TO....OBLIVION
Historic Landmarks Around Los Angeles
To….Oblivion is an album of pieces for solo electric guitar, electronics and video, inspired by historic and lost landmarks around Los Angeles of some societal or personal significance.  Each movement consists of a live electric guitar part, sound effects and a slideshow of historic and contemporary images.  

The landmarks include places such as the Dunbar Hotel, the Zanja Madre and the Belmont Tunnel, among others.  These locations are symbols of larger issues that have shaped the city, such as race, water access, or public transportation’s impact on the development of the city.  

LAist: This Electric Guitar Album Puts Your Inside 6 LA-Area Landmarks That Are Long Gone

​NEW CLASSIC LA: Track Premiere: Alexander Elliott Miller's "Zanja Madre" from To....Oblivion

Long Beach Press Telegram: This guitarist wants you to hear the history of Anaheim, Long Beach and Los Angeles

​The album is available below and on all major platforms, including:
Belmont Tunnel
Dunbar Hotel
The Belmont Tunnel was the first subway in Los Angeles, carrying the Red Cars one mile from 4th and Hill St. underneath downtown traffic to a Westlake neighborhood just south of Echo Park near where 1st Street turns into Beverly Blvd, before tracks diverged to various points north and west.  Trains ran from the 1920’s through the 1950’s, with traffic peaking during WWII; the last subway car to pass through the tunnel in June of 1955 carried a banner reading “To….Oblivion.”  The tunnel has been sealed off, but the retaining wall at its Westlake terminus still stands, next to the adjoining Toluca Substation.  The site, for years a major attraction for graffiti artists, has since been fenced off and surrounded by luxury apartments.
The Dunbar Hotel, originally opened as the Somerville Hotel, still stands at Central Avenue at 42nd Street, an intersection once regarded as the hub of Los Angeles’ jazz scene.  During the 1930’s and 40’s especially, Central Avenue was crowded with jazz clubs, and the Dunbar, as one of the few hotels to accommodate African Americans in the area, had a guest list that read like a jazz history book: Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Lionel Hampton all stayed there, and Duke Ellington was known for his parties at the Dunbar with “champagne and chicks everywhere.”  As racial integration in the city slowly improved, the need for the Dunbar diminished.  Jazz clubs, including the prominent Club Alabam across the street, closed and Duke began staying at hotels in Hollywood while in town.  Today, the Dunbar is a registered historic landmark, and is no longer an active hotel, serving as a retirement home.  My thanks to my friends Jamond McCoy (piano) and Zaq Kenefick (tenor sax) for allowing me to record their original jazz improvisations for the soundtrack.
Anaheim's Center Street
The Walk of a Thousand Lights
Anaheim’s Center Street.  In the mid-20th Century, Anaheim's Center Street was a vibrant, typical American main street; a strip lined with hotels, department stores, cafes, theaters, any number of small businesses and the site of several annual parades.  By the 1970's, however, as a result of a major shopping mall opening near the freeway exit, business had dried up, and the area succumbed to significant urban blight, much of the downtown core being completely abandoned.  

With much of the town falling into disrepair, the city initiated what it called "Project Alpha:" the complete demolition of a 200 acre section in the heart of the city for redevelopment.  Beginning in 1978, most of Anaheim's historic core was entirely destroyed, buildings torn down, streets erased and remapped.  Making matters worse, the city had begun demolitions before contracts from redevelopers had been secured.  Shortly after all the buildings were gone, the money dried up, and much of the heart of old Anaheim remained empty dirt lots for the better part of the 1980's.  

Many of Anaheim's well known present day businesses and attractions, such as DisneyLand, Angels Stadium, the Convention Center and Honda Center, are actually miles south of the original site of the city.  But the traditional downtown area is now slowly bouncing back.  Precious few remaining historic buildings have found reuse (with the Anaheim Packing House being a recent and notable example), but overall, the downtown district appears to have fully transformed, with much of the actual site of the original Center Street now a strip mall and parking lot.  
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I have lived on a sliver of what remains of Anaheim's Center Street since 2012.  While this neighborhood was at first something of a mystery to me, my work on this project has given me a richer understanding of the changes that my neighborhood has experienced over the years, and that so many neighborhoods around LA are continuing to experience today.
The Walk of a Thousand Lights.  Long Beach's downtown waterfront has changed dramatically over the years.  Most of the real estate which is now home to the Aquarium of the Pacific, Shoreline Village and the dock of the Queen Mary was originally ocean, built out through landfill projects during the 20th Century.  The original beach, located as far north as what is now Seaside Way, was not only a popular bathing beach, but hosted a large amusement park from 1902 through 1979.  Its official name was the Pike, but I prefer its nickname, "The Walk of a Thousand Lights," derived from the strings of lights suspended above its main thoroughfare. 

Demolished by 1979, the site is now home to the Pike Outlets, a standard contemporary shopping mall bearing no resemblance to its predecessor, its name merely an homage.  But in its day, The Pike Amusement Park was known as a sort of "Coney Island of the West," complete with shooting galleries, fun houses, sideshows, a grand bath house, ballrooms and rides including a double ferris wheel, carousels and, most prominently, a famous roller coaster extending off a pier near the water, The Cyclone Racer.
Zanja Madre
At Sunset (and Horn Ave.)
The Zanja Madre, or “mother ditch,” was the first aqueduct in Los Angeles, constructed by Spanish settlers in 1781, and providing the city with water for over a hundred years, nearly until the completion of William Mullholland’s Los Angeles Aqueduct in the early 20th Century. Originally an open ditch, and later an enclosed brick pipe, the Zanja Madre took water from a large water wheel on the LA River at a site near the present day Broadway Bridge, channeled it close to Broadway’s current route, to a small central reservoir building in the middle of the Plaza of the Pueblo de Los Angeles. Pieces of the Zanja Madre have occasionally been discovered by accident during various construction projects in Chinatown, including the excavations for the Gold Line Metro Rail.
At Sunset (and Horn Ave.) Tower Records did not begin in Los Angeles.  The famed record store began in Sacramento, California in 1960, eventually operating locations around the world, until going out of business in 2006.  Yet, its arguably most famous store stood at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Horn Avenue, at the heart of LA’s Sunset Strip.  Legendary rock clubs, including the Viper Room and Whiskey a Go Go were mere steps away.  Celebrity sightings were frequent, concerts occasionally even took place in the parking lot.  I chose the Tower Records site as a grand finale for my suite of historic landmarks in Los Angeles for several reasons.  It is a symbol of the changes in the music industry over the last decades, it was located in on a street that, for all its excesses, is a cultural focal point for the city, and it is an institution that, in a way, I believe represents a kind of welcoming attitude and celebration of all styles of music.  Special thanks to Thomas Kendall Hughes (drums) and Mikey Ferrari (voice, guitar) for improvising their own background recordings for the soundtrack of this piece, and to the California Association of Professional Music Teachers for their commission of this movement.