Angeleno Valley Mortuary

Los Angeles, for many decades, was a place for ambitious absurdities, and so we live among real-estate-advertisements-turned-American-deities rising from the mountains, ribbons of concrete unwinding in the sky, stripmalls built around restaurants designed to look like hats, mechanical ballerina clowns looming above our heads, other people’s visions all over a spacious, flat place still governed so stubbornly by Midwestern conservatism and a Wild West refusal of community. Angelenos are surrounded most of the time by the evidence of human civilization—buildings, foreign palm trees, power lines, superfast robot exoskeletons—and less often by fellow humans. We meet each other sometimes in the 16-million-year-old mountains, with our dogs."The world seemed a myth, a transparent plane," Arturo Bandini thinks to himself as he walks the Long Beach Pike amusement park minutes before the 1933 earthquake hits in John Fante's novel Ask the Dust, "and all things upon it were here for only a little while … and then we were somewhere else; we were not alive at all, we approached living, but we never achieved it. We are going to die. Everybody was going to die."Sometimes I drive home late at night down a wide boulevard, the traffic lights in a bokeh accordion as far as I can see, and I think maybe I've died already, t-boned by a drunk driver, and been reborn exactly as I was, behind the wheel of my car heading west down Beverly. It's got to be about the dumbest theory of reincarnation ever imagined, but how would I know? Everything feels so good here and there's so little way to measure time passing, except in the slow breakdown of your body.(Come to think of it, the Eagles wrote a song about this.)Before Disneyland opened in 1955, the biggest tourist attraction in greater Los Angeles was supposedly a cemetery. Actually, it was a memorial park. Going by the stories, its creator, Hubert Eaton, had at least as much vision and ambition as Walt Disney, who was a friend and honorary pallbearer at his funeral, and, a... (Curbed LA)

After the ceremony at Old St. Mary’s Cathedral, Pak’s body was placed in a hearse and paraded through the city en route to Cypress Lawn in Colma, where it was supposed to be cremated and interred in a plot purchased by Pak’s older sister Theresa Pak Wang. But, in a bizarre turn of events, Pak’s body has since returned from Colma, and is resting unburied at the Green Street Mortuary, not far from the Jackson Street walkup where she died. Wang is now claiming that the public was hoodwinked by a “phony funeral,” and is accusing her youngest sister Joanna Pak Kish of having Pak’s body removed from the crematorium so that it could undergo a private autopsy, against Wang’s instructions. Wang charges her surviving sister, Kish, of “cheating all the people who believed a funeral took place and the body was cremated afterward…This was a phony funeral. The body is still there.” The two sisters have retained more than half a dozen attorneys between them, and Wang is now refusing to sign papers that would allow Pak's body to be cremated. The brewing legal battle will likely kick up a notch during a probate hearing scheduled for Wednesday,* in which Pak’s descendants will wrangle over the deceased power broker's estate. And it is a significant estate: Papers filed in October by one of Kish’s three attorneys peg Pak’s worth, conservatively, at $550,000. This dispute is an unsightly but perhaps predictable finale to the often-operatic saga of Rose Pak, a longtime civic leader who reveled in playing politics as a “blood sport.” Though she had been battling severe illnesses for at least the past two years, she apparently did not put all of her personal affairs in order before her death—opening the door to rancorous divisions within her family. At the heart of the dispute is the sisters’ disagreement over why Pak died and who should be blamed for her passing. Though the medical examiner determined the cause of Pak’s death as cardiac arrest, with sequential conditions listed as “acute myocardial infarction,” “coro... (San Francisco magazine)