For decades I never felt the slightest affection for Terner’s Liquor (SW corner of Sunset and Larrabee). It was always just a common, overlighted liquor store with clerks who’d absolutely never been to college. I visited from time to time, but I always wanted to bolt as soon as possible. (I’ve been in liquor stores that had nice settled vibes…places that I felt vaguely soothed by.) Terner’s was a soiled establishment.
Aaahh, but the skanky history of the place! The rock-industry druggies and clubbers (the Viper Room is right next door) who stopped in each and every night at Terner’s for smokes and 16-oz. cans of beer and whatnot. I would occasionally visit while waiting for a pizza from Panini across the street. I would buy cheap pocket combs when they were available, but never wine or champagne or cigars — Terner’s was always fundamentally sleazy and unworthy of anything more than incidental purchases.
Let’s not forget, by the way, that the people behind “Terner’s” were crassly imitating the name of the more reputable and storied Gil Turner’s Liquors (NW corner of Sunset and Doheny), which opened in 1953. Before that there was a liquor store on the same corner called Tobey’s. Check out the color photo below — notice how Tobey’s had a tidy and well-tended look, and didn’t seem the least bit cheap or tawdry?
Anyway Terner’s is permanently closed now. It’ll soon be torn down to make way for a large glass-box monstrosity called 8850 Sunset Blvd. Strange as it may sound, I’m half-sorry about this. Because as low-rent as it was, Terner’s had personality.
“More Sunset Strip Corporatism,” posted on 4.10.22:
A year or two from now a large, rectangular, 12-storied, glass-walled building (business + residential) will arise on the south side of the Sunset Strip — 8850 Sunset Blvd.. Right across from Panini, an Italian pizza take-out place that I’ve been going to for decades, and bordered by Larabee on the eastern side and San Vicente Blvd. on the west.
No, they’re not destroying the Viper Room…well, they are but they’re re-launching or reconstituting it as a kind of corporate lounge rock-music club, or so it seems. The VR’s glowing shamrock green color (a trademark thing) will frame the entrance.
This morning a couple of older guys with a notepad and printed reading materials dropped by to solicit opinions about the forthcoming structure. I shared a few thoughts, using the words “soul-less” and “rancid” and “corporate-feeling”, etc.
After they left I posted the following on the 8850 website:
“The proposed (and almost certainly forthcoming) 8850 Sunset Blvd. structure will be, to go by your illustrations, another moderately ugly and soul-less office building that will (what else?) degrade the aesthetic atmosphere of the Strip. All of that glass looks so synthetic, so humdrum, so similar to tens of thousands of other office + residential buildings all over the world.
“Imagine if, say, Frank Gehry had been hired to design it. Or a disciple of Gehry’s. I have no ideas myself, but a less conventional Gehry-ish design would probably feel a bit more fitting, given the uptown vibe and all.
“It’s L.A. buildings like these that make visiting the historical sections of London, Paris, Rome, Florence and Prague such transporting experiences. Over there they respect history and classic architecture and keeping in touch with the past. Then again this part of the Strip hasn’t been anything to architecturally shout about for decades.