104 E Platte Ave, and a funny story

This is one of those buildings in your city that you've always been aware of but never paid much attention to. The Acacia Community Center sits on the northeast corner of Platte and Tejon, just across from Acacia Park. I believe it's an assisted living facility. In its early days it was the Acacia Hotel, but that was long before my time. For a couple of decades there was a bar called Jinx's Place occupying the ground floor. It was one of those crusty old bars with a scary edge. In a word, Jinx's was a dive. It took a little bit of gumption to go in there, but go in there I did, because Jinx's had a great jukebox and cheap beer! I remember going to Jinx's once with my friend Mark, who was not a tough guy. There were several chain-smoking barflies holding the bar down, rough-edged characters mined right out of Charles Bukowski's imagination, and as we stood at the bar an old woman asked me in a raspy voice, "How long you been packin' a black?" I gave her a blank look, and Mark immediately began to panic, because these people frankly scared the crap out of him. It was quite comical. Eventually (after asking her to repeat herself twice and receiving a couple of equally confusing iterations of the same question, along the lines of "how long you been flingin' a skin" or some such) I discerned that she was asking about my black leather biker jacket, which I wore every day. I told her I'd been "packin' a black" for a few years, and that seemed to satisfy her curiosity. (And Mark was very relieved.)

The best thing about Jinx's was the sign outside the building. It was the COOLEST SIGN EVER. So mid-century, it jutted out over the sidewalk with its neon flashing, JINX spelled out in giant bold letters. Oh how I wish I had a picture of it to show you here! I always meant to take a picture of it, but a snapshot just wouldn't do -- I wanted to do a real study of it. And then one day in 1989 the building was sold, the sign was removed and Jinx's Place was relocated, sans sign, to a different building on South Nevada, where it lived on for another three years or so. I never did get a picture of that sign. Jinx herself passed away in 2007. And that, my friends, was the end of an era.

The Acacia Hotel, around 1915.