Do you hate Valentine’s Day? Dark stories from the streets of lovers

Choose your coy romantic euphemism for it: canoodling, spooning, necking, caressing, feasting or sparking.

But the most suitable – at least for us around here – is “parking”.

No one could mistake it for the valet parking type or the mall parking type; this is the parking that is done in the lanes of the lovers.

Lovers’ lanes predate the internal combustion engine almost as long as stealth sex. But once four-wheeled sin cubicles began freeing couples from the scrutiny of the family’s front parlor, moralists and theologians lined up to denounce the libertine freedoms of the automobile. A Catholic cardinal in Ireland in 1931 used his Lenten pulpit to lament “the great and common source of evil: the parking of cars near dance halls in ill-lit village streets or highways dark rural areas”.

A year later, Los Angeles traffic cops had to remind couples courting in their cars that it was a violation of Section 136.5 of the State Vehicle Law to take both hands off the wheel. It was when people used their left arms to signal lane changes, and officers had just ticketed a man who let go of the steering wheel to signal with his left hand while keeping his right arm tightly wrapped around his girlfriend His car rolled for 100 feet, but only his ego was hurt when the incident hit the papers.

As early as 1919, when California had about 415,000 cars, Santa Barbara authorities felt compelled to prohibit parking along the state highway for “billing and lulling” purposes.

“On any given night, dozens of machines can be found parked on the side of the road and dark, a threat to general traffic.” The news account was titled “Back to the Park Benches.”

Los Angeles, city of so many roads, took the cars and “parked” with equal ardor. It’s no surprise that Yelp lists the rankings of Los Angeles makeup spots, and coming in at #5 (I would have bet #1) is Mulholland Drive, with its dark exits above the jewel-bright carpet that is LA (it is overtaken by places). above the Hollywood Bowl, in Baldwin Hills, Universal City, and a park in Culver City.)

As the TV sleuths would say, parked cars provided means, motives and opportunities, for sex, yes, but also for violence, putting the “allure” on the “allure” of lovers’ streets, where couples absorbed they sit down to steal. , rape and murder.

In recounting flivver-related crimes in the 1920s and 1930s, The Times was fond of turns of phrase describing parking lot couples as “worshippers at the shrine of the goddess of love” who engage in “parties of caresses on the road”.

But they made the news especially when things turned sinister.

In December 1960, in the oil town of Signal Hill, a teenager wearing a fake police badge banged on car windows and pulled over a dozen couples parked in the dark. Around midnight, he took a pair of Lakewood teenagers into “custody.” He handcuffed them and drove them away in his own car, even having the temerity to take the girl to her mother and give a lecture on the moral hazards of lovers’ streets. The guy he let go in Long Beach.

“Don’t let me catch you up there again,” he warned the boy, “or I’ll find you for sure.”

In 1991, near the city of Industry, developers asked Los Angeles County to get rid of the street crowd of “riff” lovers and sell or privatize the road. One real estate broker said, “You can go there any weekend and in broad daylight you can see guys and girls in their clothes,” he knew because he had kicked them out himself. But a sergeant at the local sheriff’s station said, hey, the kids are lovers, not fighters, and “usually it’s not a problem for us.”

Other times, the police tried to move the children away, for their own safety. In 1983, the police encountered a young couple in a car in Elysian Park and warned them that the area was dangerous. The couple didn’t leave, and some time later, three men stabbed the 17-year-old driver to death and then kidnapped and gang-raped his girlfriend.

Teenagers shuddered at the urban legend of the Hook, a murderous maniac on the loose, armed with a grappling hook instead of a right hand. In the gruesome and tense campfire retellings of this tale, usually delivered with sound effects, the killer manages to pull the boyfriend out of the car and kill him, or the youngsters get nervous listening to a radio report from the killer on the loose and leave in a hurry, later to find a hook with a bloody arm hanging from the door handle.

A Valentine dated 1910 is addressed to a recipient in Santa Monica. On the reverse, it says, “better late than never.” Uh oh

The true crimes of lovers lane should have been terrifying enough to keep young lovers sitting across from each other at a malt shop table.

In 1932, a Beverly Hills oil and real estate man who could have afforded a hotel room was shot to death parked in Laurel Canyon with an “attractive 30-year-old Venetian matron.”

In June 1961, five couples parked near Ballona Creek were held up at gunpoint, and one man was shot while struggling with the thief, who was carrying a .30-caliber carbine stolen shortly before the Armory in the West Side National Guard. (The police noted with an unusual tongue-in-cheek phrase that the lovers “were not in an established frame of mind” at the time.)

In Encino in 1967, a gunman attacked a married couple, tied the boyfriend’s hands and pushed him down a hill and began raping the woman. The boyfriend broke free from his bonds, climbed back up the hill and fought off the attacker.

Nine years later, on a lover’s alley in Boyle Heights, two teenage girls who police believed “may have rejected the advances of male acquaintances” were shot to death execution-style. The girls were neighbors and had gone to a party together that evening.

Honestly, some of the stories about the street of lovers crimes were grotesquely salty. From February 1959 in – I’m sorry to say – The Times: “An attractive brunette was yesterday found beaten to death on a lover’s alley in a sparsely populated area of ​​the Verdugo Mountains in Tujunga… the body, found naked except for a pair of flaming red trousers and a white bra. The victim was “a regular at bars in various Southland communities”.

Get a critical mass of stories about any kind of crime and Hollywood pays attention. Several TV shows and movies have been created around the lovers’ crimes, including a 1964 episode of the hipster show “77 Sunset Strip” and Sean Penn’s exceptional 1995 Oscar-winning film , “Dead Man Walking,” about a prisoner condemned to die for guilt. his part in the kidnapping and murder of two stationed teenagers.

The streets of lovers were where the San Francisco Bay Area serial killer “Zodiac” found victims, as was New York’s “Son of Sam.”

A suggestive vintage postcard from the Patt Morrison collection.

One of California’s most notorious death penalty cases involved robbery, rape and kidnapping by lovers. Caryl Chessman was one of the last men executed in California for a crime that did not involve killing another human.

The state’s Little Lindbergh Law, passed after the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the renowned aviator’s son, allowed the death penalty for kidnapping and harming a victim. The “Red Light Bandit” had used a red light of the kind used by police to stop couples driving their cars, in one case in Mulholland, stealing them and in at least two cases forcing the women to accompany the thief, who sexually violated them.

Chessman’s conviction and death row, and his four death row books arguing his innocence and criticizing the justice system, earned him international attention from such well-known figures as Billy Graham, Ray Bradbury, and Aldous Huxley. His case was such a source of anti-American sentiment abroad that, in early 1960, the State Department got Governor Pat Brown to issue a 60-day stay of execution for Chessman assassinated while President Eisenhower was visiting South America.

California repealed the Little Lindbergh Act while Chessman was on death row, but by law the governor was prevented from commuting the sentence on his own, and Chessman died in the gas chamber in May 1960.

A beautiful vintage postcard from the collection of Patt Morrison, made prettier by the message written, perhaps, by its sender.

To end on a more Valentine’s Day-appropriate note, set aside a moment for Edward Berg. For at least eight years in the 1950s, he returned every March 24 to a lovers’ street in San Bernardino, where his teenage sweetheart, Angela Dornna, had once promised to meet him.

In 1952, the teenagers had met near the grounds of the National Orange Show and struck up a conversation and affection. He was there with his father, an Air Force man who will soon be assigned to Hawaii. He was about to go with his father to his new position in Bermuda.

They saw each other frequently for three months, and after they broke up, she wrote to him to let him know that she would find it difficult to write to him, but that she would keep their date at the Urbita Springs lovers’ street where they had spent time together

I couldn’t find any mention of Berg after the eighth year of his vigil, when he was a high school teacher in Hyde Park, Illinois, but come this March 24, if you’re in the Urbita Springs neck of the woods and you see an old person . blue-eyed lady in a white dress or an old gentleman looking around expectantly for her, give them their private moment.

Explaining LA with Patt Morrison

Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly report, Patt Morrison explains how it works, its history and its culture.