to gather a few beer signs, and maybe the ice cream cone that hung on the wall of the local ice cream [...]
When Modern Neon shuttered their doors in Santa Barbara in 2002, it was the end of sixty-one years of neon domination is Santa Barbara. What happened? Where did all the neon go?
Neon is experiencing a resurgence across the country, and throughout the planet, perhaps as human creativity itself resurges. China and Japan have [...]
