SUNDAY IN THE PARK

Since Kirkpatrick’s review of Giroux’s “A Deed of Death” in large measure emphasizes the latter’s “inadequacies,” it seems in order to question the reviewer’s opening sentence/paragraph:

When did streetcars “rattle through Westlake Park”?

In the 1920s and much later, streetcars ran past the swank shops on Seventh Street--the park’s southern boundary. And perhaps past the then quality apartments and hotels on Sixth Street, along the northern edge of the park. I can’t pinpoint them at the moment.

But to my knowledge, in modern times the only street through the park was and is trackless Wilshire Boulevard; the famed motorized thoroughfare extended east through the park many years after the nearby 1922 William Desmond Taylor murder on Alvarado, the park’s eastern boundary.

How young is the captious Mr. Kirkpatrick--or when did he arrive from elsewhere? I was attending junior high school a little more than a mile south east of Westlake Park in 1922. Even those “nearby orange groves” he included in the opening sentence were something you saw only on a Sunday drive in the country.

JOHN CORNELL

SAN MARINO

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