Brother, are you in Cincinnati now? I used to haunt the jazz joints there. Surprisingly hip jazz scene.
Please stop by Fickell’s office and tell him, “Hector says, ‘Go west, young man!’”
I'm Tri-State Area born and raised until I left at 16.
My mother's still there, my father was until he passed away.
I'm a day's drive away instead of being in LA for almost 20 years, so I've been back frequently the last couple years.
And I eat it up - literally and figuratively - every time I go back.
I stay in the Netherland Plaza and hit all the classic restaurants and bars.
Cincy had a GREAT jazz scene back then. And all the clubs would let underage kids drink.
The only one that sticks in my mind is the Blue Wisp, but you could find me there - back when it was in that basement on Garfield - every couple weeks when I was 19-20 and back from SC.
Those old cats burned that place down every weekend and raised it from the dead the next Friday
We had WVXU out of Xavier U that was one of just a few jazz stations in the country, back before the internet.
My father was the working man's thinking man, an IAM Machinist at GE, and that's what he listened to all the time when I was a young one.
To bring this all back around to the subject at hand - my father was all about finding out what the world had to offer. Our hillbilly coal-miner descendant family had nothing to do with Judaism, but you may know that Cincy has a strong community, and Reform Judaism was born there. And so, every chance he got we'd have some different diverse food, and a special delight to all of us was hitting Marx Hot Bagels (which I'll put up against the best bagel in NYC) or Izzy's or one of the other many Jewish delis that were still around when I was little.
So when I got to LA and found out that Pastrami was a Jewish AND Mexican thing (and the story of cultural exchange in Boyle Heights that led to that) oh man, was I ever in heaven.
As for Fickell's office - Cincinnati is a vastly different vibe than LA, and if you walked in almost any place like you were supposed to be there, no one would hassle you.
Being an architect, and a fan of the building's architect Bernard Tschumi, I ah... "gave myself a tour" of the Lindner Center right after it opened in 2006 or so. So yeah, you might still get away with that.