Odds and Ends

Catching up on some items I've been meaning to post for days:



:: Eating L.A. blogger and Variety colleague Pat Saperstein published her survey of L.A.'s top pizza joints in last Friday's VLife Weekend.

The top ten spots: Albano's (Studio City); Casa Bianca (Eagle Rock) -- our choice!; Cheebo (Sunset); Damiano's Mr. Pizza (Fairfax); D'Amore's Pizza Connection (Canoga Park and elsewhere); Dino's Pizza (Burbank); La Buca (Melrose); Pitfire Pizza Co. (Downtown and North Hollywood); and Zelo Gourmet (Arcadia).



:: Check out how much of your favorite caffinated beverage you can drink in one sitting before it kills you at Energy Fiend. Looks like I'm safe for now with the Starbucks, and it will take 265.42 cans of Diet Coke before I slump over.



:: With all the recent failures in preserving old L.A. architecture, it's heartening to read about a preservation effort that was successful: The restoration of L.A.'s old St. Vibiana's Cathedral into a downtown arts center.

With St. Vibiana's about to reopen, the L.A. Times took a tour last week:

After being closed for years, the carved wooden doors of Los Angeles' original cathedral are again open.

From its perch at the corner of 2nd and Main streets downtown, St. Vibiana's Cathedral has witnessed majesty and despair, care and neglect, earthquakes, court orders and the burgeoning of Los Angeles from a sleepy pueblo into a bustling metropolis.

Built in 1876 — when 10% of the city's nearly 10,000 inhabitants could fit inside its nave — the Spanish-Baroque structure was once the city's primary Catholic church, the home of its archbishop and the headquarters of the region's Catholic community.

But after it was severely damaged in the 1994 Northridge quake, the cathedral became the center of an epic preservation battle that marked a beginning to the revitalization of the district. The Los Angeles Archdiocese fought to raze the building and build a new cathedral on the site; when preservationists blocked it at every turn, it was decided to abandon the church altogether in favor of building a new one on a site several blocks away.

Now, the former cathedral is about to begin a second act, as Vibiana Place — a community center at the heart of downtown's revitalization. After three years of public battles and six years of planning and renovation, the newly retrofitted and restored building will be unveiled this evening at a gala, $350-a-head fundraiser for the Los Angeles Conservancy, the preservation group that mounted the fierce campaign to save it.

Making the former cathedral into an arts center, said Tom Gilmore, the developer who bought St. Vibiana's in 1999, has been a lesson in "extreme preservation."