beneath l.a.

no idea who's responsible for this groovy and atlas(t)ilicious site, but Beneath L.A. has a lot to offer (besides gratuitous typos---doesn't anyone proofread their homepage anymore?)

Anyway, the site offers "An anthology of little known Facts and Stories about Los Angeles, California," including the story of an Axis powers POW camp in Travel Town, Griffith Park that once housed around 450,000 prisoners of war (see map above), or the "Hump" in Taylor train yard, where they used to use gravity to let trains roll slowly down to their next berth (at right).

The site also tells about the "Integratron", a structure designed to rejuvenate cell tissues built by one of Howard Hughes' test pilots, who was visited by UFOs.

George Van Tassel began weekly meditation sessions in 1953 at Giant Rock with interested persons which, he claimed, led to UFO contacts and finally to an actual encounter with extra-terrestrials when, in August of that year, a saucer landed from the planet Venus, woke Van Tassel up and invited him onto the ship. There the aliens gave him the technique for rejuvenating living cell tissues. In 1954 he and his family began building a structure they called the Integratron to perform the rejuvenation. He spent the next 18 years constructing the Integratron but died in 1978 before completing it. During this time he hosted annual Spacecraft Conventions that were attended by thousands, featuring high profile UFO contactees and pioneers in the fields of antigravity, primary energy research and electromagnetics.

Yeah, that's pretty L.A. Don't expect a lot of deep discussion about the cultural impact of these sites, though. Beneath L.A. is like a tourist site built by critical geographers. That's pretty L.A., too.